I WAS A NERVOUS WRECK waiting for Delta flight 1655 to touch down at San Jose International Airport. "What if they forgot to transfer him in Salt Lake City? He's probably on his way to Reno instead of here."
"Well, let's just worry about that if and when it happens," said Craig Harris, an always-calming influence and the anticipated-arrival's new daddy. "Let's go outside and watch the planes take off and land to pass the time and relax."
We were adopting a baby Cape parrot, a Poicephalus robustus suahelicus, from Scott and Linda Lewis of Old World Aviaries in Austin, Texas. We had all but decided to name him Thor but were waiting to actually meet him to see if the name suited him. It did.
"I've got an animal here from Flight 1655," said the Delta employee. "It's a small carrier; must be a cat."
"If it's a cat, we've got a problem," I said, as he placed the carrier on the counter. "It's supposed to be a bird."
Craig lifted the taped-on dish cloth covering the wire mesh door of the carrier. It was a bird, all right, but the Cape, with its heavy body, at first impression somewhat resembled a duck, especially when standing with its large feet on a flat surface and with its neck extended; and Thor's first words to us were something of a quacking sound!
From all we had read, we were expecting to have a terrified, trembling, cowering creature on our hands, after the traumatic experience he'd just been through, being taken from the only family he'd ever known and placed on an airplane for a half a day.
"Wugga wugga," said Thor, greeting us by sticking his beak through the wires of the carrier.
Craig stroked Thor's beak. "Hi, baby," said Craig.
"Wenna wenna," said Thor.
Thor loved us immediately. He was not afraid, not traumatized; he didn't seem to be upset at all. At least not until we got him home.
"Let's just put him in his cage and leave him alone for a few hours so he can chill out, get used to his new predicament, like the books say to do," I said.
"Probably a good idea," agreed Craig. "He's been through a lot."
Letting Thor relax alone for a while was not to be. He cried unceasingly every time we left the room, stopping when we returned. He paced back and forth on the floor of his new cage, crying, seemingly asking to be let out.
"Well, he doesn't seem to be afraid of us at all, and he seems really upset to be in there by himself, so maybe we should take him out and hold him for a while and see if that calms his down," I suggested.
"Probably can't hurt," agreed Craig. "Let's give it a try."
"Yeah, he's probably never been alone in his life," I said.
Craig took Thor out of his cage and let him perch on his hand, and Thor stopped crying instantly. He seemed to calm down and relax almost completely.
"Wow," I said, "we sure didn't anticipate that."
For the rest of the first day in his new home, Thor stayed out of his cage with us. He wanted to be with us constantly and cried whenever we put him back in his cage. He wanted to be in direct physical contact at all times. If he stepped off a hand to reach for a toy, he still kept one foot on the hand at the same time.
The next day, Thor seemed much calmer. He would still cry when we left the room, but he could now stay in his cage without crying, as long as we were in the same room. We also had our vet appointment that afternoon.
We took Thor to see Dr. Fern Van Sant, an exclusively avian veterinarian at For The Birds in Los Gatos, California. We had about a half-hour meeting with the vet's assistant, an educational session on how to care for Thor, where we learned everything from keeping him away from household cleaners, air fresheners, "anything with a scent," to what kind of toys and cages are safe, to how to feed him his cooked food to minimize the danger of molds.
Then Dr. Van Sant came in to do the examination. Thor greeted his new doctor when she came into the room by flying into her legs. "Well, hello there," she said.
"Do you have any other Capes as clients?" I asked.
"No, Thor's the only one," she said. "He's a rare bird."
Thor did not like being held in the towel by the assistant. Dr. Van Sant examined Thor's mouth. "Look at those muscles!" she exclaimed.
Thor screamed when Dr. Van Sant did the blood test, but within minutes he was back to his active, happy self, playing with his toy barbell and eating a Nutri-An cake. "Nothing seems to bother him for very long," we explained. "He is a very good-natured baby."
Dr. Van Sant continued with the exam. "He's in good feather," she said. "When I hear of people who buy birds mail-order sight unseen, I cringe. But he's in very good feather."
