Content Under Pressure: Gratitude 19

Sunday 19 February 2017

Gratitude 19

I will be spending a few posts dwelling on the theme of birds, Gentle Reader, so much gratitude I feel for their existence. Try to imagine a world without birds, how poor we would be, how we would just hobble along as an incomplete planet without them. This post I am dedicating to the parrots, these wonderful, colourful, intelligent birds, birds that talk like humans. It has been found that parrots don't merely mimic, but they know what they are saying. They have an unusually large brain size and capacity, placing them at a similar level of smarts along with crows and hummingbirds.

I learned about parrots through interacting with them in captivity. I do not approve of keeping birds as pets in cages, it is so counterintuitive to their nature and the way they are built. They have wings, dammit! and how can they possibly use them in a cage inside a house or apartment. And parrots have magnificent wings, long, broad and often pointed, suggesting paintings of angels. There was a pet store in Richmond when I lived there during the late eighties and early nineties. They had a lot of different parrots. I soon found that some of them weren't only friendly, but affectionate. They wanted to be pet, and sometimes even cuddled, like kittens or puppies. I particularly remember a very loving Moluccan cockatoo

Image result for moluccan cockatoo, images

as well as a sun conure

and a scarlet macaw,

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each of which demanded and reciprocated affection as though they had been hatched and bred for that very purpose. I almost bought the sun conure. This is a mistake I am glad I never made. This isn't just the difficulty of owning and training a parrot, but the moral and ethical discomfort of keeping in captivity a wild animal, especially one that needs the open air to complete its existence.

Still, I was already complicit in that I was visiting and enjoying these beautiful creatures in their captivity. Or perhaps my friendship was also a comfort to them?

I also recall fondly the friendly parrots in the Crystal Gardens in Victoria. This was an indoor tropical garden surrounded by Victorian era glass, with an aviary that included parrots. They hyacinth macaws

and the red lory

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were particularly affectionate and enjoyed being stroked.

Parrots, as many of us already know, are very-long lived, especially macaws that can live up to seventy or eighty years, rather like humans.

Australia and South America have the greatest diversity of parrot species. Here are some images of my paintings of parrots: