Nature (1982–…): Season 32, Episode 9 - Parrot Confidential - full transcript
From PBS and NATURE - Exotic beauty, outrageous intelligence, and remarkably advanced language skills have made parrots one of the world's most popular pets. But unlike dogs and cats, parrots have not been domesticated. Their hard...
With huge brains and hollow bones,
they navigate the canopy.
Every cell
is engineered for flight.
They speak a language all their own
and form lifelong bonds
that can last for 80 years.
Their wings can carry them
50 miles in a day.
This is a creature
who lives without borders,
in a world we can hardly fathom,
and yet millions live among us.
This is their story.
As day breaks over Santa Barbara,
a cockatoo named Dolly
calls to her flock.
Oh, Dolly.
Good morning pretty bird,
good morning pretty bird,
pretty girl, you're just
up and all sparky, huh?
- I'm a pretty bird.
- Hi!
Dolly likes to wake up about
6:30 or 7:00 in the morning.
Want some breakfast?
- Hi, pretty bird!
- Hi, pretty bird.
- Hi, pretty bird!
- Hi, pretty bird.
I rush to get her before
she wakes up all the neighbors.
They're very nice people
and I want to keep it that way.
With voices designed
to each across the forest,
cockatoos can be a challenge
for the average homeowner.
The screaming is really hard.
I finally got gun range earphones.
And that doesn't completely deaden it.
You can still hear it, it just
doesn't make your eardrums hurt.
Dolly was in a bird collection,
and the gentleman just wasn't really ready
to deal with a Moluccan cockatoo.
She was sort of damaged when
I got her, emotionally.
I had a friend that took me over there
to see if I wanted to adopt Dolly.
And I just took one look at her
and she took one look at me
and I knew I had no choice, you know.
She was gonna be mine.
She was three when I got her,
it'll be 16 years in March.
She is going to live to be 80 or 90.
And I am 74, so, that's...
we don't have many more years together.
And I'm for... That's my biggest concern.
I take Dolly everywhere I can.
She loves going in the car.
I think it's an experience
probably like flying.
You know, they see the scenery rushing by.
Dolly's headed to a local sanctuary,
where she boards a few days each week.
This is Lavanya's survival tactic.
When Dolly is at home with
Lavanya, it's all about Dolly.
There's no talking on the phone,
there's no having company.
And after about three or four days of that,
poor Lavanya has to take care of
her own needs, as well.
Watch you head!
So I can go to
appointments and get things done
and have a little time to do
some of the things I like to do,
visit friends.
- We're gonna go bye-bye!
- Bye-bye, pretty bird.
Bye-bye, pretty bird!
Hey, Jamie, we're back.
Jamie McLeod founded
the Santa Barbara Bird Sanctuary
nine years ago, when she noticed there was
a problem with unwanted parrots.
- I'll see you in a couple days.
- All right.
Good morning, Dolly!
She began to realize
many of the birds she was selling
were being re-homed.
I was a breeder for more than 30 years.
Amazons, Macaws, Cockatoos.
When people typically would keep
the birds two to four years,
it became apparent
that not everybody's cracked up to own one.
They live 80 years...
crunch those numbers out
and there's a lot of unwanted
parrots out there.
Hi, guys!
I felt I was contributing to a problem,
and started focusing on
re-homing all the unwanted ones.
There we go!
We currently have
more than 60 birds
and we're beyond capacity.
We're turning people away.
Okay, you ready for your breakfast?
Let's go, girl!
People abandon them on our porch,
they threaten to euthanize them
if I don't take them.
Many of the birds that we have
now have been adopted out
numerous times, and they come back.
It's a huge problem.
People don't always understand
that when a bird forms a bond with you,
it's actually a mate bond.
They're not just part of your life,
they become your life.
I rarely go away on vacation...
they literally are my life.
People will come in and they'll say,
"I want a bird that talks, that's quiet
and that doesn't bite,"
and that species has not yet
been discovered.
Come on over here!
Come on! Come on!
Come on over here!
Come over here!
Come over here!
- Come on over here.
- Come over here.
- Come on over here.
- Come over here.
Her original owner taught her
most of her vocabulary.
Everybody loves the Amazons
cause they sing and they talk,
but nothing can bite you harder
than an Amazon parrot.
One day you're cuddling it,
and the next minute you're
missing part of your face.
Squeezethose little birdie legs!
Squeeze those little birdie...
Squeezethose little birdie legs!
Squeeze!
Scary bird, roar!
Kona, who has such a wonderful vocabulary
and is so animated and everybody
wants to adopt her,
actually removed this part of
her owner's nose.
♪ I love you true dear
Once they start to hit sexual maturity
they have drastic behavioral changes.
You're not gonna bite me right now are you?
Up you go.
Let's go, up up up.
Oh, yeah, you are!
Goodbye! Goodbye!
Being injured by a parrot,
you can't be angry with them.
If you take them into your life,
that's one of the things
that you need to accept.
It's still a wild animal.
In a cage or soaring above the canopy,
parrots are still considered wild.
Unlike dogs and cats,
they haven't been domesticated
over thousands of years.
Captive bred parrots
are just a few generations
from their wild cousins.
They have complex social lives
and large brains, like primates.
Dr. Tim Wright from
New Mexico State University
has discovered
their language skills
are remarkably advanced,
and they learn to speak much as humans do.
Learning how to sound like others
seems to be very important
for these parrots.
If you sound like others,
you're a member of their group.
They are very tightly bonded
with each other.
Here in captivity, they're
trying to recreate that bond
with whoever's around.
Wright's research has revealed
that they speak in regional dialects...
and some are even bilingual.
But human encroachment
is making it
increasingly difficult
to study these birds.
Yellow-naped Amazons are not
doing that well in the wild.
There's been a very rapid decline.
The parrots often nest
in lone trees on ranches.
Sadly, this is a risky place
to raise their young.
They're not recognizing
the danger posed by these
new human predators.
The ranch hands
often will poach the parrots.
They're out in the fields every day,
they watch the parrots,
they know what they're doing
and have a good sense of where
they're putting their nests,
and they know when
there might be chicks there.
These birds are certainly touchy
around their nest,
so we just try to keep our distance.
Oh yeah, she's going back,
she's going back down now.
Yeah, she's going in, tail first.
Wright has been studying nest cavities
in order to learn how parents
teach language to their young.
Okay, hold it!
He tries to keep his contact with the birds
to a minimum.
If we do climb up,
we do it quickly and get out of there.
Oh, it's a deep one.
Ah, there are two eggs in there.
The female will sit on these
eggs for about three weeks
and then the chicks will hatch,
and that's when the rough time comes.
It's hard to say whether these
chicks will be left in the nest
and fly free, or become pets.
I've been trying to study
their nesting behavior,
and I can't do that
if people are taking the chicks
out of the nest,
so it's... it's sort of a double, uh,
a double heartbreak for me.
We were visiting a night roost
to record the vocalizations there,
and I heard a strange sound.
Hola!
It wasn't quite human,
someone was saying
"hello," or "hola."
Permisso!
In fact, it was a parrot.
Look at you!
Hi!
You are a yellow-naped Amazon.
I talked with the manager of the ranch,
and he told me a little bit
about her history.
So, they've had it about 9 months,
it's a... it was a chick taken
from the nest this year,
um, from a nest a little bit south.
He said, you just have to climb up the tree
and stick your hand in and take it out.
I asked how much a chick
like this would sell for,
and he said, well, when they're very young,
just out of the nest, they might
sell for $30 or $40.
A bird that was a little bit older
and in good health like Lorita
would sell for about $100.
She has learned a lot of human
language words, Spanish words.
She laughs, she calls "hello" or "hola,"
but when there are other parrots
in the area,
she'll also call to them.
Normally, one parrot
might fly over and join the flock.
But Lorita can't do that.
She's in a cage.
Baby parrots like Lorita
have been taken from the nest
for thousands of years.
But today, nearly one third of
wild parrots are endangered.
The illicit trade in exotic birds
has become a multi-billion dollar business.
In 1992,
the U.S. banned
the importation of wild birds.
But before then,
it was wild parrots
that filled our pet stores.
For many parrots, this is how life began.
Jimmy Gentile opened his pet shop in 1975.
We kind of specialize in what I call
"no pets allowed" pets,
or unique companion animals...
we don't do dogs or cats.
Liz Hartman moved to Boston in the '80s
to attend vet school.
I worked part-time
for Jimmy at the pet shop,
I really was just a cage cleaner.
There was a bird there,
a yellow-naped Amazon,
that I thought was so cool.
I thought, "Oh, man, I really
want to take this bird home,
I really want to own it."
And Jimmy said,
"You really should get a baby
and hand feed it,
because that's how
you bond with them."
I had ordered a bunch of baby birds,
taken from the nest in Honduras.
A day came when they called me
and they said,
"Your chicks are available."
So, I went to the airport,
picked up the box.
I was so excited,
I couldn't wait, I was beside myself.
I packed up that bird
and went home with it.
When she brought him home, I remember.
We had discussed it, and at first
I was totally against it,
because I knew how long parrots lasted.
He was totally into it,
he thought it was great.
They're messy, I've been in the pet stores.
In the beginning you had to
wrap him up in a towel,
cause he would try to bite you.
It was our first experience at parenthood.
I eventually warmed up to the idea,
and we couldn't help but
sit there and just look at him,
it was so amazing to see
this wild bird in our house.
Basil's early years were trouble-free.
Good morning, Basil.
The first four years
were lovely and blissful.
I would come down in the morning
and open Basil's cage.
Whenever we were home, he was
basically free to crawl around,
and he mostly stayed on his cage.
The quickness at which
he could pick up anything,
he was so amazing.
I think he was wicked smart.
He loved the interaction.
We thought, "We're gonna
love this bird to death,
and we're going to do
whatever we need to do
to make this bird happy
for the rest of it's life."
Parrots usually bond with one person.
For Basil, that person was Russ.
He was so bonded to Russ.
Russ traveled overseas a lot for business,
and he'd been gone for about a month.
Hi!
You must be exhausted.
He got home at night and we went to bed.
Good night, Basil.
Everything seemed fine.
We woke up the next morning
and...
Hello!
Basil had plucked all of
the feathers off of his chest.
Like, just plucked it bald.
He'd never plucked before, ever.
It was devastating to us
because we didn't know
what was going on.
We later determined he was so angry
that he was willing to go through the pain
of pulling his own feathers out.
It wasn't down to the skin,
but just the grey down.
I mean, there had to be
some sort of emotional response
to Russ coming home.
I think he was making a point.
You have to be there for them.
They are social animals.
I can't even imagine anything more complex.
They're up there
with the apes and the humans.
If Basil was still in the wild,
he would already have found a mate by now.
They'd rarely be apart.
Their mated bond would nurture
the next generation,
ensuring the survival of the species.
A wild parrot
is seldom alone.
Even in flight,
a mated pair is almost never
out of earshot.
For a wild parrot,
solitude is rare.
In a Boston suburb,
a parrot has been left behind.
The family lost the home,
the bank had taken possession,
and I received a call.
The bird had been left behind
for approximately four days.
It was four days
since anyone had been last seen
coming or going from the home.
It did have water,
it did not have bird food available,
there was other pet food in the home.
To just be left behind in a cage,
it has to affect them...
they're not stupid.
I've heard the stories
that these animals go through
and for me it's utter heartbreak.
Did you give me a call earlier?
I did, it's been three or four
days since I've seen anyone here
and I've heard some bird noises.
Okay, I'm gonna go take a look
and see if I see anything.
Guys I can't, I just need you
to stay outside
if you don't mind for now.
Thanks, Lisa.
Ah, an umbrella cockatoo,
our favorite species.
This is the only animal
we found in the house.
Aw, hey.
So, you can take care of him for us, Marc?
- Thank you.
- Sure, no problem.
Thanks.
Bye, little guy!
Part of the evaluation
process when we get a bird,
if we don't know his name,
we wait for him to tell us.
He'll say hello, and then
usually say his name.
In this case the bird never told us.
So, we just named him after
a good friend of ours, Lou.
He seems really nervous with me,
maybe he'll be better with you,
wanna get him out?
Marc Johnson and Karen Windsor
have devoted their lives
to rescuing parrots.
Every bird has a story.
Every bird has a history,
especially an emotional history.
They carry their baggage.
I think there are probably
a lot of forgotten birds
in a lot of dark corners of the world.
Hey, hi. Hi.
It's hard economic times
and our animals sometimes pay the price.
I spoke to you on the phone last week
about putting my parrot, Max,
up for adoption,
he will be ten years...
...friends
who could not keep them.
The blue and gold is very aggressive...
And due to a divorce I am being forced
to move into an apartment
which will not allow...
I've been in contact with the vet
and I'm planning on euthanasia
if there is no...
Everyday we get e-mails,
and that's the hardest part
of our life now.
We have to say no a lot.
...as I want to make sure
they don't end up suffering
or being mistreated...
...she's driving my
husband and children crazy...
I cannot live like this anymore,
I hope to hear from you.
Johnson has witnessed
the proliferation of parrots
over the years.
It all began with a want ad.
In the 1980s I had a small pottery studio.
I had a deep admiration for the rainforest
and I wanted to get a pet,
AND I thought something exotic
would be fun,
so I bought a parrot
in the Want advertiser for $900.
Wally was a blue and gold macaw.
He was a wonderful bird.
People would come in and see I
had a parrot and they would say,
"Oh, I have a cousin
that's got one of those,"
"My brother's got one of those,"
"I've got one of those
that I don't want anymore,
would you like my parrot?"
Not knowing how big the problem was,
I thought, well, this is great,
because people were
giving parrots that were
worth lots of money.
We were being besieged by birds.
Before I knew it I had 30 of
them with more coming every day.
It turns out, people were giving
me their parrots
because they're very difficult pets.
And I was the only game in town.
Nobody else would take unwanted birds,
so people came to visit me.
Before I knew it I had
outgrown the pottery studio,
and I had to figure out
some way of dealing with it.
Johnson closed the studio
and moved to a house in the suburbs.
From that point on
it was, if you build it they will come.
The birds took over the house.
Every single room
had half a dozen birds in it.
The pantry, the spare rooms, the bedrooms.
When I first came to volunteer,
I found parrots in the kitchen,
parrots in the living room,
parrots in the bathroom.
Within no time we had over 300 parrots.
The house had become a sanctuary.
With more requests each day,
Johnson ran out of space... again.
As luck would have it,
we came across this abandoned chicken farm.
I kind of stumbled on this place
by accident.
It's a wreck but I think it's
what we've been waiting for.
This is gonna be
an enormous amount of work.
It's too much.
It scared the hell out of Karen,
but I saw it as a golden opportunity.
Within two years,
they had tripled the size of the sanctuary.
But in no time, even the new facility
would be bursting at the seams.
Where were all these unwanted
parrots coming from?
From South America, Africa,
Asia, Indonesia,
parrots were streaming in from the wild.
When it became illegal to import
wild birds to the U.S.,
domestic breeding filled the void.
Today, the practice of breeding parrots
is not without controversy.
Anybody with $40
can walk into any Petco and buy a parrot.
There are no regulations.
Anybody can have as many of them
as they want,
they can breed them, they can sell them.
I'm not one to talk, because I did it.
Hand feed everybody.
This was a long time ago,
there wasn't any such thing
as a rescue or a sanctuary,
there was no need for it.
Phoebe and Harry Linden
were once highly respected breeders.
It all started nearly 40 years ago.
In 1971, I saw in the paper
somebody was advertising they
had to get rid of a parrot.
And I basically rescued him from this guy.
And then I started finding out
that they were bringing in
birds from the wild.
You could go down and you could
buy at wholesale price
just about any bird you'd want.
I got another parrot, and another parrot.
Before you knew it,
we had so many birds in the house
we couldn't live there anymore,
I had to get another house.
40 years ago,
if you purchased a parrot,
it would almost certainly be
a parrot from the wild.
Capture and transport
took a terrible toll.
It's been estimated
that more than 70% of wild-caught parrots
died before ever reaching the pet store.
I felt bad about these wild caught parrots,
and I thought, if we bred these birds,
then people would not need to
pull them out of the wild.
I named the business
Santa Barbara Bird Farm.
When we started to breed parrots,
I quit my job and just hand-fed birds.
Harry and I decided
not to have human children,
and I just found that I could
like zip open my heart
and pour it into these baby birds.
We wanted to keep every single one of them.
The Linden's had an excellent reputation
and a long waiting list.
They were hands-on with the chicks,
and carefully screened potential buyers.
But in the late '70s
the landscape began to change.
A TV series came out
called "Baretta."
This detective had a medium
sulfur-crested cockatoo
that made it look like
the coolest pet you could have,
they don't scream,
they don't pick their feathers,
they do what you tell them to do.
Go look in that window
and tell me if somebody's getting stabbed.
The word got out there, how charming,
how companionable parrots were.
The phone started ringing off the wall.
Demand bloomed overnight.
All of a sudden,
you could get one anywhere.
In the beginning it wasn't like that.
We started to hear about
rescues and sanctuaries.
And we started to realize that,
wow, there are unwanted parrots.
When we saw that there was going to be
a tremendous amount of fallout from that,
we decided to stop breeding.
We shut breeding down forever.
The Linden's decided to close the business
and instead focus on building
the best facility they could
for the birds they still had.
This new aviary
can actually have foraging potential
with the trees and the grass.
We're in the position now
where we want to take back
any baby who we raised who needs a home.
So, they get to live a life
where they can make
their own decisions, exercise,
have access to fresh air, fresh food.
A lot of breeders like
ourselves just stopped breeding,
but we still have some of
the parrot mills out there
that produce a lot of babies every year,
and so there's still
going to be parrots out there
who are gonna run into problems
in the future
and have to be put up for adoption.
People who really care about parrots
don't buy birds... they adopt.
We need to take care of
the parrots who are here,
the best way that we can,
and conserve the parrots in the wild.
It is the paradox of the parrot.
As numbers dwindle in the wild,
the number of rescues in captivity
continues to increase.
With sanctuaries struggling to stay afloat,
the fate of unwanted parrots
is becoming more precarious every day.
The step-father died,
and the daughter called up
and asked us to take Fagan.
- Hello?
- Hey.
- Here he is.
- Okay, thank you.
'Kay, thank you.
In a Detroit suburb,
a parrot named Fagan has found
his way to Marie Crowley.
Good boy, good boy.
When I took Fagan out of the carrier,
it was pretty obvious that he had
a big self-mutilation wound on his abdomen.
You really chewed yourself up buddy, huh?
I noticed that he smelled
heavily of nicotine.
You smell, you stink.
He obviously hadn't been bathed
in a long time.
Did they smoke, hmm?
He was just covered in goop.
You are a dirty, dirty bird.
Need a bath.
There you go.
I noticed my hands were just disgusting.
They were covered in nicotine,
my hands were stained for two days after.
I gotcha, there you go.
It's all done.
Yes, the yuckies are over, there you go.
I knew that the conditions
that he was coming from
were really, really poor.
Good boy.
Shh.
After living in a smoke-filled house
for nearly 25 years,
Fagan presented a challenge
for Dr. Orosz.
Let's listen to the
chest, can you let me listen?
When Fagan walked through the door,
I saw a bird in crisis.
His feathers were greasy with nicotine.
He had a large patch
where he had been mutilating on his chest.
He was basically a mess.
- Back of his throat, see that?
- Ah, okay, mm-hmm.
He's from a home where the lady
smoked all the time, right?
It was those little dime-store cigars.
Oh, great.
It became pretty clear that he was actually
physically addicted to the nicotine.
He started having seizures.
We had to detox him from the nicotine,
and then he had this large area
where he's been mutilating his body.
Those are very difficult things
to overcome in birds, very difficult.
In discussions with psychiatrists,
the closest thing I can think of
is that it could be something like cutting.
When they do physical damage to themselves,
it's a kind of a release effect.
We had to help him with his stress.
Here, buddy, come put this collar on, okay?
Good job.
Fagan has been in a collar so long
that he is okay with putting a collar on,
he doesn't really argue or fight about it.
Fagan was really malnourished
his whole life.
It took weeks to get him to eat properly.
There are no sanctuaries
for parrots in Michigan,
there's just some people like me
who try and take them in as best they can.
They don't have anywhere else to go,
so they end up in this
little suburbia neighborhood
where you'd never expect to see
a parrot... in my basement!
I have 26 birds here.
The situation is less than ideal.
But we do everything we can...
we've put up air filters,
full-spectrum lighting, and then
I keep palm trees down there
'cause I figure
if the palm trees stay alive,
then the lighting is at least adequate.
Every bird here has to be fed and watered
three to four times a day,
their cages have to be cleaned.
It's a labor of love.
Like most parrot rescues,
Crowley's non-profit,
Feathered Friends of Michigan,
barely scrapes by.
Most sanctuaries and rescues
across the United States are full,
so we all make do
with the bad situation as best we can.
Come here. Come here.
Let's take your collar off, huh?
It's important Fagan gets some time
out of his collar every day,
so that he can work on
preening his feathers
and flapping his wings and climbing.
He's been in a collar so long,
he falls a lot.
Because he can't open his wings
to catch himself
like a bird should.
So, we're gonna work on building
those muscles back up over time.
Would you like to dance?
Yeah?
You would like to dance?
♪ My head up to the sky
♪ Ooh, la la, la la, la la
♪ I'm going to keep my head up
to the sky ♪
♪ Won't let life
pass me by ♪
♪ 'Cause after the rain
comes down ♪
♪ The sun will always
come back around ♪
♪ And I'm going to keep
my head up to the sky ♪
Yeah, we gotta read this one.
This is a long one, man.
Fagan isn't comfortable
with other birds yet,
and with his health issues,
Marie needs to keep
a close watch.
So, he lives with the family.
My son was learning his colors.
What's red?
Good job, Fagan!
And whenever we went over a color,
Fagan would go up and tap it with his beak,
so, we brought these out and...
What's green?
He does like to differentiate
between the colors.
Good.
What I'm trying to do is give
his mind a way to exercise,
it's another form of enrichment
that's been shown to reduce
anxiety in parrots.
What's yellow?
It's a non-sexual way for me to
interact with him.
That will kind of break the cycle
of the mated bond that
he's trying to create with me.
If Fagan was in the wild,
he would have a flock,
he would find a mate and they'd
crawl up into a tree cavity
and build a nest and have babies.
But in captivity,
that causes a lot of frustration
for birds like Fagan.
What's red?
Good job!
Yeah.
What's yellow?
Unfortunately for the African Grey's,
their intelligence level ended up being
somewhat their undoing in captivity.
- What toy?
- Truck.
- That's right!
- Good birdie.
- What is it?
- Key chain.
Good boy!
In the '90s, Alex showed the world
that parrots are capable of more
than just mimicking.
- What toy?
- Nail.
Irene Pepperberg's
work with Alex was seminal.
Tell me what color, what color?
- Yellow.
- Yellow, that's right.
When the work with Alex came out,
everybody wanted to buy an Alex.
The breeding of them skyrocketed.
But Alex isn't your everyday African Grey,
he's a bird that was trained for
hours a day for years on end.
Most African Greys don't talk.
They mostly love to make really
obnoxious microwave sounds,
and phone sounds...
stuff that people find hard on their ears.
So, they end up getting surrendered a lot.
I think as long as Alex is at
the top of the YouTube charts,
he's gonna be at the top of
my surrender charts.
In the wild, Fagan's intelligence
would be put to task.
In flight, his large brain
would measure space, wind and speed.
He'd calculate distance
and sources of food.
If confronted, he'd take flight.
These wild instincts
are still very much intact
for birds like Basil.
The first four years,
like I said, were wonderful.
Kiss kiss!
He was sweet, he was handleable,
he was lovely,
and then adolescence set in.
He just became progressively
more aggressive.
I'd be sitting at the dinning
room table Sunday morning
reading the paper,
and he would seek me out.
It got to the point
where I could not
leave the cage open at all.
If I were in the house
and the cage was open,
he would immediately climb down
the cage to attack my feet.
He just decided I was the person he hated.
He would lunge at her,
he would fly out of the cage at her.
One morning I got up,
I opened the door to his cage
and then I turned around
to open the window,
and he just flew at me,
he was hanging off my ear.
You just didn't know, he could
be all sweet and happy,
turn around and bite you.
When we had the kids,
Basil wasn't quite ready
to have these foreigners.
They didn't know any better,
they thought they could walk up
just like I did.
My daughter was four years old at the time
and she was feeding him
a cracker, and he nailed her.
I heard the screaming,
I came running down the stairs.
It was awful.
That was when we started to realize that
perhaps Basil wasn't going to
warm up so much to the kids.
I didn't think I could keep this
animal as a pet anymore.
No one knows the
number of parrots in captivity.
Estimates range from
10 to 40 million in the U.S.
While many live in stable homes,
thousands are surrendered each year.
What happens to the parrots
who fall through the cracks?
Abandoned for four days in an empty house,
Lou is one of the lucky ones.
At Foster Parrots, Lou's next
chapter is about to begin.
With no clues about his past,
providing the right care
will be a challenge.
No one knows how old he is,
how many homes he's had,
or if he's ever seen anther parrot.
How must it feel
for a bird like Lou, entering a sanctuary
for the first time?
Thousands of sounds, hundreds of birds,
each calling out with its own story.
Hi.
Pretty bird.
When we walk through the facility,
it's important that everybody understand
that what they are seeing is a tragedy.
What we are looking at
is the failure of humans as companions
to parrots.
Any new arrival gets a full physical.
It's especially critical for
a bird with no medical history,
like Lou.
Was left in an abandoned home.
Was there food and water?
There was a bag of dog food.
Dog food?
Nice.
Poor Lou.
Okay, buddy.
Let's look at your plumage, Lou.
Sounds like you had a tough life, huh?
Any avian vet realizes that
the stress our captive parrots are under
is immense.
There you go.
Pretty good weight for his species.
We take these birds into our
homes and we cut their wings.
This guy's pretty scared,
his heart rate's off the chart.
Probably over 300 beats a minute.
We house them in cages
and we don't allow them to be
with their own species.
You can imagine the stress
on these animals.
Stress is known to lower the immune system.
Clipped wings and cages
guarantee a sedentary life, and avian vets
are finding that heart disease
is all too common in captive parrots,
especially those with poor diets.
Parrots can also carry infectious diseases.
Lou will stay in quarantine for 30 days,
to make sure he's not contagious.
His test results will determine his future.
With over 550 birds,
Foster Parrots is well beyond capacity.
If we take another bird,
my volunteers would kill me.
35 volunteers and a staff of six.
That's not enough humans
to meet the needs of really
human-bonded birds.
Are you gonna step up?
Good girl.
We cannot integrate
these parrots with their own species.
And yet they don't fit into
a human society either.
What are we to do with these birds?
'Cause they don't even know they're birds.
Peepers exhibits an
unusual feather picking profile.
She pulls the feathers
out of her head and neck with her foot,
giving her that vulture-like appearance,
that if she only knew
what she looked like,
she might not do so often.
You're still beautiful.
Being a domestically raised bird,
she identifies with humans
and she also wants to mate with humans.
That's not good peepers.
You just wants to be loved,
is that so wrong?
We received a call from a woman
whose neighbor was keeping
peepers in an unheated porch
in the middle of winter.
You're a good girl.
Right now we take in birds when
it's a life and death situation.
I mean, you have to take that bird in.
The care requirements are so huge
you can never feel like
you've been successful.
Is that for you?
From the very first day
I got Wally, the blue and gold macaw,
my resolve was to make his life
better, every day, and...
God, sorry...
Give me a sec.
I mean, when people ask me
what is the right size cage for a macaw,
there is no right size cage for a macaw,
it's 35 square miles, you know, it's like,
it's huge, and it's the sky, it's...
The owner is an older gentleman
whose wife passed away
about four years ago,
and the bird has been
pecking away at himself...
Hey, Marc, my mother died three weeks ago
and I need to find a place
for a cockatoo...
It's killing me writing to you like this
but I must find a new home...
When I first started Foster Parrots,
I thought we could take every
single bird that needed a home.
But of course, the numbers were staggering,
to a point now where we have
over a thousand calls a year
for surrender.
How wonderful it would be if these parrots
could be released to the wild.
But it's unlikely they'd have
the skills to survive
like their wild cousins.
And the risk of spreading
disease would be too great.
With populations so low,
every parrot matters.
In Costa Rica, a scarlet macaw
is calling to his mother.
I knew Geoffrey was special from hatch.
He had a very cute peep.
They communicate with mum
well before they've hatched.
So, the babies will actually be
talking to mum
through the egg.
They hatch open and they're so helpless,
they're all wet
and they still have
the little umbilical cord
attached to the egg.
We leave them about 12 hours,
to allow the yolk
to be used up.
So, little Geoffrey hatched out
and he was just so cute.
I could tell Geoffrey was
a smart one from hatch.
The ARA Project is breeding rescued macaws
in order to release their
offspring to the wild.
The parents, who are former pets
and rescued birds,
don't always know how to raise their young.
Geoffrey's mother was an ex-pet,
and his father was poached from the wild.
His mum is not a very good mum.
His parents abandoned him, unfortunately.
So, for the first two months
of Geoffrey's life,
he had to live in an incubator.
Geoffrey started off like
a little plucked chicken,
and then he started getting
his pin feathers coming through,
you'll get a little bit of
a tail come through,
and then you normally get
a little bit of a Mohawk.
They put on about 10% of weight every day.
Takes three months of hand aring.
And then on top of that,
you've got up to a year
of looking after them.
Geoffrey came out beautiful red,
beautiful, beautiful deep red.
Geoffrey? Are you Geoffrey?
Geoffrey's species of Macaw is in trouble.
The wild population is only
a fragment of what it once was.
Costa Rica is one of the last strongholds.
ARA hopes to stop the extinction
by repopulating the wild
with birds like Geoffrey.
They recently released
a group of seven macaws.
Geoffrey will be next.
We've released
over 100 scarlet macaws, and we've had
over 85% survival rate.
Part of the process of them
learning how to survive in the wild
is teaching the birds what to eat.
The biologists Rachel and Charlie
are going round
and they're collecting things
like beach almonds,
finding coral pods,
all of the foods
the birds are going to have to
learn to survive off.
You'll see them put
whole branches in the aviary,
and that's so the birds can recognize,
"Oh, this leaf
means this food."
They start chewing on things, finding out
what part of the fruit
or the seed tastes good.
A lot of it's instinct,
so a lot of them actually will
pick up an almond
for the first time and go,
"Oh, yeah, I know how to
crack this, that's fun."
It's boot camp, basically.
Macaw boot camp.
We were going on vacation
and I was trying to figure out
what to do with Basil.
I have a friend who also has
a yellow-naped Amazon.
So, I offered to take him.
Basil had never seen
another yellow-naped Amazon
in the 15 years I'd owned him.
Liz and Holly decide
to take a gamble with the birds.
By the time the Hartmans
returned from vacation,
Basil and Koko
were tightly bonded.
We loaded him into his travel cage
and started to walk
out of the house with him,
and her Amazon just starts
pacing back and fourth going no!
You could hear Koko calling
like he was losing his best friend.
We were in tears,
we said, oh, we can't have this happen,
this is heartbreaking.
I starting talking to Holly
about whether she would adopt Basil.
So, she said yes.
You can't just give away a friend.
You just can't do that.
I had a huge amount of guilt.
You take on this living creature,
it's your responsibility.
It's not that we wanted to give up Basil,
the kids were having a hard time.
He's just being a normal, wild bird.
They're not pets...
you can call them a pet,
you can put them in a pet shop,
you can dress it up all you want,
they're not pets.
Now, when you go over there and see them,
they're best buddies.
I definitely would not have a parrot again.
I would never do it again, no,
for my own mental health,
and the mental health of the parrot.
No.
After a month in quarantine,
Lou is given a clean bill of health.
Then we begin the process of trying to
integrate him with other birds.
In the wild they have an entire rainforest,
they can choose their own mate.
You put them together with birds
that are not of their choice,
and it just doesn't always work.
They start Lou outside a large aviary.
From here, he can watch the other cockatoos
from a safe distance.
After three weeks on the outside,
it's time for Lou to move into the aviary.
Without knowing Lou's past,
they can only guess,
and watch, and hope.
Lou, he's a little on
the quiet and reserved side,
we had to very carefully pick
his aviary mates.
He needed non-aggressive,
you know, kind of docile aviary mates,
and so that's what we set up for him,
an aviary with five other cockatoos.
After two weeks inside the enclosure,
they feel it's safe to take Lou
from his cage.
Hi, buddy.
You're okay!
Here you go, buddy! Oh!
Oh, good boy!
And then the unexpected.
Another lone cockatoo,
Princess, a parrot with an
injured foot and a hazy history,
takes a chance.
In Costa Rica,
Geoffrey's big day is finally here.
Being able to see
animals that you've raised,
free and wild, this is the ultimate.
You do have that worry
in the back of your mind,
what happens if it doesn't
go well and he doesn't survive?
See? That's where
you're going soon.
It's not likely that
all of them are gonna survive.
Predators, accidents.
You can't predict what they're gonna do
and it's always the favorite ones
that you think are gonna get lost.
Come on Geoffrey, Geoffrey!
Come on, Geoffrey!
Once the birds have lived in
the cage for x-amount of time,
it can be two months
or it could be six months,
depending molts, depending on
how quickly they adapt,
the time of year, the food availability.
When all those factors are right,
that's when we begin the release.
We release the birds individually,
so we can make sure each bird
has an equal chance of survival.
They're gonna let Geoffrey out,
they're gonna tempt him into the box,
or try to... he's quite cunning.
Geoffrey, this is your chance
at freedom, mate.
It can take at least a few hours
to get the right bird in the box.
I'll put a pile of food in there.
And once they have Geoffrey in the box,
they'll let him eat his food
in peace and quiet.
He's ready to go!
He's eaten all his almonds.
That's when they'll let
the outside door down.
Quite often we find that the birds outside
come in, and there's a big scrap.
This is gonna be interesting.
Geoffrey has now got the advantage
of having these outside birds established.
They show off quite a bit
and they're actually teaching
the birds in the aviary,
"look what I can do," you know,
"you're going to be able
to do this soon."
They're going to be able to help
show them where to eat,
teach them what to do,
show them how to fly.
Geoffrey, I'm hoping will,
just fit into the flock
and everybody will think he's awesome.
We'll have to hope for the best,
and that's all you can do.
Good luck mate,
this is your big shot.
He's a good flyer.
It would be far worse for him to
live 45-50 years in captivity
than to have a chance
at living life in the wild.
I hope he has a nice missus
and lots of babies...
a long happy life in the wild.
And that's what I wish for all
of them, not just for Geoffrey.
they navigate the canopy.
Every cell
is engineered for flight.
They speak a language all their own
and form lifelong bonds
that can last for 80 years.
Their wings can carry them
50 miles in a day.
This is a creature
who lives without borders,
in a world we can hardly fathom,
and yet millions live among us.
This is their story.
As day breaks over Santa Barbara,
a cockatoo named Dolly
calls to her flock.
Oh, Dolly.
Good morning pretty bird,
good morning pretty bird,
pretty girl, you're just
up and all sparky, huh?
- I'm a pretty bird.
- Hi!
Dolly likes to wake up about
6:30 or 7:00 in the morning.
Want some breakfast?
- Hi, pretty bird!
- Hi, pretty bird.
- Hi, pretty bird!
- Hi, pretty bird.
I rush to get her before
she wakes up all the neighbors.
They're very nice people
and I want to keep it that way.
With voices designed
to each across the forest,
cockatoos can be a challenge
for the average homeowner.
The screaming is really hard.
I finally got gun range earphones.
And that doesn't completely deaden it.
You can still hear it, it just
doesn't make your eardrums hurt.
Dolly was in a bird collection,
and the gentleman just wasn't really ready
to deal with a Moluccan cockatoo.
She was sort of damaged when
I got her, emotionally.
I had a friend that took me over there
to see if I wanted to adopt Dolly.
And I just took one look at her
and she took one look at me
and I knew I had no choice, you know.
She was gonna be mine.
She was three when I got her,
it'll be 16 years in March.
She is going to live to be 80 or 90.
And I am 74, so, that's...
we don't have many more years together.
And I'm for... That's my biggest concern.
I take Dolly everywhere I can.
She loves going in the car.
I think it's an experience
probably like flying.
You know, they see the scenery rushing by.
Dolly's headed to a local sanctuary,
where she boards a few days each week.
This is Lavanya's survival tactic.
When Dolly is at home with
Lavanya, it's all about Dolly.
There's no talking on the phone,
there's no having company.
And after about three or four days of that,
poor Lavanya has to take care of
her own needs, as well.
Watch you head!
So I can go to
appointments and get things done
and have a little time to do
some of the things I like to do,
visit friends.
- We're gonna go bye-bye!
- Bye-bye, pretty bird.
Bye-bye, pretty bird!
Hey, Jamie, we're back.
Jamie McLeod founded
the Santa Barbara Bird Sanctuary
nine years ago, when she noticed there was
a problem with unwanted parrots.
- I'll see you in a couple days.
- All right.
Good morning, Dolly!
She began to realize
many of the birds she was selling
were being re-homed.
I was a breeder for more than 30 years.
Amazons, Macaws, Cockatoos.
When people typically would keep
the birds two to four years,
it became apparent
that not everybody's cracked up to own one.
They live 80 years...
crunch those numbers out
and there's a lot of unwanted
parrots out there.
Hi, guys!
I felt I was contributing to a problem,
and started focusing on
re-homing all the unwanted ones.
There we go!
We currently have
more than 60 birds
and we're beyond capacity.
We're turning people away.
Okay, you ready for your breakfast?
Let's go, girl!
People abandon them on our porch,
they threaten to euthanize them
if I don't take them.
Many of the birds that we have
now have been adopted out
numerous times, and they come back.
It's a huge problem.
People don't always understand
that when a bird forms a bond with you,
it's actually a mate bond.
They're not just part of your life,
they become your life.
I rarely go away on vacation...
they literally are my life.
People will come in and they'll say,
"I want a bird that talks, that's quiet
and that doesn't bite,"
and that species has not yet
been discovered.
Come on over here!
Come on! Come on!
Come on over here!
Come over here!
Come over here!
- Come on over here.
- Come over here.
- Come on over here.
- Come over here.
Her original owner taught her
most of her vocabulary.
Everybody loves the Amazons
cause they sing and they talk,
but nothing can bite you harder
than an Amazon parrot.
One day you're cuddling it,
and the next minute you're
missing part of your face.
Squeezethose little birdie legs!
Squeeze those little birdie...
Squeezethose little birdie legs!
Squeeze!
Scary bird, roar!
Kona, who has such a wonderful vocabulary
and is so animated and everybody
wants to adopt her,
actually removed this part of
her owner's nose.
♪ I love you true dear
Once they start to hit sexual maturity
they have drastic behavioral changes.
You're not gonna bite me right now are you?
Up you go.
Let's go, up up up.
Oh, yeah, you are!
Goodbye! Goodbye!
Being injured by a parrot,
you can't be angry with them.
If you take them into your life,
that's one of the things
that you need to accept.
It's still a wild animal.
In a cage or soaring above the canopy,
parrots are still considered wild.
Unlike dogs and cats,
they haven't been domesticated
over thousands of years.
Captive bred parrots
are just a few generations
from their wild cousins.
They have complex social lives
and large brains, like primates.
Dr. Tim Wright from
New Mexico State University
has discovered
their language skills
are remarkably advanced,
and they learn to speak much as humans do.
Learning how to sound like others
seems to be very important
for these parrots.
If you sound like others,
you're a member of their group.
They are very tightly bonded
with each other.
Here in captivity, they're
trying to recreate that bond
with whoever's around.
Wright's research has revealed
that they speak in regional dialects...
and some are even bilingual.
But human encroachment
is making it
increasingly difficult
to study these birds.
Yellow-naped Amazons are not
doing that well in the wild.
There's been a very rapid decline.
The parrots often nest
in lone trees on ranches.
Sadly, this is a risky place
to raise their young.
They're not recognizing
the danger posed by these
new human predators.
The ranch hands
often will poach the parrots.
They're out in the fields every day,
they watch the parrots,
they know what they're doing
and have a good sense of where
they're putting their nests,
and they know when
there might be chicks there.
These birds are certainly touchy
around their nest,
so we just try to keep our distance.
Oh yeah, she's going back,
she's going back down now.
Yeah, she's going in, tail first.
Wright has been studying nest cavities
in order to learn how parents
teach language to their young.
Okay, hold it!
He tries to keep his contact with the birds
to a minimum.
If we do climb up,
we do it quickly and get out of there.
Oh, it's a deep one.
Ah, there are two eggs in there.
The female will sit on these
eggs for about three weeks
and then the chicks will hatch,
and that's when the rough time comes.
It's hard to say whether these
chicks will be left in the nest
and fly free, or become pets.
I've been trying to study
their nesting behavior,
and I can't do that
if people are taking the chicks
out of the nest,
so it's... it's sort of a double, uh,
a double heartbreak for me.
We were visiting a night roost
to record the vocalizations there,
and I heard a strange sound.
Hola!
It wasn't quite human,
someone was saying
"hello," or "hola."
Permisso!
In fact, it was a parrot.
Look at you!
Hi!
You are a yellow-naped Amazon.
I talked with the manager of the ranch,
and he told me a little bit
about her history.
So, they've had it about 9 months,
it's a... it was a chick taken
from the nest this year,
um, from a nest a little bit south.
He said, you just have to climb up the tree
and stick your hand in and take it out.
I asked how much a chick
like this would sell for,
and he said, well, when they're very young,
just out of the nest, they might
sell for $30 or $40.
A bird that was a little bit older
and in good health like Lorita
would sell for about $100.
She has learned a lot of human
language words, Spanish words.
She laughs, she calls "hello" or "hola,"
but when there are other parrots
in the area,
she'll also call to them.
Normally, one parrot
might fly over and join the flock.
But Lorita can't do that.
She's in a cage.
Baby parrots like Lorita
have been taken from the nest
for thousands of years.
But today, nearly one third of
wild parrots are endangered.
The illicit trade in exotic birds
has become a multi-billion dollar business.
In 1992,
the U.S. banned
the importation of wild birds.
But before then,
it was wild parrots
that filled our pet stores.
For many parrots, this is how life began.
Jimmy Gentile opened his pet shop in 1975.
We kind of specialize in what I call
"no pets allowed" pets,
or unique companion animals...
we don't do dogs or cats.
Liz Hartman moved to Boston in the '80s
to attend vet school.
I worked part-time
for Jimmy at the pet shop,
I really was just a cage cleaner.
There was a bird there,
a yellow-naped Amazon,
that I thought was so cool.
I thought, "Oh, man, I really
want to take this bird home,
I really want to own it."
And Jimmy said,
"You really should get a baby
and hand feed it,
because that's how
you bond with them."
I had ordered a bunch of baby birds,
taken from the nest in Honduras.
A day came when they called me
and they said,
"Your chicks are available."
So, I went to the airport,
picked up the box.
I was so excited,
I couldn't wait, I was beside myself.