The vet explained the lab tests while Thor played. "He is definitely a male," Dr. Fern said. "I would have known he was a male even if you hadn't told me. You can tell by the way he acts. He's all male. It's probably the flat head that gave him away!" She turned to Craig. "Just kidding."
Everyone in the vet's office came into the room to see Thor, because most of them had never seen a Cape before. "I just wanted to take a peek at your bird. I've never seen one of these before. Just look at that face!" they'd say. "He's a real cutie."
"He's a cool customer," concluded the doctor, who called us a week later to tell us that all of his tests came back perfect. "Feel free to call us if you have any questions at all."
Thor was much more relaxed by this time than when he arrived, but now we had a new problem: Thor was losing weight. He'd lost about 25 grams since he'd left Texas.
"Well, the book says that a 10 percent weight loss isn't unusual when they're put through a trauma, so let's keep an eye on it and call Scott if he loses too much more," I decided.
"He seems healthy," said Craig.
Thor did seem healthy. He was very active, playing with all his toys and learning his way around his new cage. He did eat, but he apparently wasn't eating enough. We'd asked the vet about it, and she said he would probably settle in and the problem would take care of itself. But by the fourth morning when I weighed him, he'd lost 37 grams, close to 10 percent of his highest weight of 387 grams. I emailed Scott Lewis, the breeder, and asked him what to do. Scott phoned back immediately.
"Get some baby bird formula and feed it to him at night in a 20cc syringe," Scott instructed. He gave me explicit instructions on what to do, how to take the temperature of the formula, and what else to feed Thor. "Don't worry, it's easy to do on a baby this age. Call me if you have any more questions or concerns," said Scott. "You get lifetime tech support when you buy a bird from me."
So I gave Thor his formula that night, which he ate voraciously. Each night after that, he seemed to want less and less of it.
"I understand how he was too excited to eat," I later told my girlfriend. "I myself lost three pounds the first week he was here!"
Thor's favorite foods, when he decides to eat, are grapes, corn on the cob, papaya, cantaloupe, homemade applesauce and peas. He picks through his soak-n-cook mix and eats only the soybeans. He picks through his nuts, which we give him to help him get his weight up, and eats only the pine nuts. He eats Roudybush or Harrison's pellets, and he likes both. He also gets Lafebre's Nutri-An cakes as a treat. He loves just about anything crunchy, and likes foods that he can hold in his foot to eat. Dr. Van Sant instructed us to feed Thor only organic produce. I've recently discovered that he eats better if he is offered only one food at a time. If he is given a mixture of anything, most of it will get tossed out of the bowl. For example, he never ate his filbert nuts when I gave him his nuts mixed; now, if he is only given a small bowl of filberts, he will eat them. It may be a coincidence, but he's been eating a lot more this week, and his weight has been higher, since I started feeding him this way.
Thor seems to be what our vet calls a "social eater." Often, when I get home after a few hours' time, there is little evidence that he's eaten. But as soon as I come in the room, he goes right for the food bowl. He seems strangely disinterested in food much of the time and seems to be more interested in playing and socializing with his people than in eating. He's never put the lost weight back on, but he has stabilized.
A few weeks after our breeder Scott Lewis instructed me on the handfeeding, I wrote back to ask him if he thought Thor's inability to gain weight was a problem. Scott's wry, dry sense of humor came through in his response.
"Let's say I put you in a 8 x 8 room with food in front of you from sunup to sundown and not a lot to do except play with your brothers and sisters inside that room and eat, except for two 30-minute exercise periods per day. I suspect you might end up carrying a little extra weight. Now let's say that you then move to a big house that borders on a park with lots of fun things to do other than eat. Would you expect to lose some weight and stabilize at a new weight that was lower than when you were sitting in the room staring at food? If he's eating and pooping and playing and preening and perching, I'm sure he's fine. I wonder if it is also natural for them to be less in a rush to eat when they are removed from a situation where they think they are competing with siblings for food."
So, Thor is settling in at an athletic weight, between 350 and 360 grams.
The first few weeks we had Thor, he was driving us crazy because he would not stay put. He was flying constantly. He only had four primaries clipped on each side because, as a heavy-bodied bird, he had to be prevented from crashing to the floor and hurting himself. Having only four feathers clipped allowed him to drift, rather than crash, to the floor. Thor soon learned to compensate for the lack of flying feathers and flew the entire length of my apartment. He flies less now, but when he wants to be with one of us, especially Craig, he will fly to him. We haven't trained him to stay put yet.
