The Osprey and the Parrot

I say goodbye to Shanti the African Grey Parrot, assure him that I’ll be back soon, and head out for a walk at Lake Casitas.

Although Shanti is a wild creature, we have a relationship of habits, expectations, memories and routines. We are always on each other’s mind; we enjoy each other’s company; we remember and anticipate. Shanti knows me like he knows no other being; and I know him like I’ve known no other bird. He is an undomesticated animal, but ours is a domesticated, familial relationship—-a mix of human and bird traditions, human and bird love.

A relationship with a unknown wild creature in its natural habitat, however, is very different.

Every few days I have been visiting an osprey who perches high in a dead oak above the lake. Osprey are diurnal raptors. They mate for life, and they may live 25 years or more.

I see the osprey at a distance of 100 yards, through an open field rounded by woodland. A crow is perched on a lower branch of the oak, and a solitary young doe stands halfway between the osprey and me. There is a quick and silent communion of contemplation among the deer, the crow, the osprey and the person. A twig may break at any moment, and all three wild creatures will vanish, leaving the bemused human to his loneliness, his schemes and his mental perturbations.

I meet the osprey’s gaze. I know that afterwards I will reflect on our delicate and stunning field of awareness, and I know the osprey will not. She is a fisher, supremely unconcerned with the lives of crow, deer and people. She is undistracted by my presence, yet not oblivious to the bridge of white light between raptor and person.

There’s a palpable bond of awareness between us that feels to me like love and wonder. It must feel like something to the osprey too. But what? A quality of sentience unstored in memory, pure of all reflection, perhaps indistinguishable from that sense of love and wonder, perhaps its essence.

Shanti is not a Doll

I love Shanti the African Grey parrot.

Human beings fall in love with animals, and our love for individuals—our dogs and cats and parrots—can open our eyes to our responsibility to their species and to all sentient creatures.

When we dismiss our love for animals as childish or as a surrogate for human love, we denigrate our own emotional integrity, we delegitimize interspecies relationship, and we slam the cage door on animal rights.

We have been taught that love for an animal is nearly as frivolous as love for a teddy bear or a doll. But if we are honest and attentive, we will observe that -- just as with human love -- our bond with our companion animals is a response to their intelligence, awareness and generous willingness to engage us.

Once we acknowledge the authenticity of a loving relationship with a non-human, we face a serious ethical challenge: we are obliged to address the logical inconsistency and moral perversity of loving an individual animal while decimating its kind.

Our loving relationship with animals needs to become part of our spiritual discourse. Just as we hope one day to create a world of peace and social justice among humans, we should likewise express our highest ethical hopes and dreams for nonhumans.

We will not end the slaughter of human beings by warlords tomorrow, nor will we end the slaughter of pigs, foxes, deer and seals the day after. But we ought to at least aspire to a world in which we no longer kill sentient beings for food, fur, entertainment or better cosmetics. Our companion animals will show us the way.

Wild As Wild Can Be

Shanti is a wild animal, breed in captivity for human profit and pleasure, sold to the highest bidder: me.

African Grey parrots have not been domesticated for thousands of years like dogs, cats, chickens and cows. They are today the genetic equals of their diminishing and endangered forest siblings, at most a couple of generations from tropical mangrove and savannah. They are wild as wild can be.

We take a parrot from its flock, from its parents, from its habitat. We deny it flight, freedom, mating, parenting and the society of birds. We keep it in a cage. We exercise our ownership and dominion. We take on a casual and temporary responsibility, but when human concerns intrude or when the animal becomes a nuisance, we break our promises. We get on with life; and they suffer, go crazy or die.

It troubles me how blithely and brazenly we invade this creature’s nature, its purpose. We assume – based on nothing but banal arrogance, reckless speciesism and empty assertion – that a life among us is an enviable life. Or worse, we assume that life doesn’t really matter all that much to the dumb creature; for mattering is exclusively human.

Shanti and I have oddly come together—-the 9-month-old Psittacus erithacus and the 62-year-old Homo sapiens. We have become symbiotic, fallen in love. A fate sealed.

Certainly it's a good deal for the grateful human and not the worst that could have befallen the choiceless parrot. But I wonder about the legitimacy of this covenant. We have exerted unwarranted authority when we usurp all the freedom of the wild, all the rights of nature's creatures.

