Jungle Sprite

Joanna Burger, a biologist, wrote The Parrot Who Owns Me about her relationship with Tiko, a Red-lored Amazon. Of his arrival, she wrote:

..so far as Tiko was concerned, we had entered his world, not the other way round. ...Our suburban home had become, in a sense, the wild tropical forest of Tiko's ancestors, the pair of us pressed into service as the flock of his generational memory.

When the AGP came to live with us, I thought we were getting a pet bird. Not so. On Tiko's first night, Burger, sleepless, lay awake thinking that their "dark quiet house felt different, inhabited as it was by a strange new spirit, a jungle sprite." We felt the same way on the AGP's first night: She doesn't just live here, she inhabits here. Her presence filled the house that first day, even after she had quieted for the night.

We have always been dog people, owning up to three at once and fostering others for a rescue organization. We had a cat once, too, who lived with us for about 17 or 18 years. The AGP is altogether a different dynamic. For one thing, she is an independent sort. She may not want to come out of her cage, or step up (or down, for that matter) when we think she should. She has strong preferences for one toy over another. She will reject out of hand a perch we thought was awesome when we brought it home for her. Yet she is very bird-like in her connection to us, her flock. She verbalizes constantly if we are out of sight (we of course call back).

For another, although she was supposed to be "my" bird, she chose to bond with The Birdfather. That is probably because I made the mistake of leaving town for a week shortly after we brought her home, but I sometimes think she might have chosen him anyway for her own inscrutable reasons. She is at her absolute happiest sitting on the back corner of the couch a few inches from his right shoulder.