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The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story
. . .with Wings There was a stairwell running through the fire escape’s center, which left a foot-and-a-half-wide inside passage against the building. At the next feeding, I chose this narrow passageway as my new spot and sat down to watch. It was magical being out in the open air with the parrots and hearing the immediacy of their squawks and screams. They talked to each other constantly. They were making a lot of low croaking sounds that I hadn't heard from inside. I loved listening to the rustle of their feathers and the flutter of their wings as they flew around the fire escape. The only bad thing about my new position was that I was uncomfortably cramped. I was shoved right up against the wall of the house, which was hard on my back, but at least I was able to dangle my legs down into the stairwell and rest my feet on the stair steps. The parrots accepted the new situation with their usual condition: no movement. The instant I scratched an itch or flexed a stiff leg muscle, they fled to the safety of the lines. After a few days of this, I started telling them in advance what I needed to do, pointing slowly to the area that I was going to scratch or move before I did. Happily, it made a difference: They stopped bolting every time they saw me twitch. Naturally, I wanted even closer contact. It became my goal to have one of the birds perch on me. The parrots were constantly flying all around me, either retreating from or heading toward the bowl. Often a bird would cross paths unexpectedly with a rival, which would require an abrupt change of course and, perhaps, a collision with some other bird, or else a hasty perching. My hope was that during all the maneuvering one might choose to land on me. One place where they often did make emergency landings was the stairwell handrail. The handrail was level with my forehead and only inches from me, but I ignored any bird who landed there. It seemed smart not to make a big deal out of it. I’m sure that they stuck around longer because of it. Our closest contact came when a parrot landed next to my feet on the stairwell step. She put a foot on the toe of my boot as if to climb up on it, but then thought better of it and flew away. After three weeks, the joy I felt at being outside with them had faded. The confinement of the tight space and the flock's demand that I remain relatively still was causing me back pain. One day, I couldn't take it anymore. I stood up in the middle of the feeding and moved down to the east end of the fire escape. I wanted to retreat anyway and figure out my next step. The birds who weren't eating often roamed the railing, sometimes coming quite near me. I usually had a few sunflower seeds in my pockets, and, as a joke, I'd occasionally offer them to passing parrots. Any bird to whom I offered one would give me a startled look and hustle on by-which is exactly what I'd expected. Then one day, before running away, a bird I'd offered a seed seemed to think it over first. Hand-feeding them had seemed out of the question, but the bird's hesitation made me wonder. Maybe it would be possible. Maybe Connor would do it. So I started encouraging every bird who wandered by me to take a seed. But no one was willing to try, and Connor wouldn't come anywhere near me. After several days, one of the cherry heads paused and seemed to seriously consider my offer. I moved my torso back as far from him as possible and extended my right arm, a seed sticking out from my fingertips. I was in a very uncomfortable position and the bird was in no hurry to make a decision. After awhile, my arm began to tremble. To keep it from shaking, I had to hold my elbow with my left hand. My discomfort kept growing while the parrot patiently sized up the situation. Finally, his neck began to stretch out toward the seed. He moved so slowly, it was nerve-wracking. I forcibly held my body stiff and still as his beak came closer and closer. Abruptly, he snatched the seed and waddled off with it, disappearing into the crowd. I had to keep a lid on the pleasure that exchange gave me. The parrots disliked it when I was anything other than matter-of-fact, so I was in the habit of restricting my emotions when I was outside with them. Besides, I’d spent six months watching them several times a day from inside the kitchen and another month sitting out on the fire escape with them, so it was all beginning to feel normal to me. The bird came back two more times for seeds later in the feeding. For some reason, the name Noah popped into my head. I probably meant Adam, thinking of him as the "first bird," but I got my biblical names mixed up. I made a mental note of the pattern of red in Noah's cap so that I could recognize him the next day. It wasn’t until after the flock left the fire escape that I began to take in what had happened. I’d always been fascinated by stories about relationships between humans and wild animals. It seemed to me that if I were patient enough, there might be no limit to how close I could get to the parrots. I liked the idea of cultivating a close friendship with one of them. I fantasized having a parrot friend who came into the house for visits, for food, and for long pets, and who knew that he was free to leave whenever he wanted. My neighbors had been making jokes, comparing me to Saint Francis. I’d read stories about sages and saints making friends with wild animals. Maybe it was all allegory, but I could imagine the conditions that would allow such a thing to happen. A real saint is someone who through prolonged, deliberate effort has purged himself of every trace of selfishness and aggression. I reasoned that wild animals, not having the neuroses that human beings do, might be able to perceive directly the authentic friendliness of such a personality. On the other hand, if a person was at a spiritual level where he or she was still capable of thinking how wonderful it would be to catch one — even if there was no real intention of acting on that thought — the bird would sense it, and it would set a limit on the closeness of the interaction. I wasn’t a saint, but I saw that there was a continuum I could work in. So it became my goal to have a close friendship with a single parrot. I knew that I would never harm the parrots, but how could I convey that? How does one win trust? I’d never given it any serious thought. At times, all of us sense a poetry in the universe ’ strange coincidences that speak to us in a strong way. In my life away from the parrots, I was beginning to have doubts about my path. Although I believed in the existence of the spiritual plane, I wondered now whether it was benevolent and considerate of my needs. I’d devoted twenty years of my life to this idea, and I felt like I was wasting away. It seemed cruel. A spiritual path has to be reliable and genuinely good-hearted. How else can you trust it? At the same time that I was struggling with my spiritual doubts, I was obsessing over a woman whose trust I wanted. A few years earlier I’d fallen in love with her. We barely knew each other and, hoping that I’d finally met the one I’d been looking for, I’d gone overboard and frightened her away. I was willing to let go of her, but I wanted the opportunity at least to explain myself, to let her know that I wasn’t a bad guy. But she didn’t trust me and wouldn’t let me anywhere near her. So in a very clear way, this issue of trust was being mirrored back to me in my experience with the parrots. I saw that to win trust, you have to be trustworthy — not simply most of the time, but constantly. The first time you cut even the smallest corner, doubt enters, which is corrosive to trust. This was a big revelation to me. To some it might seem too simple to be a revelation, but, as with every virtue, the profundity is in the difficulty of practice. The issue of trust arises wherever there is temptation. Parrots are obviously tempting to some people. They’ve been taken out of their free and natural lives, locked in cages, and sold to those who have desired their beauty and personality. I wanted them to know I wouldn’t do that. Excerpted with permission from The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story. . .with Wings, published by Random House in January 2004. The writer: Mark Bittner was born and raised in southwestern Washington State. His ambition as a teenager was to be a Great Novelist, but Mark was alarmed by the uniformly miserable fates of all the writers whom he loved. So he decided to pursue a career in music instead. After hitchhiking through Europe in search of experience, he moved to San Francisco determined to sink or swim as a poet-singer-songwriter. He sank. Completely bereft, he turned to spiritual seeking and ended up on the street where he spent the next fourteen years. Ultimately his search led him to the wild parrot flock, which, in turn, led him back to writing, and his first book: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Visit Mark Bittner's website and listen to the parrots |
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