I packed up that bird
and went home with it.
When she brought him home, I remember.
We had discussed it, and at first
I was totally against it,
because I knew how long parrots lasted.
He was totally into it,
he thought it was great.
They're messy, I've been in the pet stores.
In the beginning you had to
wrap him up in a towel,
cause he would try to bite you.
It was our first experience at parenthood.
I eventually warmed up to the idea,
and we couldn't help but
sit there and just look at him,
it was so amazing to see
this wild bird in our house.
Basil's early years were trouble-free.
Good morning, Basil.
The first four years
were lovely and blissful.
I would come down in the morning
and open Basil's cage.
Whenever we were home, he was
basically free to crawl around,
and he mostly stayed on his cage.
The quickness at which
he could pick up anything,
he was so amazing.
I think he was wicked smart.
He loved the interaction.
We thought, "We're gonna
love this bird to death,
and we're going to do
whatever we need to do
to make this bird happy
for the rest of it's life."
Parrots usually bond with one person.
For Basil, that person was Russ.
He was so bonded to Russ.
Russ traveled overseas a lot for business,
and he'd been gone for about a month.
Hi!
You must be exhausted.
He got home at night and we went to bed.
Good night, Basil.
Everything seemed fine.
We woke up the next morning
and...
Hello!
Basil had plucked all of
the feathers off of his chest.
Like, just plucked it bald.
He'd never plucked before, ever.
It was devastating to us
because we didn't know
what was going on.
We later determined he was so angry
that he was willing to go through the pain
of pulling his own feathers out.
It wasn't down to the skin,
but just the grey down.
I mean, there had to be
some sort of emotional response
to Russ coming home.
I think he was making a point.
You have to be there for them.
They are social animals.
I can't even imagine anything more complex.
They're up there
with the apes and the humans.
If Basil was still in the wild,
he would already have found a mate by now.
They'd rarely be apart.
Their mated bond would nurture
the next generation,
ensuring the survival of the species.
A wild parrot
is seldom alone.
Even in flight,
a mated pair is almost never
out of earshot.
For a wild parrot,
solitude is rare.
In a Boston suburb,
a parrot has been left behind.
The family lost the home,
the bank had taken possession,
and I received a call.
The bird had been left behind
for approximately four days.
It was four days
since anyone had been last seen
coming or going from the home.
It did have water,
it did not have bird food available,
there was other pet food in the home.
To just be left behind in a cage,
it has to affect them...
they're not stupid.
I've heard the stories
that these animals go through
and for me it's utter heartbreak.
Did you give me a call earlier?
I did, it's been three or four
days since I've seen anyone here
and I've heard some bird noises.
Okay, I'm gonna go take a look
and see if I see anything.
Guys I can't, I just need you
to stay outside
if you don't mind for now.
Thanks, Lisa.
Ah, an umbrella cockatoo,
our favorite species.
This is the only animal
we found in the house.
Aw, hey.
So, you can take care of him for us, Marc?
- Thank you.
- Sure, no problem.
Thanks.
Bye, little guy!
Part of the evaluation
process when we get a bird,
if we don't know his name,
we wait for him to tell us.
He'll say hello, and then
usually say his name.
In this case the bird never told us.
So, we just named him after
a good friend of ours, Lou.
He seems really nervous with me,
maybe he'll be better with you,
wanna get him out?
Marc Johnson and Karen Windsor
have devoted their lives
to rescuing parrots.
Every bird has a story.
Every bird has a history,
especially an emotional history.
They carry their baggage.
I think there are probably
a lot of forgotten birds
in a lot of dark corners of the world.
Hey, hi. Hi.
It's hard economic times
and our animals sometimes pay the price.
I spoke to you on the phone last week
about putting my parrot, Max,
up for adoption,
he will be ten years...
...friends
who could not keep them.
The blue and gold is very aggressive...
And due to a divorce I am being forced
to move into an apartment
which will not allow...
I've been in contact with the vet
and I'm planning on euthanasia
if there is no...
Everyday we get e-mails,
and that's the hardest part
of our life now.
We have to say no a lot.
...as I want to make sure
they don't end up suffering
or being mistreated...
...she's driving my
husband and children crazy...
I cannot live like this anymore,
I hope to hear from you.
Johnson has witnessed
the proliferation of parrots
over the years.
It all began with a want ad.
In the 1980s I had a small pottery studio.
I had a deep admiration for the rainforest
and I wanted to get a pet,
AND I thought something exotic
would be fun,
so I bought a parrot
in the Want advertiser for $900.
Wally was a blue and gold macaw.
He was a wonderful bird.
People would come in and see I
had a parrot and they would say,
"Oh, I have a cousin
that's got one of those,"
"My brother's got one of those,"
"I've got one of those
that I don't want anymore,
would you like my parrot?"
Not knowing how big the problem was,
I thought, well, this is great,
because people were
giving parrots that were
worth lots of money.
We were being besieged by birds.
Before I knew it I had 30 of
them with more coming every day.
It turns out, people were giving
me their parrots
because they're very difficult pets.
And I was the only game in town.
Nobody else would take unwanted birds,
so people came to visit me.
Before I knew it I had
outgrown the pottery studio,
and I had to figure out
some way of dealing with it.
Johnson closed the studio
and moved to a house in the suburbs.
From that point on
it was, if you build it they will come.
The birds took over the house.
Every single room
had half a dozen birds in it.
The pantry, the spare rooms, the bedrooms.
When I first came to volunteer,
I found parrots in the kitchen,
parrots in the living room,
parrots in the bathroom.
Within no time we had over 300 parrots.
The house had become a sanctuary.
With more requests each day,
Johnson ran out of space... again.
As luck would have it,
we came across this abandoned chicken farm.
I kind of stumbled on this place
by accident.
It's a wreck but I think it's
what we've been waiting for.
This is gonna be
an enormous amount of work.
It's too much.
It scared the hell out of Karen,
but I saw it as a golden opportunity.
Within two years,
they had tripled the size of the sanctuary.
But in no time, even the new facility
would be bursting at the seams.
Where were all these unwanted
parrots coming from?
From South America, Africa,
Asia, Indonesia,
parrots were streaming in from the wild.
When it became illegal to import
wild birds to the U.S.,
domestic breeding filled the void.
Today, the practice of breeding parrots
is not without controversy.
Anybody with $40
can walk into any Petco and buy a parrot.
There are no regulations.
Anybody can have as many of them
as they want,
they can breed them, they can sell them.
I'm not one to talk, because I did it.
Hand feed everybody.
This was a long time ago,
there wasn't any such thing
as a rescue or a sanctuary,
there was no need for it.
Phoebe and Harry Linden
were once highly respected breeders.
It all started nearly 40 years ago.
In 1971, I saw in the paper
somebody was advertising they
had to get rid of a parrot.
And I basically rescued him from this guy.
And then I started finding out
that they were bringing in
birds from the wild.
You could go down and you could
buy at wholesale price
just about any bird you'd want.
I got another parrot, and another parrot.
Before you knew it,
we had so many birds in the house
we couldn't live there anymore,
I had to get another house.
40 years ago,
if you purchased a parrot,
it would almost certainly be
a parrot from the wild.
Capture and transport
took a terrible toll.
It's been estimated
that more than 70% of wild-caught parrots
died before ever reaching the pet store.
I felt bad about these wild caught parrots,
and I thought, if we bred these birds,
then people would not need to
pull them out of the wild.
I named the business
Santa Barbara Bird Farm.
When we started to breed parrots,
I quit my job and just hand-fed birds.
Harry and I decided
not to have human children,
and I just found that I could
like zip open my heart
and pour it into these baby birds.
We wanted to keep every single one of them.
The Linden's had an excellent reputation
and a long waiting list.
They were hands-on with the chicks,
and carefully screened potential buyers.
But in the late '70s
the landscape began to change.
A TV series came out
called "Baretta."
This detective had a medium
sulfur-crested cockatoo
that made it look like
the coolest pet you could have,
they don't scream,
they don't pick their feathers,
they do what you tell them to do.
Go look in that window
and tell me if somebody's getting stabbed.
The word got out there, how charming,
how companionable parrots were.
The phone started ringing off the wall.
Demand bloomed overnight.
All of a sudden,
you could get one anywhere.
In the beginning it wasn't like that.
We started to hear about
rescues and sanctuaries.
And we started to realize that,
wow, there are unwanted parrots.
When we saw that there was going to be
a tremendous amount of fallout from that,
we decided to stop breeding.
We shut breeding down forever.
The Linden's decided to close the business
and instead focus on building
the best facility they could
for the birds they still had.
This new aviary
can actually have foraging potential
with the trees and the grass.
We're in the position now
where we want to take back
any baby who we raised who needs a home.
So, they get to live a life
where they can make
their own decisions, exercise,
have access to fresh air, fresh food.