Animals are not Accidental

We are immersed in a culture of exploitation of animals. How did we get there? It wasn’t an accident.

Often when good conscience demands profound cultural change, we mistakenly think of the status quo as a natural state of affairs. You don’t have to be religious to think that way; you just have to be human. We people tend to like stability and a system of values we can view as good, true and enduring.

Racial segregation in the Southern United States seemed in the first half of the 20th century to be just the way things were, always had been, and ought to be. Women throughout much of modern history were expected to do the housework and obey their husbands. Homosexuality was viewed as perverse, immoral or insane because love between same-sex couples simply wasn’t “normal.”

Similarly, our laws and foundational values regarding non-human animals are also taken for granted as part of the “natural” world. As we did with blacks, gays and women previously, we view animals as social constructs in addition to being sentient beings over whom men have dominion.

But there is no natural and normal way things have always been for animals. We people have decided – based on our interests and our ignorance– what animals are: property.

As a culture, we view animals as among the things that are subject to ownership, like land, lamps, cars and chairs.

Just as this property notion has changed for slaves and women, so can it change for animals. In fact, it is changing. We have come to a grudging acceptance of the protection of animals on wildnerness preserves. There, they may have a home where they are not subject to capture and property claims (although they are certainly subject to anthropogenic environmental impacts).

Outside of the shrinking and threatened wilderness and outside the emergency provisions of laws like the US Endangered Species and Marine Animal Protection Acts, however, animals are still subject to property law and regulation. We claim animal carcasses by hunting, fishing, breeding, capturing and -- above all-- mass-producing them for slaughter in the meat industry.

Let’s make a little progress every day. Here’s one example of an animals rights advance stemming from a horrifying tragedy:

WASHINGTON (Feb. 24, 2009) — Eight days after a chimpanzee kept as a pet attacked and critically injured a Connecticut woman, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, H.R. 80, introduced by U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., to stop interstate commerce in primates as pets. The bill passed by a vote of 323 to 95. The bill now moves for consideration to the U.S. Senate, where the effort to pass the legislation is being led by U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and David Vitter, R-La.

The Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society Legislative Fund expressed thanks and appreciation to Reps. Blumenauer and Kirk for introducing the bill, and to Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee Chairwoman Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam, and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V., for their leadership in bringing the measure to the House floor so expeditiously.

The effect of this law is to make the private ownership of primates illegal. They will still be used in medical experiments, but they won't be kept as pets. Fewer will be exploited.

Genesis and Animal Rights

God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. —Genesis 1:20-21

It’s low tide and the birds are abundant. I am awake to gulls and sandpipers, in awe of unknowable animal consciousness.

The journey to justice, dignity and rights for nonhuman animals begins in humble contemplation and wonder.

It’s almost always imprudent to make pronouncements about the limits of science. What once seemed inscrutable and hopelessly beyond comprehension has turned out—time and again—to be knowable, accessible and of vast practical consequence. The progress of scientific knowledge and the development of new technologies are so fast and vast that it would be foolish to make predictions even 10 years out, much less than 100, 1,000 or 10,000.

If I had a crystal ball I wouldn’t be surprised to find in the blink of an eye at the end of the 21st century enormous advances in addressing the problems we face today: global warming, overpopulation, degradation of the environment, disease, ageing, world hunger and war. We may have much longer human lifespans, colonies in space, brain-boosting drugs and a world running on energy sources we’ve barely begun to develop today.

Of course, dystopian outcomes are also possible. We may fail to address climate change; we may blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons; we may be wiped out by a virus. We may be too aggressive, xenophobic, reckless or unlucky to survive.

But whether the next century brings us peace and prosperity or misery and megadeath, animal consciousness will remain largely impenetrable to us. What it’s like to be a fox, a bat, a dolphin or a parrot will remain both wondrous and distant.

We may gain enormous knowledge of the psychology and biochemistry of other animals, but we won’t grasp their inner life. The species barrier will remain. Intersubjectivity—communion—is beyond science.

Although we can communicate with animals, we’re too different to share an inner world. We cannot experience camels and eagles or even fellow Great Apes the way we experience other human beings. We don’t share body and mind with other species. Thus, our communion with them is the stuff of intuition, deep empathy and ultimately, the imagination.

