Therapy birds give patient something to live for

I filmed the most amazing interaction between parrots and humans last month: I was with a rescuer who does parrot therapy in hospitals. She had introduced me earlier to Carlos, a quadriplegic who had given up on life until she brought her parrots to meet him. He was so inspired by their beauty that he decided to learn to paint using a brush held in his mouth. His subject? Macaws, of course!

Alex, the cockatiel’s, reaction to Carlos and/or my filming was pretty amazing. He started squawking loudly using a lot of mostly indecipherable sentences. Every once in a while you’d catch a word but most of it sounded like a bad transistor radio from the 70s. He also got pretty agitated, shaking his topknot up and down, and began pacing along the back of the chair, switching sides and seemingly taking both ends of some argument he was having with himself. Dana was kind of horrified and told him to calm down. I, of course, was loving it and asked her to just let him go because I was getting great footage and he wasn’t hurting himself. She said he’s never acted like that before.

I wonder if it was meeting Carlos, who is locked up in a cage constructed of his own physical limitations. Did it remind Alex of his former life locked in a cage? Or am I completely wrong and he was just hamming it up for my video camera? I thought I caught the word “professor” several times. I teach at a local university and I wonder if someone had referred to me as the professor before I got there.  Could he possibly already know that word and have used it just because I mentioned “students”? It was the first time I’d met Alex and also his first time in the hospital. Since he’s a rescue, Dana’s not sure exactly what he was exposed to previously. Looking forward to more meetings with Alex to see if he acts up again.

I’ve filmed about 4 hours worth of footage for my documentary on parrots, which I’ve decided to call FreeFlight. As I mentioned to Dana, the parrot rescuer I’m following, I’m not at all a parrot expert – just an animal lover who wants to see better lives for these beautiful creatures. It just breaks my heart that humans treat them so cruelly. We have decimated their populations in the wild and then trapped them in cages where they are often abused.

I just finished putting together a trailer for the project and have posted it to Indiegogo, a site that helps filmmakers with donations, in the hope of raising some money to allow me to keep shooting. I’ve already gotten a $50 donation and can only hope they keep coming. In the meantime, I get to learn more about these amazing birds.

An added bonus to making this doc is that I get to pet Dana’s rescued parrots. I was afraid at first that I would hurt them. Accustomed to petting dogs who are a lot more substantial, the birds little bodies felt too delicate to pet. Dana encouraged me though, and I found they really like it. One cockatiel, Pinky, kept grabbing my finger in his beak and bringing it back to him in order to encourage me to keep up the good work, I guess. Another one, Alex, kept raising his wings a little and looking at me. Dana told me that he like to be petted under the winds (I just wasn’t listening again!) I tried it and he blissed out, then kept raising those wings again every time I came near.

I have to say that I think the bald spot the cockatiels have under their topknot is too funny. Until I saw Pinky’s and Alex’s, I had no idea they were bald under there. Much to my surprise, they seem to like being petted there also.