Long, but very interesting....
An unexpected bond between damaged birds and traumatized veterans could reveal surprising insights into animal intelligence.
(S)he was in the veterans’ garden and happened to catch sight of the parrots being housed in an unusual facility that opened a year earlier on the grounds of the center.
‘‘This place is why I’m still here,’’ Love, now 54, told me one day last summer as I watched her undergo one of her daily therapy sessions at the facility, known as Serenity Park, a name that would seem an utter anomaly to anyone who has ever been within 200 yards of the place.
Inside one mesh-draped enclosure, Julius, a foot-high peach-white Moluccan cockatoo with a pink-feathered headdress, was madly pacing, muttering in the native tongue of the Korean woman who, along with her recently deceased husband, had owned him. Next door, a nearly three-foot-tall blue-and-gold macaw named Bacardi, abandoned by a truck driver who was spending too much time on the road, kept calling out for someone named Muffin, before abruptly rising up and knocking over his tray of food to surrounding squawks of delight. Across the way, Pinky, a Goffin’s cockatoo, the castoff of a bitter custody battle between his original female owner and the husband who threatened to spite her by cutting off her beloved pet’s wings, was mimicking a blue jay’s high-pitched power-saw plaint. More screams rang out and then, in the ensuing silences, random snippets of past conversations: ‘‘Hey, sweetheart!’’ ‘‘Whatever.’’ ‘‘Oh, well.’’ ‘‘Whoa! C’mon man!’’ Soon, from a far corner, came the whistling, slow and haunted, of the theme from ‘‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’’