But don’t despair. The intersubjective gap can be filled by love and respect. When we stretch our compassion, our imagination and our awareness, we learn that somebody is home in animal sentience. We don’t quite know who or what she feels, but she’s there. On the inside. Sacred. Alive.

When we contemplate living creatures like these gulls and sandpipers we find them lovable; and our capacity for love expands to meet them. That is awe. That is wonder.

Radical wonderment is the message I take away from the Biblical creation myth – not that man has dominion over the animals, but that “God” saw Creation in wonder. “God saw that it was good.”

God—the contemplator-in-chief—saw the sandpipers, the dolphins, the parrots and every creature in the wondrous intuitive light of empathy.

This is a light, I believe, that will eventually guide us to reject dominion over animals and honor their rights. Let there be light.

House Sparrow

It was raining and windy at the beach yesterday, but I felt the need to be with wild birds, so like birders everywhere, I heeded the call, bundled up and trekked on for a bit, leaving Shanti behind.

I followed the willets, terns and Western sandpipers along the shore. The cormorants bobbed on the waves among human surfers; the pelicans flew north to south in silent groups of half a dozen.

It’s always worth the effort to get out among the birds. No matter how exhausted, sad or lonely I feel, the birds and the sea restore me. They pass like angels—winged creatures of light—invariably granting us respite, strength, the capacity to endure another day of outrageous misfortune or shallow mediocrity.

Birds are constant over time. What changes are the human trials and tribulations. What mattered to me a decade or two ago is trivial now. What matters now soon won’t.

Nature, however, is loyal to us, even as we betray, exploit and forget her.

I started bird-watching in Mexico City more than 25 years ago. I remember the very moment the connection was made and the journey began. I sat on the grass in El Parque México, a block from my home, eating a torta and drinking a soda. Suddenly I was stunned by the beauty of a house sparrow, Passer domesticus, a few feet away. The bird didn’t have much going for him. He was a member of a non-native species, a European colonizer; he was shabby and begging for bread crumbs. But it was love at first sight. I was captivated by holiness, elation and love—all contained in a bird.

I rose full of energy and spent the next weeks, months and years learning everything I could about birds. I bought birding guides, binoculars and maps that traced the heritage of generations of birders before me. For years, I spent all my free time observing birds.

Everywhere were birds, and no bird was without grace.

Over the years, my zeal for identifying, classifying and recording every bird has waned. I no longer carry guidebooks or binoculars; I no longer seek rare and previously unrecorded species. Now I mostly watch birds I’ve seen a thousand times—crows, gulls, pigeons, red-wing blackbirds, and species as ordinary as a house sparrow.

Rejoice, for birds are everywhere.

Top 10 Reasons for Never Buying a Parrot

I’ve written a lot about the many joys of life with Shanti. Here, however, are a few of the hard truths you should know before acquiring a parrot.

1. You don’t own a tropical forest. You can no more simulate a parrot’s native habitat in your home than you could simulate a European vacation by putting a human being in a dungeon on the moon and giving her a plastic replica of Big Ben.

2. You don’t socialize with hundreds of other parrots. A parrot in the wild spends its entire life among its flock. Parrots are highly social animals and are never alone in nature. Never.

3. Although the importation of wild parrots to the US and Europe is outlawed (a good thing), domestic breeding of parrots is widespread and millions of parrots have been raised for sale as pets. Breeders profit from producing and distributing parrots even though they know the birds will inevitably end up in inadequate—if not horrific and abusive—conditions.

4. Breeder parrots have a horrible existence. They are confined for life, in isolation, often in darkness, with only one other bird. The pair is coerced into copulating and mass-producing as many offspring as possible. If they fail to perform optimally as baby-parrot factories, they are killed.

5. Any parrot you buy in the US or Europe will have been stolen at birth from its parents, who are devastated by the loss.

6. Any parrot you buy from a breeder will have been deprived of even minimal parental care and nurturing. Mine was taken from his parents before he opened his eyes. This practice is promoted to the public as “hand-feeding,” a technique that is supposed to produce happier, better-adjusted, less aggressive parrots.

7. Parrots don’t like living being locked-down indoors, dependent on the schedule, moods, whims, health and stability (or lack thereof) of their human companions. They like living in a cage about as much as you and I would.

