Joanna Burger - The Parrot Who Owns Me: The Story of a Relationship

BECAUSE OF OUR hectic schedules, Mike and I rarely found the time for a leisurely breakfast, not even on weekends or holidays. But one Sunday morning in April 1989, about a year after Tiko had bonded with me, I decided to alter the pattern. The sun warmed us through the window facing the garden; daffodils spiked through the snow. Finches and woodpeckers were making good use of the feeder. I was married to a good, gentle man. My relationship with Tiko had continued to mature, and I had the feeling that sometimes occurs, out of the blue, that everything is right with the world.

Lets dawdle over breakfast, I suggested.

What for?

To celebrate being together. Were wonderfully suited, and I love you now more than ever.

He cocked an eyebrow. Sounds like a plan.

Lets enjoy the spring. Lets watch the competition among the squirrels.

This may not sound like a big date to you, but for two field biologists it was better than a night at the opera.

Fine by me, said Mike. Ive always had a weakness for squirrels.

Tiko glided in and joined us in the dining nook. He flew to his perch by the window and watched his fellow birds feeding in the garden. I put homemade strawberry jam (a gift from my sister Barbara) on the table, hot biscuits, warm bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon. Tiko had always eaten in his own space, and, as usual, I piled his yellow plate high with Cheerios, lettuce, and fruit. Then I smeared cream cheese on two bagel halves and handed one to Mike. As I took my first bite, Tiko abandoned his birdy repast and scampered across the window ledge, climbed onto the table, and marched over to my plate. His eyes darted from my bagel to my face. When I didnt scold him or shoo him away, he leaned down and peeled a bit of cream cheese from the bagel. It vanished swiftly down his throat. He looked at me and flashed his eyes. I got the message: Now were talking FOOD; youve been holding out on me, Joanna, enough of this eating like a bird.

From then on Tiko ate what I did, and not from his dish but my own. His tastes were eclectic, often ethnic. He became an amusing and involved dinner companion. Along with plates, napkins, glasses, knives, and forks there would be Tiko, waiting expectantly, part of the table setting. During dinner hed browse, peering at our plates and the serving dishes containing sundries more or less to his liking, looking for something interesting to try. Between courses, hed wipe his beak clean of sticky foodspudding, for instanceby rubbing it against the tables edge. When Id try to wipe his bill with a napkin, hed become indignant. No! No! No! hed squawk. With time, we made it a game. Id try to wipe his bill while he tried to wrest the napkin from my hand.

Pudding, pasta, corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, chickenhe had a taste for them all. It wasnt chicken meat he seemed to want so much as the bones. He would grab a denuded drumstick in his right foot, crack it with a single bite, split the shaft, and extract its marrow with his tongue.

You rarely find behaviors in captivity that do not also exist in the wild, and while no one has ever seen a wild parrot gnawing on a bone, my surmise is that they would if given half a chance. Many herbivores will eat meat when they have the opportunity. On a visit to China in 1992, I found to my surprise that scientists trapping pandas would bait the cage with goat meat rather than bamboo, which everyone knows is the staple of the pandas diet. Many more animals eat carrion than we think.

It was long believed that our closest primate relatives were vegetarians. Jane Goodall discovered that chimps eat meat, and that they even form hunting parties to attack and kill their preyoften a young member of another troop. Parrots, however, are scavengers rather than hunters. Because they spend nearly all their time in treetops, theyre unlikely to come across carcasses of other animals. But I can imagine a bird dying in a nest cavity, its bone marrow providing a nutritious snack for the parrot who found it.

Anthropologists suggest that nutrition-packed marrow from the bones of antelopes and wildebeests killed and discarded by lions and leopards helped early humans survive on the African plains. Bones from early digs in Africa contain both predator teeth marks, and, superimposed, the hack marks of primitive knives. Our ancestors might have hidden in the bush while a large beast killed its quarry. Once the lion or leopard abandoned the kill, early man moved in and dragged the bones back to his cave. Were I to find myself transported to the African plain, Id choose to run the vultures off a lion kill rather than hunt down a gazelle. The vultures would be feisty, but Id only have to keep them at bay for a moment.

One of the advantages of scavenging for food was that women, too, could find meat. Scavenging calls into question the theory that mens strength and aggressiveness evolved from hunting. If these traits didnt come from hunting, where did they come from? For what were they used? Is male dominancephysically, economically, and politicallyrelatively recent, masquerading as an ancient, immutable trait? Recorded history is ten thousand years old, compared to the over 4-million-year period man and his ancestors have walked the earth. The social behavior of Homo sapiens could have been very different for much of our evolution.

TIKO, TOO, WAS A SCAVENGER, cracking open the chicken bones on my plate. It was share and share alike at the table, and this new arrangement seemed to be a tangible manifestation of how, in what I now think of as our middle period, the balance of power between us shifted. I stopped treating Tiko like a pet. I began to see him as an autonomous creature whose dependence on me only highlighted the need to really understand, deep down, that his life was as important as mine, his desires and inclinations equally valid. It was he who had been transposed, forced to adapt, live in the world of these strange creatures who slept in beds, spoke mostly in gibberish, ate with forks and knives, and, worst of all, took showers. He trained me well. I came to know that the contest of wills between me and the parrot who owned me was beside the point. It was obvious who was lord of our roost.

Of course, I can confess to you (although I would never do so in front of Tiko) that it was not only appreciation for the intrinsic dignity of all life that caused me to indulge Tiko. To casual visitors he may have appeared to be a spoiled child, with me doing the spoiling. Was he a petty tyrant? Did Mike and I cower in the face of his moods? Perhaps. But Tiko was also furthering my scientific career, and if you know anything about me by this point, it is that I would go to extremes to make new scientific discoveries. I have already mentioned that watching Tiko had subtly redirected my career into the arena of public policy and to not so subtly suggest research topics. He now also began to widen my understanding of bird behavior.

Somewhat late in the day, I began to use my scientific training to unravel Tikos mysteries, and as he came clear so did hitherto unexplained parrot behavior, as well as the behavior of other birds I had studied. Tiko made me pay attention to details that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. I began by correlating his behavior to behavior I had observed in the wild. What I had assumed to be orneriness on his part turned out to have, under this kind of scrutiny, a wild counterpart. For example, his habit of eating one kind of food and one kind only for days or weeks on end, and then quite suddenly refusing to eat it at all, had been especially vexing, until I figured out its source. In nature, most flowers, seeds, fruits, and nuts are available for only a few days or weeks. So a wild parrot will eat figs, and only figs, when figs are ripe. When the fig trees are exhausted, the bird must switch, say, to cashew fruit. Tiko was replicating the foraging habits of his wild ancestors.