Mallards on Lake Casitas; Shanti at Home

There were a pair of male mallards on the shore of Lake Casitas today, dunking their iridescent green heads in limpid water. There seemed to be a joy intrinsic to their gesture, but perhaps I was only projecting the happiness I felt in contemplating duck beauty. Either way their grace was a kind of gift, a gratuitous blessing from innocent avian to obsessively curious and dangerous Homo sapiens.

I watched the redwings in the reeds -- the vultures, herons and egrets overhead.

A vulture flew across the hillside where white-tailed deer graze. He made two or three robust wing flaps, but mostly coasted three hundred meters, braking abruptly at the end to make an effortless landing high in a eucalyptus, instantly at rest, nestled in for approaching dusk.

These simple activities of wild birds are magical to us humans, sunk deep in our alienation and wonderment. We admire the sublime fitness of a bird in its natural habitat. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have come to this: the happy dunking of the yellow mallard beak in the lake water, the long glide of Cathartes aura, the snowy egret perched silently on one leg in high grass.

We intuit that there is a perfect pleasure – a clarity -- for these beings; we sense that they luxuriate in their biological niche.

But such perfection is forever denied to Shanti and to all our companion animals. Try as we might, we cannot recreate the African rain forest in our cities, farms or suburban homes. At best we become a homely and artificial surrogate flock for our birds.

Bred in captivity, there is no going back to nature for Shanti. Fed from birth by human hand, Shanti has no mother and father parrot, no social relationships with parrot kin, no future parrot lover or parrot babies hatching high in a forest tree.

We superpredator humans who bend and twist the biosphere to hold us anywhere, anytime, anyhow underestimate the sacred hold of native habitat on our fellow-creatures. Once we left the savannah to conquer the planet, our sense of home became more abstract and malleable; we forgot that other species cannot adapt as easily as we.

For a parrot, no house of steel can ever replace rain forest. No store-bought bag of treats and seeds can match the naked splendor of fresh seeds, berries, nectar and nuts.

I have brought Shanti into my world to enrich my life -- a world in which Shanti can survive, and I hope, somehow flourish. But it is finally a human world in profound debt to parrots and to countless other sentient species we have violated and molded.

What a gift our companion birds give us, what a sacrifice they make. Our debt to them can be repaid only in love, kindness and perpetual protection.

Photo: An African Grey at one-day old, hatched in an incubator.