8. The essence of a bird’s life is flight. Even if you refrain from clipping your bird’s wings and build her a beautiful aviary, you can never re-create the freedom of flight in her natural habitat.

9. Your captive parrot will never do what s/he was designed to do: find a lover, mate and raise babies. S/he will be celibate and alone from birth to death, which might be fifty years or more. No love, no sex, no parenting, no descendants.

10. In its fifty-year lifespan, your parrot is almost certain to pass through several human hands. Your best-laid plans for his/her welfare are nonenforceable by law and likely to be blithely violated by future “owners” of your parrot. Your parrot has no rights, no legal protection and will have to be extremely lucky to avoid abuse and abandonment.

If you must get a parrot, take the high and hard road. Adopt one that already been abused, abandoned or rescued.

If you’re like me and found out the truth too late, or knew it and went ahead anyway, love and cherish your parrot forever.

The Sanctity of Parrot Life

In the year 2000 the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the World Parrot Trust published their “Action Plan.”

Noting that “No other group of birds has been subjected to more exploitation, numerically and financially, than parrots,” the WPT called upon the millions of ordinary people who keep psittacines to “accept more responsibility for the survival of parrots in the wild and the welfare of existing captive parrots.”

I’m one of the millions of ordinary people who live with a parrot, so I’m going to try to do my share.

According to journalist Mira Tweti, author of "Parrots and People," there are between 40 and 60 million companion birds in the USA alone, perhaps half of them parrots. If just 1% of us bird "owners" began to lobby vigorously for the conservation and protection of parrots, we’d have an enormous influence.

But we can’t do it alone. We also need the cooperation of the parrot industry—those who profit from parrots. They includes cage and accessory makers, food suppliers and distributors, pet stores, and of course breeders.

On the conservation side of the equation, 28% of the 330 known parrot species are threatened with extinction. The parrots we love are decimated by the bird trade, destruction and fragmentation of native habitats, and hunting for food, feathers or for crop protection.

Parrots did fine for many millions of years before they ran into people.

Birds in general are perhaps the only living dinosaurs. They survived the extinction events that finished off other dinosaurs because they had the most powerful brains. That made them more adaptable, more capable of prospering in emerging ecological niches.

European parrot fossils have been dated at 54 million years, although modern parrots may be “only” 20- 23 million years old.

Parrots flourish in warm regions of South America, Africa and Australasia. They love the sun, the verdant tropical forest and the open sky.

What got them in the most trouble with us? Their brains, their looks and the fact that we want their land.

But conserving their habitat and outlawing their importation is only half the battle.

We also have the vast responsibility to protect those many millions of parrots who live in captivity.

Most of that job is educational. We need to teach our children that parrots are not commodities, not things. We need to acknowledge the sanctity of parrot life. As awareness increases, we’ll become better (and surely fewer) parronts. We won’t buy and sell parrots on a whim. We won’t release them to fend for themselves or kill them when we get bored with them. We will treat them with the respect we accord to people, to each other. They will join our “each other,” our community of consciousness and conscience.

Illustration: Sinornithosaurus millenii, a flying, feathered dinosaur ancestor of modern birds

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.

Preaching to the Birds

"Thereupon St. Francis went up naked into the pulpit, and began to preach so marvelously of the contempt of the world, of holy repentance, of voluntary poverty and of the desire of the celestial kingdom, that all they which were at the sermon, men and women in great numbers, began to weep very bitterly, with wonderful devotion and compunction of heart…"

The 12th century Italian mystic, St. Francis, is said to have preached to the song birds of Assisi. The image of the barefoot friar talking to the forest animals is spellbinding. For hundreds of years, Francis has inspired artists and charmed the meek of the Earth, especially children.

What can it mean for a man — a purported spiritual genius— to preach to birds? Perhaps it only means he understood them deeply, as Jane Goodall understands chimpanzees, as Mark Bekoff understands coyotes and as Irene Pepperburg understands African Greys. Perhaps when villagers saw Francis “preaching” he was just communicating attentively in compassion and respect.

The traditional view of the church is that Francis was teaching the birds human morality. But such an interpretation, consistent with the view that the pyramid of creation has “man” (in God’s image) at the top, seems at odds with the saint’s radical compassion and creativity.

Francis was a visionary who sang joyously on his pilgrimages through the Italian countryside, nursed lepers, gave away his father’s riches to beggars, mediated between Crusaders and Muslims, and became a lifelong barefoot mendicant. Such a person seems more likely to have been an iconoclast who questioned conventional notions of morality than a priggish conformist who enforced them.

Was Francis a pedant and a fanatic who tediously urged animals to tame their desires and behave more like Christians? Or was he so connected to the feelings of both humans and non-humans that he felt compelled to genuinely interact with his fellow beings rather than to hunt, domesticate and exploit them? Did Francis simply include the birds, sheep, wolves and donkeys in his community, his flock? Is it blasphemous to think that he —like us— was shocked and dismayed by the mistreatment of animals?



Francis is the patron saint of animals. Children take their pet pigs and kitties and parrots to church to be blessed in his name. But what would it mean for adults to take “preaching to the birds” seriously? Would we change our attitudes and behaviors? Would we, like Francis, approach them in humility, wonder, grace and poverty – in loving relationship to other beings?

“All these people accuse you and curse you,” Francis said, “But brother wolf, I would like to make peace between you and the people.”

On his deathbed Francis thanked his donkey for a lifetime of service. The donkey, according to legend, wept. The story may well be apocryphal, but its theme – that animals experience grief and other deep emotions and that Francis was intensely aware of animal feeling and consciousness – still moves us and instructs us, almost a millennium later.

Eating Birds

The more I study animal consciousness the more I become concerned about how unconscionably we treat animals.

Although we live our lives in relationship with animals, depend on animals for survival and cherish our companion animals, we often fail to make the empathic connection to the other animals we blithely harm.

Photo: Cornish hens


Ironically, this human failure may also have strong biological roots in our kinship bonds and our instinct to view those outside our kin group and small community as enemies, inferiors or simply objects. Objects we eat.

I’m not a vegetarian. Even though 40 years ago I concluded it was morally wrong to eat meat, I only abstained from doing so for a couple of years. Then I relapsed.

It’s disturbing and demeaning to consciously do wrong. As a moral agent, I believe I should act on my convictions. Being a meat addict is not a valid excuse.

On Christmas Eve we gathered around the dining room table for a holiday meal I cooked: stuffed Cornish hens. Beautiful and beloved Shanti, my Congo African Grey parrot, was literally gazing down on us as we dined and celebrated our holy traditions of Hanukah and Christmas. I felt a twinge of guilt as I stabbed, chewed and swallowed the dead (and delicious) bird. What could be more grotesque, I thought, between sips of wine and holy benedictions.

Shanti may not have a sense of irony, but I sure do. I wondered how I got to this hypocritical point in my meat addiction. I began to consider the convoluted and fallacious arguments I’ve used over the decades to rationalize eating meat. Here’s my top ten list:

Top Ten New Year’s Rationalizations for Eating Meat

1. One person can’t possibly make a difference. If I stop eating meat, I won’t reduce the total number of killed animals in my lifetime even by one. It’s a futile gesture.

2. People eat to live. It’s in our genes, and other animals do the same. Chimpanzees eat monkeys. Owls eat squirrels, bats and ducks. Kingfishers and pelicans eat fish. Fish eat more fish. Why shouldn’t we do what comes naturally?

3. Animals don’t know what death is. As long as we don’t abuse or mistreat them before we kill them, we have done nothing wrong. The animals we eat don’t value individual lives the way we humans do. Individuals of a species are fungible.

4. I need animal protein. At my age, a radical change in my diet might be detrimental to my health and deprive me of the energy I need for all the good I can still do, including promoting animal causes.

5. Vegetarianism isn’t really important in the great scheme of things. It’s a middle class luxury that makes privileged activists feel good about themselves. Our priorities need to be human rights, climate change and ending the wars we wage that cause such immense pain and suffering.

6. Eating meat is culturally important. If I’m puritanical about abstaining from meat, family and friends will have to make special accommodations. I’ll become a pain in the butt to everyone, a self-indulgent prig.

7. A majority of people will never become vegetarians. I should focus instead on the issues of protection and conservation of animals that are realistic and doable. I have a better chance at success by urging people to reject veal crates and paté de fois gras.

