Baby Parrot Rescue

This morning, on my way back from the market, I discovered a small green parrot on the steps of my building, clearly in distress. I knew right away that this was not someone’s pet, as we hear the parrots every morning in the oak trees, and the other evening a flock had noisily flown across our terrace through the pines. The theory is that parrots were introduced to the eternal city back in the 1990s and have adapted very well to la dolce vita. They are called parrochetto (parakeet) and come from Asia and Latin America.

Immediately, I got out my camera and took a few pictures and two short videos, which also enabled me to see if it had a broken wing or other visible injury. It kept looking back at me nervously and tried to climb the step, using its beak and feet to pull itself up to the next level. I tried opening a few grapes to see if it would eat, but it just wanted to hide. I checked to see if the neighbor’s cats were around, and then went upstairs with my bags.

My mother was immediately interested when I showed her the videos, and we decided I should go back down with my garden gloves and see if I could help it move along to safety. I found it curled into a corner, head tucked down into feathers, hoping to make itself invisible. As I approached, again it squawked loudly in distress, and was clearly not able to fly even though it was trying. Meanwhile, the cats were getting curious, and I shooed them away, but realized I had to get the bird inside the lobby of the building away from the cats. I went back upstairs to get a box, cornered the bird, and gently lifted it into the box and put the cover on.

I headed over to Maurizio, who sits at the gate entrance about a block away, as he had recently helped me figure out what to do when some bees were thinking about setting up a nest on our balcony. When he saw me coming he jokingly asked if I had an explosive, but I said, no, it was just a dilemma. Together we tried to get the parrot into a nearby tree, but it flapped its way back down to the ground, clearly too young to fly. For the time being, we left it hiding in the bush, and I returned to have lunch with my mother.

All through lunch we worried about the baby parrot. Would its mother find it? Every little bird sounded like a mother parrot in distress. At least I had managed to prevent the cats from attacking it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about whether and how it might survive where we had left it. I went back down to look for it, with no luck, and then asked Fausto (now guarding the entrance) if Maurizio had filled him in. Fausto is also a nature lover and when we first moved in, told me there were foxes and squirrels who lived in our apartment complex gardens. Fausto provided the happy ending: one of the regular delivery men had offered to give the baby parrot a safe home in his garden in the country.

Mimi on the balcony

This little saga reminds me that the third inhabitant of our home, Mimi, is truly a part of the family as beloved pets tend to be. My mother has asthma, so pets were out of the question when I was growing up, and I only got my first cat when I lived in Milan. When I moved back in with my mother, Mimi was confined to my bedroom for the most part, because I was nervous that her fur and dander would further aggravate my mother’s allergies. But it quickly became clear that as long as I regularly groomed her, and my mother kept her out of her bedroom, things were fine. Mimi seemed to understand the boundary, but would sit at the edge of the room when we were both in there as if to say, can’t I come in too? Now, in our apartment in Rome she goes everywhere and loves to nap in the afternoon with my mother. She provides comfort when needed, levity with her funny little behaviors like licking my chin in the morning, and we love to spoil her with salmon treats. Having an animal to care for seems important to someone with a degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s. Just as saving the baby parrot made us feel we did our good deed for the day.