Thor is an extremely social creature. As a deposition court reporter, I do much of my work at home, and Thor shares my office space with me, so he is used to being with someone most of the day. So far, he's never been alone for more than a five-and-a-half-hour stretch of time. He usually cries whenever I leave the room, even if he can still look down the hall and see me. He stops crying as soon as I come back in the room. Craig works at home as well, so Thor always has plenty of company; probably too much, as he often has difficulty amusing himself when he's alone. The majority of the time when we come home after being out, even if it's for several hours, Thor is just sitting on his perch, not playing, though he's had plenty of time to rest, seemingly just waiting for us to return.
Thor is a very active baby, and since his first day with us has needed to take a couple of "power naps" throughout the day, lasting 20 minutes or so, which rejuvenate him to go back to his playing. Thor's favorite toys are hanging toys with knots and wood disks, and anything he can hold in a foot and chew. He's already untied several knots, and pulled three of his foot toys apart, and made toothpicks out of several toy pieces. He loves being on his playpen with his hanging toys, but his favorite place to play is in the big tray that is on top of his cage. He goes through a 20-minute period a couple times a day that we call "brain-dead birdie," when he seems to get overstimulated and chases his toys around, screams, jumps and hops, "barks" and lunges at his toys, as if they were attacking him back. He growls and whines, and sometimes even rolls onto his side, holding onto a toy with his beak and one foot; he even shakes his head with a toy in his mouth, like a puppy. He tugs on a hanging plastic chain and growls and lunges at it. He plays soccer with a little plastic wiffle ball. He stalks his toys, pretending he doesn't notice them, and then attacks them. He also loves to drop a toy to the floor, just for the joy of watching one of us pick it up for him. His favorite toy for the longest time, until he destroyed it, was a plastic keyring with four plastic keys and a red heart on it, a gift from his Grandma and Grandpa Parrott, whom he met last month. "I think you should come live with me," said Grandma.
If there is something that frightens him, it doesn't take him long to get used to it, such as his bell, which scared him at first when it rang. He is still scared stiff by his birdie jukebox, which he's only set off a few times. But we're sure he'll be abusing it soon too.
Thor refused to be placed on his back for the first couple of weeks, but we got him used to it, gradually, by mesmerizing him with a head or beak rub while on his back. Now, he puts himself on his back with a silly game he invented that we call "Oopsie." While perched on a hand, he'll very slowly start to fall backwards, acting as if he's doing it by accident. If I could read his mind, I think he would be saying to himself, "Uh-oh, I think I'm slipping. No, I'm not. Yes, yes, I am slipping. I can't hold myself up. I'm going to fall over backwards. Oopsie!" Occasionally, the oopsie is a forward fall.
Thor doesn't much care for playing in a towel, which we're trying to acclimate him to. He loves having his head and beak rubbed, especially now that he's molting. At first, he had to be talked into it, but once we started, he was putty in our hands. Now he actually asks for a pet by putting his head close to one's hand. When he wants a scratch, he'll get as close to me as he can on his perch, and lean way over so I can reach him. If I stop, he'll follow me for more. He will now lay on his back in my lap until I get tired of holding and scratching him. The longest time so far has been 25 minutes.
Thor is remarkably similar to a human child. He wants to put everything in his mouth, and he hates having his face wiped. When he is tired and falling asleep, and we put him in his cage, he wakes up and calls for us. "But I don't want to go to bed!" And he always wants what I have. If I have food, he'll drop his own food to try to get mine. If I have a toy, he'll drop the toy he's playing with because he's sure the one I have is better. If he's not eating out of his own food bowl, he'll eat if I hold his food. He vacillates between, "Hold me! Scratch me! Cuddle me!" and "Leave me alone, I'm busy!"
