Sarah Ause / saussie.com »

I got a macro! Hooray!

It always blows my mind that when traveling by air, you can be in one place in the morning, and on the other side of the country a few hours later. I woke up in Atlanta yesterday, but after a four hour flight, a two and a half hour layover, another one hour flight, and an hour and a half drive home, I was back in my bed in the Utah desert. Weird.

I wanted to be productive today… go to yoga, maybe clean the house, but after a full day of travel, I was not up for any of it… especially considering I spent all day Thursday traveling out to Atlanta (it was a very quick trip). So I puttered unproductively around the house, ran some errands, and then found myself bored again at home. That’s when my animals come in handy. My household loves each other and provides endless hilarity.

When I went to Los Angeles the other week, it was to meet up with Mickey Rourke, the Wrestler himself, who was looking to adopt a rescue bird. Sunny would be that bird.

Wendy and I took off on our road trip from Utah to L.A., bird in tow, and the next day found ourselves at the very top of Beverly Hills. The meeting of Sunny and Mickey was only a meeting, letting us see if they would be a good match. We would tow Sunny back if it didn’t feel right. But well, it felt great. Sunny, who can be very picky about who he likes, took to Mickey within a minute. And Mickey, who has had birds over the years, said and did all the right things. We felt completely comfortable sealing the deal and making it official right then and there. And so we did.

Everyone knows Mickey as a dog person, after he publicly thanked his pups during an award acceptance speech, but here’s to hoping we hear Sunny’s name at the next Academy Awards!

Check out the Best Friends story here.

Imagine spending 20 years of your life in a dank basement with no windows. No sunshine, ever, just fluorescent lights set to a timer. You live in a rusty wire cage, hanging from the ceiling, and your excrement stains the walls around you. The only contact you ever get is when a man comes down the stairs to give you food and water, and to check if you have produced anything that could benefit him… an egg.

My household expanded a few weeks ago when I brought home Pippi and Monkey, two of the 22 birds Wendy and I rescued from a hoarder last month. The woman and her husband had over 80 parrots, around half of which were breeders living in the basement I described above. All the ones we took came from down there.

There are 14 still left down in the basement, and it broke our hearts not to take them. But the woman wouldn’t let us. We were lucky to get 22. We went there to take 12, but convinced her to surrender the other 10 to us. One step at a time, I guess. Maybe someday she will let us take all her birds… but the 14 in the basement are the ones who really need it. Those are who we really want out.

I had no desire to add more critters to my household, but the only way we got Pippi and Monkey out was by me telling the woman that I personally would adopt them. I didn’t really mean it, but over the course of the five-hour drive home, I realized maybe I did. Already in their 20s, they will not be a life-long commitment to me, but I can guarantee them a happy ending… sunshine, fresh food, and attention for however many years they have left.

While the other birds from that rescue are, well, let’s just say “more difficult,” mine are incredibly well-adjusted. They really just wanted some attention, and now that they have it, they are so happy. They sit on my shoulders while I eat my breakfast and pick food off my spoon or lips. Pippi has grown especially fond of me and likes snuggle up to my neck, crawl inside my shirt, and has even started trying to regurgitate food for me… which may sound gross, but is actually something they do out of love. They are loud little shits, but I think I might love them just as much as they love me… just don’t expect me to throw up any of my food for them.

I know I have been seriously slacking on posting lately. I have plenty of stuff to post too… I just haven’t been posting it. But fear not, this will change. To usher the posting back in, here are some photos from the past week or so at work.

… because I haven’t posted much lately.

Today I got my first bite. Five months into the job, and I got bit. I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but freakin’ A man, I was not expecting it, and it HURT. I’m doped up on ibuprofen right now, so I’m feeling alright, but I could not say the same thing when it happened.

I will preface the story by telling you how high my tolerance for physical pain is. It wasn’t always high, but over the past few years, I’ve become amazed at the things I can endure without a single tear… things like concussions, breaking my thumb, bashing my face with skis (and trees), etc. The only physical pain I can recall in recent years that actually made me cry was giardia (holy unbearable pain). So you know it has to be bad when a bird bite hurts me so bad that tears flow like a tidal wave within two seconds, my vision goes foggy, and I feel faint.

I got bit by an Amazon. Thing is, I was not holding it, or even trying to touch it. I was simply walking by it (sitting atop its cage) when it lunged onto my shoulder blade (me wearing a tank-top) and bit me. It hurt immediately, I screamed, but it wasn’t until a second or two later, that it became unbearable. As soon as it was off of me, I reached my hand around to my back, sure to find myself gushing blood and missing a chunk of muscle, but that wasn’t the case. She barely broke the skin, but instead pinched my shoulder muscle so hard, I couldn’t move it until the souped up Excedrin and ibuprofen combo finally kicked in two hours later and an icepack numbed my feeling there. Those two hours were awful though. I would compose myself, only to randomly start crying as my muscle spasmed and everything went cloudy again. I felt like a big baby.

Parrots have hundreds of pounds of pressure in their beaks, and I have a new-found respect for the parrot caregivers at work who are bit on a regular basis. They get chunks taken out of them, and I will merely have but a bruise and a small cut (and perhaps a little apprehensiveness when walking by cages). They are tough cookies in the bird department, I can tell you that.

Two very special birds arrived from California this week… a Hyacinth macaw and a Major Mitchell cockatoo. Birds like Joey (the Hyacinth) and Honey (Major Mitchell) don’t usually find themselves in rescues, because they are very rare and fetch a very high price in the bird market. But luckily, a very kind couple did the right thing when they found themselves not able to give enough attention to their birds anymore… they handed them over to us (a noble thing since they could sell those birds for as much as half my yearly salary).

These two birds are going straight into our education program, meaning they won’t be available for adoption. We don’t want to advertise these incredibly beautiful birds as pets. Through the illegal pet trade, the Hyacinth’s numbers have diminished in the wild to the extent of being classified as endangered. Over 10,000 were taken from the wild in the 1980s alone, and today, only 2,000-5,000 of the world’s largest parrot species remain in the wild.

I love birds. I have two. Everyone in the bird department loves birds. But what people probably don’t realize is that we wish pet birds didn’t exist. Parrots belong in the wild. We take in the birds that are already pets, and will love and care for them, but in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to. The parrot trade is no different than puppy mills, where dogs are kept in cages for the sole purpose of breeding more and more pet dogs… pet dogs that are so overpopulated that thousands are killed in shelters every year. The pet bird population continues to grow as well, leaving more and more birds homeless as they are very hard to take care of, and people are often ill-prepared. Over their head, people also don’t seem to realize that most parrots can live as long as a human. Did I mention that I’ve had my birds since I was three years old?

Birds have not been domesticated for thousands of years like cats and dogs. Even if raised as a pet, living life in a cage, wings clipped is highly unnatural for them. Pet birds are deprived of everything they were meant for, and though they can live a good, happy life as a pet, they usually don’t. These birds that we view as “pets” here in America are wild, native species in other areas of the world. Would you support the sale of eagles or a hawks as pets? It’s no different.