A lot of breeders like
ourselves just stopped breeding,
but we still have some of
the parrot mills out there
that produce a lot of babies every year,
and so there's still
going to be parrots out there
who are gonna run into problems
in the future
and have to be put up for adoption.
People who really care about parrots
don't buy birds... they adopt.
We need to take care of
the parrots who are here,
the best way that we can,
and conserve the parrots in the wild.
It is the paradox of the parrot.
As numbers dwindle in the wild,
the number of rescues in captivity
continues to increase.
With sanctuaries struggling to stay afloat,
the fate of unwanted parrots
is becoming more precarious every day.
The step-father died,
and the daughter called up
and asked us to take Fagan.
- Hello?
- Hey.
- Here he is.
- Okay, thank you.
'Kay, thank you.
In a Detroit suburb,
a parrot named Fagan has found
his way to Marie Crowley.
Good boy, good boy.
When I took Fagan out of the carrier,
it was pretty obvious that he had
a big self-mutilation wound on his abdomen.
You really chewed yourself up buddy, huh?
I noticed that he smelled
heavily of nicotine.
You smell, you stink.
He obviously hadn't been bathed
in a long time.
Did they smoke, hmm?
He was just covered in goop.
You are a dirty, dirty bird.
Need a bath.
There you go.
I noticed my hands were just disgusting.
They were covered in nicotine,
my hands were stained for two days after.
I gotcha, there you go.
It's all done.
Yes, the yuckies are over, there you go.
I knew that the conditions
that he was coming from
were really, really poor.
Good boy.
Shh.
After living in a smoke-filled house
for nearly 25 years,
Fagan presented a challenge
for Dr. Orosz.
Let's listen to the
chest, can you let me listen?
When Fagan walked through the door,
I saw a bird in crisis.
His feathers were greasy with nicotine.
He had a large patch
where he had been mutilating on his chest.
He was basically a mess.
- Back of his throat, see that?
- Ah, okay, mm-hmm.
He's from a home where the lady
smoked all the time, right?
It was those little dime-store cigars.
Oh, great.
It became pretty clear that he was actually
physically addicted to the nicotine.
He started having seizures.
We had to detox him from the nicotine,
and then he had this large area
where he's been mutilating his body.
Those are very difficult things
to overcome in birds, very difficult.
In discussions with psychiatrists,
the closest thing I can think of
is that it could be something like cutting.
When they do physical damage to themselves,
it's a kind of a release effect.
We had to help him with his stress.
Here, buddy, come put this collar on, okay?
Good job.
Fagan has been in a collar so long
that he is okay with putting a collar on,
he doesn't really argue or fight about it.
Fagan was really malnourished
his whole life.
It took weeks to get him to eat properly.
There are no sanctuaries
for parrots in Michigan,
there's just some people like me
who try and take them in as best they can.
They don't have anywhere else to go,
so they end up in this
little suburbia neighborhood
where you'd never expect to see
a parrot... in my basement!
I have 26 birds here.
The situation is less than ideal.
But we do everything we can...
we've put up air filters,
full-spectrum lighting, and then
I keep palm trees down there
'cause I figure
if the palm trees stay alive,
then the lighting is at least adequate.
Every bird here has to be fed and watered
three to four times a day,
their cages have to be cleaned.
It's a labor of love.
Like most parrot rescues,
Crowley's non-profit,
Feathered Friends of Michigan,
barely scrapes by.
Most sanctuaries and rescues
across the United States are full,
so we all make do
with the bad situation as best we can.
Come here. Come here.
Let's take your collar off, huh?
It's important Fagan gets some time
out of his collar every day,
so that he can work on
preening his feathers
and flapping his wings and climbing.
He's been in a collar so long,
he falls a lot.
Because he can't open his wings
to catch himself
like a bird should.
So, we're gonna work on building
those muscles back up over time.
Would you like to dance?
Yeah?
You would like to dance?
♪ My head up to the sky
♪ Ooh, la la, la la, la la
♪ I'm going to keep my head up
to the sky ♪
♪ Won't let life
pass me by ♪
♪ 'Cause after the rain
comes down ♪
♪ The sun will always
come back around ♪
♪ And I'm going to keep
my head up to the sky ♪
Yeah, we gotta read this one.
This is a long one, man.
Fagan isn't comfortable
with other birds yet,
and with his health issues,
Marie needs to keep
a close watch.
So, he lives with the family.
My son was learning his colors.
What's red?
Good job, Fagan!
And whenever we went over a color,
Fagan would go up and tap it with his beak,
so, we brought these out and...
What's green?
He does like to differentiate
between the colors.
Good.
What I'm trying to do is give
his mind a way to exercise,
it's another form of enrichment
that's been shown to reduce
anxiety in parrots.
What's yellow?
It's a non-sexual way for me to
interact with him.
That will kind of break the cycle
of the mated bond that
he's trying to create with me.
If Fagan was in the wild,
he would have a flock,
he would find a mate and they'd
crawl up into a tree cavity
and build a nest and have babies.
But in captivity,
that causes a lot of frustration
for birds like Fagan.
What's red?
Good job!
Yeah.
What's yellow?
Unfortunately for the African Grey's,
their intelligence level ended up being
somewhat their undoing in captivity.
- What toy?
- Truck.
- That's right!
- Good birdie.
- What is it?
- Key chain.
Good boy!
In the '90s, Alex showed the world
that parrots are capable of more
than just mimicking.
- What toy?
- Nail.
Irene Pepperberg's
work with Alex was seminal.
Tell me what color, what color?
- Yellow.
- Yellow, that's right.
When the work with Alex came out,
everybody wanted to buy an Alex.
The breeding of them skyrocketed.
But Alex isn't your everyday African Grey,
he's a bird that was trained for
hours a day for years on end.
Most African Greys don't talk.
They mostly love to make really
obnoxious microwave sounds,
and phone sounds...
stuff that people find hard on their ears.
So, they end up getting surrendered a lot.
I think as long as Alex is at
the top of the YouTube charts,
he's gonna be at the top of
my surrender charts.
In the wild, Fagan's intelligence
would be put to task.
In flight, his large brain
would measure space, wind and speed.
He'd calculate distance
and sources of food.
If confronted, he'd take flight.
These wild instincts
are still very much intact
for birds like Basil.
The first four years,
like I said, were wonderful.
Kiss kiss!
He was sweet, he was handleable,
he was lovely,
and then adolescence set in.
He just became progressively
more aggressive.
I'd be sitting at the dinning
room table Sunday morning
reading the paper,
and he would seek me out.
It got to the point
where I could not
leave the cage open at all.
If I were in the house
and the cage was open,
he would immediately climb down
the cage to attack my feet.
He just decided I was the person he hated.
He would lunge at her,
he would fly out of the cage at her.
One morning I got up,
I opened the door to his cage
and then I turned around
to open the window,
and he just flew at me,
he was hanging off my ear.
You just didn't know, he could
be all sweet and happy,
turn around and bite you.
When we had the kids,
Basil wasn't quite ready
to have these foreigners.
They didn't know any better,
they thought they could walk up
just like I did.
My daughter was four years old at the time
and she was feeding him
a cracker, and he nailed her.
I heard the screaming,
I came running down the stairs.
It was awful.
That was when we started to realize that
perhaps Basil wasn't going to
warm up so much to the kids.
I didn't think I could keep this
animal as a pet anymore.
No one knows the
number of parrots in captivity.
Estimates range from
10 to 40 million in the U.S.
While many live in stable homes,
thousands are surrendered each year.
What happens to the parrots
who fall through the cracks?
Abandoned for four days in an empty house,
Lou is one of the lucky ones.
At Foster Parrots, Lou's next
chapter is about to begin.
With no clues about his past,
providing the right care
will be a challenge.
No one knows how old he is,
how many homes he's had,
or if he's ever seen anther parrot.
How must it feel
for a bird like Lou, entering a sanctuary
for the first time?
Thousands of sounds, hundreds of birds,
each calling out with its own story.
Hi.
Pretty bird.
When we walk through the facility,
it's important that everybody understand
that what they are seeing is a tragedy.
What we are looking at
is the failure of humans as companions
to parrots.
Any new arrival gets a full physical.
It's especially critical for
a bird with no medical history,
like Lou.
Was left in an abandoned home.
Was there food and water?
There was a bag of dog food.
Dog food?
Nice.
Poor Lou.
Okay, buddy.
Let's look at your plumage, Lou.
Sounds like you had a tough life, huh?
Any avian vet realizes that
the stress our captive parrots are under
is immense.
There you go.
Pretty good weight for his species.
We take these birds into our
homes and we cut their wings.
This guy's pretty scared,
his heart rate's off the chart.
Probably over 300 beats a minute.
We house them in cages
and we don't allow them to be
with their own species.
You can imagine the stress
on these animals.
