Today is World Parrot Day, and by coincidence, all of my feathered children are or were members of the parrot family, so I'm celebrating them.
We had lots of pets of various types when I was growing up, but we never had any birds. I don't know why that is, and I never thought to ask either of my parents that question before they passed away, so I'll never know the answer.
My family went to Las Vegas on a regular basis because my mother's parents lived there, and I fell in love with macaws by seeing them at the Tropicana Casino on The Strip. There used to be a long, long hallway with cages of macaws and cockatoos on both sides. Big, beautiful, gorgeous, and loud, and I always wanted one, but especially a macaw.
When I was living in Los Angeles after I had graduated college, I finally had enough money to think about buying a macaw, but by then I also had a cat — one who had shown she definitely liked to pursue prey. I somehow didn't think that was going to make a good combination with having a bird, so I did not try to find a macaw at the time.
After I moved to Berkeley, I discovered a bird rescue organization that specialized in parrots of different types, including macaws. I learned from a woman who volunteered with the organization that there are ways to have cats and birds coexist peacefully. So after never having had a pet bird of any type, I dove in the deep end and adopted Peaches, my blue and gold macaw, who is on my left hand in the photo above. He had been surrendered by his first owner, who apparently was more than a little OCD about cleaning and finally decided she was tired of vacuuming the house four times a day to get rid of Peaches' dander.
Peaches was my first, and he'll probably always be my favorite. He talks a little but has a limited vocabulary. He does make lots of noises, just not often words. He does sing, though, because when I was taking voice lessons, I would have him practice my vocalizations with me. (Many people would question whether you could actually call his vocalizations "singing." He is certainly not a canary.) He was hatched about 2001 and came to live with me in 2004, so I have now had him for more than 20 years. He should live to be between 60 and 80 years old and therefore should easily outlive me.
My second bird was Ray, a sun conure, who is on my shoulder in the photo. He was purchased from a Petco store by a man to give to his girlfriend, but he didn't bother to ask her ahead of time if she wanted a bird (bad idea). And she didn't! So poor little Ray, who was originally called Sunny (a common name given to sun consures), was returned to the store, which is where I found him. A friend convinced me to buy him and bring him home.
Ray is the only bird I have ever trusted to sit on my shoulder. It isn't that I don't love my birds and trust them in general, but birds don't have hands to grab things. If they start to slip or lose their bearings, their beaks act as something to grab with to hold on. And if that beak happens to grab your ear, which is usually the closest thing that looks stable to hold onto if the bird is on your shoulder, well, that can make for a lot of blood spurting all over the place. The only problem I ever had with Ray on my shoulder was that sun conures have a particularly piercing screech, more so even than most macaws, and oh, I hated that in my ear, even with the earplugs in (and I always use earplugs when I am around my birds).
Ray suddenly became ill one day. I took him to the vet, and they tried different therapies, but he didn't get better. He died on Christmas Eve day of 2010.
Zach is the third bird in the photo with me, on my right hand. He was a green-cheeked conure. Talk about a bad start in life: I was at least his fourth owner in less than a year. My friend's daughter was given Zach but quickly lost interest in him; she was probably a little young to take care of a bird. When I took him in he had a strange "thing" hanging down the middle of his chest, which my bird vet was able to take care of easily. But he was a little nippy thing, always trying to bite me. Given his background, he probably had some serious trust issues.
Eventually Zach figured out that I was not going to dump him as everyone else had. He mellowed out and turned out to be a friendly little guy. But one morning when it was time to wake the birds up, Zach was down on the bottom of his cage and couldn't stand. I rushed him to the vet, but he didn't make it through the day.
So far I've been talking about friendly, happy birds. And then there's Caesar. That's the guy in the photo above.
Caesar is a severe macaw, which is one of the mini macaws. I like to say he is half the size and has all the personality. And boy, does he have personality.
After Ray and Zach had died, Peaches was a little lonely. He was used to having other birds around, and now he was the only one. So I went looking for a new friend for him. I found Caesar at the bird store where I bought my bird food. He seemed like a friendly little guy. He stepped up for me without hesitation and didn't try to bite. I probably should have been suspicious because the store was charging only $200 for him, but I went for it and brought him home. I eventually found out that he had been returned to the store, which is where he was hatched, because he had shown some territorial and aggressive tendencies with the couple who had first purchased him, especially after they had a baby and did not pay as much attention to him.
At the beginning, everything was great. Before Caesar went through puberty, he was happy to come out of his cage and play on his playgym. He was always territorial; I couldn't put my hand in his cage, or he would attack. But I could open the door, and he would come out and stand on the top of the door. Then he would step up on my hand, and I could carry him to his playgym with no problem.
And then puberty hit, and everything changed. He would try to bite me when I was opening the door to his cage. He would fly off the playgym and try to land on Peaches' cage or on my shoulder. He started trying to bite me all the time. He turned into one mean little a$$hole. I asked my vets what was going on, and they couldn't tell me why this had happened.
One day someone asked me why I called him a severe macaw. She was wondering if that was the official name or something I had come up with. So I looked it up. And there it was in black and white: "In the wild their typically gregarious personality can become more aggressive at puberty giving them the name Severe. This tendency can be curbed in captivity but the species requires significant handling to make a tame pet." Now, why I had to find this on Wikipedia instead of my vet being able to tell me, I have no idea. But at least I finally had an answer.
After lots of advice from my vet and lots of patience from me, Caesar did become slightly easier to deal with. He still doesn't really like being handled, and he is still incredibly territorial. But he no longer tries to bite when I give him food and water, so that's a vast improvement. And that's a good thing, because he might live to be 80 years old, and he's only 20 now, so someone else will definitely have to be able to put up with him.
That pretty girl above is the fifth bird I've owned. Her name is Angel, and she is a ruby macaw, which is a hybrid between a scarlet macaw and a green-winged macaw. You'd think that macaws are beautiful enough as nature created them, but man specializes in hubris, so people crossbreed macaws to come up with different looks.
Angel came to me when my daughter-in-law's uncle and his fiancee needed to rehome most of their pets after moving into an RV park with a limit on how many pets you could have (they had fourteen, and the limit was two). I took in Angel in 2020 when she was just shy of 4 years old. I'm still not sure how old hybrids live to be on average, but I've been guessing at least 40 to 60, so I'm sure she'll be around a while.
After having gone through the hell of puberty with Caesar, I was quite worried what it would be like with a female macaw, especially with two males in the same room, albeit with everyone in their own separate cages. But Angel was very mellow, and we had no problems (hooray!).
Angel is much quieter than Peaches and Caesar. I was told by my bird vet here in Portland that females do tend to be quieter and calmer than males. She also doesn't talk as much as the boys. Her favorite thing to say is "Uh-oh", which she actually learned from Peaches. She loves apples and will say "apple" for almost any kind of food. And occasionally she will make kissing noises and say, "I love you," which she learned from me, because I say that to the birds all the time.