8. Cutting down on meat consumption is more realistic than eliminating it entirely. I can eliminate factory-farmed products from my diet and still eat free-range, humanely slaughtered animals and fish.

9. We first need to create a society that’s animal friendly. Our individual practices are not so important. If we educate people about animal consciousness, then no one will want to eat animals in the first place. Future generations will be vegetarian.

10. There’s nothing really “wrong” with eating meat. It’s part of the cycle of life. Life requires life in order to live. Every being on the planet eats the DNA of other beings.

I know, all ten excuses are lame. Maybe I’m hopeless. But that kind of self-deprecating despair just amounts to Rationalization Number 11.

People like me need support to kick our meat habits. Local communities need to create and sustain vegetarian alternatives to meat-based cultures. We need more pro-animal institutions, educators, nutritionists, scientists, technologists and politicians. We need a green and animal-friendly economy with plentiful green jobs that eradicate poverty and expand human and animal rights. Let’s work together in the right direction. Then I’ll become a vegetarian. Right?

Our Better Nature

Photo: members of a ranibow lorikeet flock


I see wild birds every day. All I have to do is look out the window. Crows, sparrows, mockingbirds, and hummingbirds abound. I also try to spend an hour a day among the native species at the beach in Ventura or at Lake Casitas, our local reservoir.

Walking along the shore, looking out to Anacapa and Santa Cruz Islands, I see scores of gulls, terns, sandpipers, pelicans and cormorants. At the lake, there are colonies of black vultures in the eucalyptus trees, redwing blackbirds in the reeds; herons, ducks, grebes, geese and hawks on the water and in the skies.

On the day we brought Shanti home I saw a Great Blue Heron flying westward with a pair of egrets. A moment of great natural beauty. Superstitiously, I took it as a good omen. More profoundly, I took it as an opportunity to ponder the legitimacy of keeping a wild animal as a human being’s companion.

I’ve always had serious reservations about taking an animal from the wild. What was the point? What was the justification? I had no need to own a bird, a gorilla or a tiger. Nature’s not for owning or leasing; nature’s not for sale. The very essence we value in animals is their wildness, their freedom. Sticking a wild bird in a hominid’s house—or worse, in a cage— seemed too much like taxidermy, self-indulgence and pretense.

Parrots—unlike dogs, cats and farm animals—are not domesticated species, bred over the centuries to serve and gratify people. Parrots are still wild— just a generation or two from the forests of Africa.

“I’m not a poodle,” says the ferociously passionate Shanti. The racoons, owls and coyotes in my neighborhood second the motion.

The only justification for taking a parrot from its perfect wilderness, for separating it from its kindred flock, lies in the sanctity of the relationship between parrot and person. The closer the bond, the more we may justify and legitimize our imperfect intrusion on their lives. Failing to love our parrots, then, defiles nature. But we needn’t fail. Our better nature is to love.

How And Why Shanti Came Into My Life

I’ve always been fascinated by the beauty of birds. Penguins or pigeons, herons, woodpeckers, hummingbirds or coots, I love them all. They bring me joy, often suddenly and unexpectedly. Birds are among life’s greatest gifts of healing, restoration and peace. They reward contemplation with healing, restoration, peace and awe.

I’m also a lifelong student of languages; I’ve always earned my living with words--as a teacher, a writer and a translator. And I’m a passionate student of philosophy.

An avid birder, a linguist and an amateur philosopher? You might think the confluence of these passions would make me the perfect match for an African Grey parrot—an extraordinarily intelligent and emotive bird that has surprisingly advanced linguistic capabilities.

But I won’t kid you (or myself.) I didn’t bring this Congo African Grey (Psittacus erithacus) into our home because birds are beautiful, parrots talk, and I’m interested in philosophy. I got Shanti because of my own emotional needs. I’m 61, my two daughters are grown up, I've retired from classroom teaching career, and I miss nurturing the young. My wife and I want grandchildren someday, but in the meantime, I spend a lot of time at home alone during the day. I’m lonely.

Living with a companion animal is something I need spiritually and emotionally, but I am also committed to Shanti's physical, emotional and spiritual needs.

Shanti isn't a pet, and he isn't a surrogate human. He's a fellow being. I'm part of his flock, and he's part of mine.