Stress is known to lower the immune system.
Clipped wings and cages
guarantee a sedentary life, and avian vets
are finding that heart disease
is all too common in captive parrots,
especially those with poor diets.
Parrots can also carry infectious diseases.
Lou will stay in quarantine for 30 days,
to make sure he's not contagious.
His test results will determine his future.
With over 550 birds,
Foster Parrots is well beyond capacity.
If we take another bird,
my volunteers would kill me.
35 volunteers and a staff of six.
That's not enough humans
to meet the needs of really
human-bonded birds.
Are you gonna step up?
Good girl.
We cannot integrate
these parrots with their own species.
And yet they don't fit into
a human society either.
What are we to do with these birds?
'Cause they don't even know they're birds.
Peepers exhibits an
unusual feather picking profile.
She pulls the feathers
out of her head and neck with her foot,
giving her that vulture-like appearance,
that if she only knew
what she looked like,
she might not do so often.
You're still beautiful.
Being a domestically raised bird,
she identifies with humans
and she also wants to mate with humans.
That's not good peepers.
You just wants to be loved,
is that so wrong?
We received a call from a woman
whose neighbor was keeping
peepers in an unheated porch
in the middle of winter.
You're a good girl.
Right now we take in birds when
it's a life and death situation.
I mean, you have to take that bird in.
The care requirements are so huge
you can never feel like
you've been successful.
Is that for you?
From the very first day
I got Wally, the blue and gold macaw,
my resolve was to make his life
better, every day, and...
God, sorry...
Give me a sec.
I mean, when people ask me
what is the right size cage for a macaw,
there is no right size cage for a macaw,
it's 35 square miles, you know, it's like,
it's huge, and it's the sky, it's...
The owner is an older gentleman
whose wife passed away
about four years ago,
and the bird has been
pecking away at himself...
Hey, Marc, my mother died three weeks ago
and I need to find a place
for a cockatoo...
It's killing me writing to you like this
but I must find a new home...
When I first started Foster Parrots,
I thought we could take every
single bird that needed a home.
But of course, the numbers were staggering,
to a point now where we have
over a thousand calls a year
for surrender.
How wonderful it would be if these parrots
could be released to the wild.
But it's unlikely they'd have
the skills to survive
like their wild cousins.
And the risk of spreading
disease would be too great.
With populations so low,
every parrot matters.
In Costa Rica, a scarlet macaw
is calling to his mother.
I knew Geoffrey was special from hatch.
He had a very cute peep.
They communicate with mum
well before they've hatched.
So, the babies will actually be
talking to mum
through the egg.
They hatch open and they're so helpless,
they're all wet
and they still have
the little umbilical cord
attached to the egg.
We leave them about 12 hours,
to allow the yolk
to be used up.
So, little Geoffrey hatched out
and he was just so cute.
I could tell Geoffrey was
a smart one from hatch.
The ARA Project is breeding rescued macaws
in order to release their
offspring to the wild.
The parents, who are former pets
and rescued birds,
don't always know how to raise their young.
Geoffrey's mother was an ex-pet,
and his father was poached from the wild.
His mum is not a very good mum.
His parents abandoned him, unfortunately.
So, for the first two months
of Geoffrey's life,
he had to live in an incubator.
Geoffrey started off like
a little plucked chicken,
and then he started getting
his pin feathers coming through,
you'll get a little bit of
a tail come through,
and then you normally get
a little bit of a Mohawk.
They put on about 10% of weight every day.
Takes three months of hand aring.
And then on top of that,
you've got up to a year
of looking after them.
Geoffrey came out beautiful red,
beautiful, beautiful deep red.
Geoffrey? Are you Geoffrey?
Geoffrey's species of Macaw is in trouble.
The wild population is only
a fragment of what it once was.
Costa Rica is one of the last strongholds.
ARA hopes to stop the extinction
by repopulating the wild
with birds like Geoffrey.
They recently released
a group of seven macaws.
Geoffrey will be next.
We've released
over 100 scarlet macaws, and we've had
over 85% survival rate.
Part of the process of them
learning how to survive in the wild
is teaching the birds what to eat.
The biologists Rachel and Charlie
are going round
and they're collecting things
like beach almonds,
finding coral pods,
all of the foods
the birds are going to have to
learn to survive off.
You'll see them put
whole branches in the aviary,
and that's so the birds can recognize,
"Oh, this leaf
means this food."
They start chewing on things, finding out
what part of the fruit
or the seed tastes good.
A lot of it's instinct,
so a lot of them actually will
pick up an almond
for the first time and go,
"Oh, yeah, I know how to
crack this, that's fun."
It's boot camp, basically.
Macaw boot camp.
We were going on vacation
and I was trying to figure out
what to do with Basil.
I have a friend who also has
a yellow-naped Amazon.
So, I offered to take him.
Basil had never seen
another yellow-naped Amazon
in the 15 years I'd owned him.
Liz and Holly decide
to take a gamble with the birds.
By the time the Hartmans
returned from vacation,
Basil and Koko
were tightly bonded.
We loaded him into his travel cage
and started to walk
out of the house with him,
and her Amazon just starts
pacing back and fourth going no!
You could hear Koko calling
like he was losing his best friend.
We were in tears,
we said, oh, we can't have this happen,
this is heartbreaking.
I starting talking to Holly
about whether she would adopt Basil.
So, she said yes.
You can't just give away a friend.
You just can't do that.
I had a huge amount of guilt.
You take on this living creature,
it's your responsibility.
It's not that we wanted to give up Basil,
the kids were having a hard time.
He's just being a normal, wild bird.
They're not pets...
you can call them a pet,
you can put them in a pet shop,
you can dress it up all you want,
they're not pets.
Now, when you go over there and see them,
they're best buddies.
I definitely would not have a parrot again.
I would never do it again, no,
for my own mental health,
and the mental health of the parrot.
No.
After a month in quarantine,
Lou is given a clean bill of health.
Then we begin the process of trying to
integrate him with other birds.
In the wild they have an entire rainforest,
they can choose their own mate.
You put them together with birds
that are not of their choice,
and it just doesn't always work.
They start Lou outside a large aviary.
From here, he can watch the other cockatoos
from a safe distance.
After three weeks on the outside,
it's time for Lou to move into the aviary.
Without knowing Lou's past,
they can only guess,
and watch, and hope.
Lou, he's a little on
the quiet and reserved side,
we had to very carefully pick
his aviary mates.
He needed non-aggressive,
you know, kind of docile aviary mates,
and so that's what we set up for him,
an aviary with five other cockatoos.
After two weeks inside the enclosure,
they feel it's safe to take Lou
from his cage.
Hi, buddy.
You're okay!
Here you go, buddy! Oh!
Oh, good boy!
And then the unexpected.
Another lone cockatoo,
Princess, a parrot with an
injured foot and a hazy history,
takes a chance.
In Costa Rica,
Geoffrey's big day is finally here.
Being able to see
animals that you've raised,
free and wild, this is the ultimate.
You do have that worry
in the back of your mind,
what happens if it doesn't
go well and he doesn't survive?
See? That's where
you're going soon.
It's not likely that
all of them are gonna survive.
Predators, accidents.
You can't predict what they're gonna do
and it's always the favorite ones
that you think are gonna get lost.
Come on Geoffrey, Geoffrey!
Come on, Geoffrey!
Once the birds have lived in
the cage for x-amount of time,
it can be two months
or it could be six months,
depending molts, depending on
how quickly they adapt,
the time of year, the food availability.
When all those factors are right,
that's when we begin the release.
We release the birds individually,
so we can make sure each bird
has an equal chance of survival.
They're gonna let Geoffrey out,
they're gonna tempt him into the box,
or try to... he's quite cunning.
Geoffrey, this is your chance
at freedom, mate.
It can take at least a few hours
to get the right bird in the box.
I'll put a pile of food in there.
And once they have Geoffrey in the box,
they'll let him eat his food
in peace and quiet.
He's ready to go!
He's eaten all his almonds.
That's when they'll let
the outside door down.
Quite often we find that the birds outside
come in, and there's a big scrap.
This is gonna be interesting.
Geoffrey has now got the advantage
of having these outside birds established.
They show off quite a bit
and they're actually teaching
the birds in the aviary,
"look what I can do," you know,
"you're going to be able
to do this soon."
They're going to be able to help
show them where to eat,
teach them what to do,
show them how to fly.
Geoffrey, I'm hoping will,
just fit into the flock
and everybody will think he's awesome.
We'll have to hope for the best,
and that's all you can do.
Good luck mate,
this is your big shot.
He's a good flyer.
It would be far worse for him to
live 45-50 years in captivity
than to have a chance
at living life in the wild.
I hope he has a nice missus
and lots of babies...
a long happy life in the wild.
And that's what I wish for all
of them, not just for Geoffrey.