Hard facts are sometimes difficult to digest. The story below is based on well-known facts about cockatoos and parrots in the wild. Join us on a journey of discovery with this fanciful tale.
Does She Dream?
Yesterday had been such sadness. When I came home my cockatoo had lost six feathers. Two of them were chewed badly. I do everything I can to help. I study clinical manuals, read the latest research, consult my avian veterinarians and use everything I can to fight the problem. Still, sometimes I just feel hopeless. Habituation they call it. The page long flowchart in one veterinary manual shows just how difficult feather destructive behavior is to correct. I went to bed with that thought heavy on my mind.
I had set the alarm for 8 a.m. An early riser I am not. Somehow a faint trickle of light from above woke me. I felt strange. There was stillness in the air and it seemed that I could feel the warmth of the approaching dawn. This would be difficult to do from my bedroom because I never leave the window open. As the light slowly grew I made out the faint shapes of leaves surrounding me. They appeared enormous.
I was captivated by a growing certainty that I was now deep in the bowels of a forest far from my bed and the life I knew so well. Could I be dreaming? Even though there was not a breath of wind the pungent smells of wet earth, moss and the unmistakable scent of recent rain rose to greet me. My dreams were never this clear.
I wanted to turn and look around but my body would not heed my call. “Remain still” was imprinted on every fiber of my being. I could have sworn that my mother taught me this. This could not be! My mother hated camping trips. What was I thinking? It was then that I noticed that I was standing and that my feet were clenched tightly around some object below to which I was rooted. Like a night watchman at his post I stood erect and alert against the vanishing darkness.
It was wonderful. My age had slipped away from me—the pain and ache of being in my fifties was gone. I felt young again, like a teenager. It was then that I noticed that I had forgotten my name. Did I have a name? Surely I did. I could not remember. Words began to escape me, too. Instead I found a history of memories and feelings stretching back many years and much like the frames of a movie in slow motion they showed me who I was and where I belonged. All my companions knew who I was. Names meant nothing. I was home in my flock and I was a lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo. I began to wonder if I had read the legend of Merlin and King Arthur once too often.
My mother and father cockatoos were not far from where I stood. They, too, were as still as stone. It was their morning call that would break me from my post and I would wait for that sound as I had since I was a fledgling.
Then it happened. A single shout broke the moment. All at once a hundred voices rose up like trumpets to greet the new day. I heard my mother and father in that symphony. My voice rose to meet theirs. The new day had begun.
The light was weak but my eyes were amazing. Because I could see into the ultraviolet the world had a beautiful glow to it. I turned them to find my mother roosting in the ironwood tree only a moment’s flight from me. Her eyes surveyed our world searching for predators. I did the same. Using the skill she had perfected in me over the four years of my life I looked and listened for signs of danger. It was something I would do all day.
Dad broke from his roost and darted into the sky with his loud, boisterous voice. Then our flock clamored into the air with sound and fury. After circling briefly we each chose a roost close to the others and from these vantage points we examined the land below. We spoke to one another by subtle body movements and only rarely punctuated these speeches with an outcry. Hunger began its daily call.
We descended together to forage. In groups we performed the age old rite of taking nourishment. My mother concerned herself with teaching my new brothers and sisters what to eat and how to survey for predators. Like a ballet dancer her body taught clearly—in words no human could ever understand—the beauty and danger of the forest. It is this dance of life that passes our culture from one generation to another. It is her dance of life that leads me to the food I eat, the safe perches on which I stand and the roosts I keep at night. Even now her gaze falls on me. Soon I will be five years old and ready to take on a life partner but our bond will never break.
We took to the sky many times that day. Whenever danger threatened we moved in a flurry of white wings with great pomp and circumstance. In moments of danger a vague memory of human hands arose in my mind but I pushed it away. What could compare with wings? What could compare to soaring free in the sky with your family?
While we were foraging I took time to examine my body with my new eyes. Strangely, memories of my studies as a human returned. Unlike humans I found that I could see clearly no matter what direction my eyes were facing and I did not need to focus on any single thing. I found myself stretching out my right wing and foot and then the other wing and foot. I began to preen and observe. My flight and tail contour feathers received attention first and then I worked on the semiplumes and the down feathers that help to keep me safe from the weather. I turned my attention to my back. With the twenty-seven vertebrae in my neck this was an easy task. This is what I did. I gently pulled on the base of each feather checking for the keratin sheath that covers them. When I found a sheath I carefully removed the upper part staying clear of the blood supply below. Then I preened the feather to bring out its fullness and lock the hooked barbs in place that provide the strength and shape to the contour feathers. One of my sisters approached and allopreened me; she cleaned my crown feathers and dressed them nicely. After all, I cannot reach them. I returned the favor and then she flew off to be with the others.
I continued my examination. I could tell that my spine was fused from the shoulders to the tail just like I had read in my former life. A fused spine gives the support needed to chest muscles to allow for the strenuous but wonderful joy of free flight. There is nothing to compare with beating your wings against the wind and soaring above the earth. We also rely on flight for needed exercise much as some humans rely on swimming pools.