Thor most definitely has a favorite human. He likes me a lot, but he loves and adores Craig. Thor gets super excited whenever he sees Craig after a period of days of not seeing him. If Thor had little birdie pants on, he would wet them. He goes crazy as soon as he is aware of Craig, and he doesn't even have to see him first, he can simply hear him and go nuts. He chirps and quivers and gets very, very excited. As soon as Craig holds him, Thor will put his head back in a baby-bird position and say, "Waaaaaa." He'll bob his head up and down in a feeding action. He can sit on Craig's shoulder and preen his hair for an hour. But just as Craig gets the adoration, he also gets the other end of the spectrum of rowdy, uncontrollable, aggressive, biting behaviors more than I do.
Thor has exhibited some territorial behaviors. When he is on his play top or in his cage, or anyplace he thinks of as "his place," he will occasionally lunge at us if he thinks we're getting too close or if he doesn't want to come off. Repeating "Step up" sternly a few times usually ends the aggression and he'll obey. If it doesn't, I have him step up onto a hand-held perch, after he's finished attacking it.
Thor has a huge beak, but he has never bitten either of us very hard. He has punctured us a couple times with the sharp point of his beak, but we don't think he intentionally wounded us. His lunges and bites have more of a playing quality than a violent quality, and getting him to release a finger from his beak is easy; we just gently lift up his upper mandible and he lets go.
Thor has a birdie harness that Craig can actually get on him, but Thor then spends all his time trying to get out of it rather than enjoying being outside. He seems to be slowly getting more used to it, but it can only remain on him for ten minutes at the most before he starts to panic about having it on.
The most impressive thing that Thor does is poop on command. He was doing it right nearly one hundred percent of the time but is now going through a phase of refusing to do it. He associated the verbal command, "Poop!" with the action of pooping. That's not to say that he won't go if he doesn't get the command, because he does. We are very careful, but accidents still happen.
Thor has decided he loves the shower. We were misting him for the first couple of weeks. At first, he seemed to tolerate it but not really enjoy it. Then he started to actually like it. Now, he gets in the shower with Craig and voluntarily soaks himself under the spray, flapping and chirping sometimes; at times he gets so relaxed that he almost falls asleep. He occasionally tries to bathe in his water bowl. He sometimes sticks his head too far into his water bowl and makes himself sneeze.
Thor doesn't say any actual words yet, but he spends a good part of every day practicing the sounds he knows, adding to his repertoire frequently. He is not a quiet bird, as Capes are purported to be. He is capable of a very high-pitched call, which we get to enjoy often, that is so loud the reverberations can be heard and felt in the room. If he lets one of these calls off while you're near him, your ear literally rings for a few minutes afterwards. He has many other sounds, most of which are pleasant, including cackles, clicks, clucks, gargles, growls, meows, whimpers, whines, and whistles. He makes a quacking sound in the cadence of "Step up" and often says it as he's actually stepping up. He makes little "wugga wugga" or "wenna wenna" or "grobble grobble" sounds. Just last week he started what sounds like an imitation either of his birdie jukebox, Craig's cell phone, or a bird outside. We've had warm weather, so we've had the windows open (screened, of course) and there is a songbird outside that Thor might be imitating. He sings up to eight notes, and it is very melodic and amusing. He makes noises that sound like a cat screeching and a puppy whining. This week he started making sounds that resemble a person talking, although there are no distinguishable words.
Thor's personality is evolving and changing all the time. He's gone from a somewhat nervous, hyper, intelligent baby to a silly, amusing, pleasant, even more intelligent child. He is extremely curious and very active. He is getting more bold and acrobatic as time passes. Thor's brother Dudley, who now lives in New York, had a reputation for being the bigger, rowdier sibling; if that's so, his new family must be exhausted, because Thor is quite a handful. He requires a lot of attention, and having him around is quite time consuming. Thor will not allow himself to go unnoticed. He is noisy, demanding, and ohmygodthemess. His constant, loud chirping whenever I leave the room is at times quite bothersome, and I sometimes cover his cage for ten minutes to quiet him down, so that I can be in another part of the house and have some peace. At the same time, he is sometimes so funny, especially when he's attacking his toys, that he has us in stitches. He has a funny little whine when he has his morning stretch, just like a human. He is super cuddly and affectionate, when he's in a quiet mood. He is friendly with strangers and steals their hearts. Though he is our first bird, so we don't have any experiences to compare to, all in all, living with Thor is an absolute pleasure.