I felt the air passing through my lungs and it thrilled me with the oxygen it gave. In this body the air tasted as thick as nectar. I remembered that this had to do with the air passing directly into the blood stream. This is also a reason we must fly away from fumes or smoke. There are more wonders. Five air sacs take up twenty percent of my body helping me to be light enough to fly. When I am flying my lungs work like billows to force the air in and out of my body. A racehorse knows the exhilaration that I feel in flight.
The entire time that I studied my new body I was surrounded by my own kind. There is nothing like the feeling of belonging, of being a part of the flock.
As the sun reached meridian height we each found our places for our daily nap. In these well-hidden perches we slept. It would be a mighty predator indeed that could find and devour us there. Our rest sites are chosen carefully to prevent the approach of any unseen threat and our eyes are never far from opening except in the deep of night. Our only defense at night is to plummet to the ground below.
We awoke to the sun lowering in the sky and we began foraging again. We spent the next two hours eating, playing and tearing wood into pieces. I took the time to examine my feet and beak. My feet were zygodactyls. I had two toes pointing forward and two pointing back. I opened and closed my toes and watched them move in unison; I used only one muscle in each foot to do this. My nails were sharp and helped me cling to branches. They were made mostly of keratin and minerals. A nerve ran down the core of each nail making them sensitive to the touch.
My beak is calyptorhychnid. That’s a fancy way of saying that it moves from side to side and has great strength. The nut I am popping right now would take a hammer to break in my old life. I have nerves in my beak in several places; that is one reason that I am so good at using it! I am a master of applying just the right amount of pressure. I remember the books I studied as a human saying that parrots cannot taste much because they have only about four hundred and fifty taste buds while humans more than three thousand. I think they need more studies to compare quantity to quality. After all, look at what those humans call food! I eat by pushing things with my skilled and powerful tongue against my upper beak and then crushing them with the lower one. There is a special groove in the upper that helps to hold food there. My beak is a constantly growing living thing even if the outside of it is hard like a nail.
As the sun set we found our safe places and cried out to the dying of the light.
A loud noise startled me and I fell off my perch in the darkness toward the ground below. Somehow I just kept falling. Was this a falling dream?
Now it seemed that I was standing again. My eyes were closed and I did not want to open them.
I heard a door creak open. It was that sound that had shattered my dream. Do I remember doors? My eyes opened. I saw myself—my old human self—coming over to my cage. For it was now clear that I was a bird locked behind bars. I watched with amazement as the old me in human form unlocked the door to the cage and opened it. I heard his words but did not understand them. I had no need. I knew the look of feeding time and the sign language of his movement. I would have liked to fly to the top of the window and to look out at the world as I did in the dream. I knew I could not. My old human self had cut my feathers and I could not fly—I am ever more nervous about predators now that I cannot fly to safety. It had been the old dream. The dream that comes every night of a place called “the forest” and the family I never knew. It is more than a dream it is a need.
I am no stranger to sadness. When I was sad and lonely a few years ago I began to pull out my feathers. Sometimes I cried out loud for countless hours but no one came to fill my emptiness. My old human self is kind to me and does not cover me or place me alone in another room as the others did. He takes me out every day and I play under his watchful eye. He cooks food for me and gives me toys. Yet, the ache remains. Pulling my feathers out still seems something I need to do and I don’t know why.
A buzzing sound began to annoy me. It grew louder and louder like a giant bug next to my ear. I recognized the sound finally. It was my alarm clock. I awoke. It was a few moments before I was able to get my bearings. I did not turn into a cockatoo. It had been a dream. I noted the bumpy texture of the ceiling, the white walls of my bedroom and the ticking of the clock on the wall.
I am still the human I was. Am I? Will I ever be the same again?
I pulled my hands from under the covers and looked at them carefully. I thought of wings. Slowly I turned to stare at the large cage at the end of the room. I heard her rustle her feathers. She was awake now. Under the cage cover I knew that she stood on her perch waiting for me.
Had she been dreaming?
End note: Research in the field and clinical studies have shown the importance of making the captive home environment as much like life in the wild as possible. The pattern of the wild cockatoo in the story closely matches that of studies done in the wild.
Father Don Scott
The Chloe Sanctuary for Parrots and Cockatoos
www.chloesanctuary.org
Dedication: a special thank you to Regina Jankowski and Haley for inspiring this piece of prose. You made my words take wing.
[Factual sources:
For the daily routine of a parrot – The Parrots of Luquillo: Natural History and Conservation of the Puerto Rican Parrot, Noel F.R. Snyder et al., The Western Foundation for Vertebrate Zoology, Los Angeles, CA, 1987 (There are no published ethologies of Indonesian cockatoos to my knowledge).
For the psychology and intelligence of parrots and cockatoos – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot; The Manual of Parrot Behavior, Andrew U. Luescher et al., Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
For physiology, anatomy and FDB protocol– Clinical Avian Medicine, Greg J. Harrison, DVM, et al., Spix Publishing, Inc., Palm Beach, Florida, 2006; The BSAVA Manual for Psittacine Birds, 2nd Edition, Edited by Nigel Harcourt-Brown and John Chitty, British Small Animal Veterinary Association, 2005.
The works above were cited for correctness only and no portion of them is included in the story. ]
(C) Copyright 2008-2011 Father Don Scott, All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.