What looked like a piece of unidentifiable debris turned out to be, on closer inspection, a dead parrot. We later found out that the poor bird had bitten through the insulation covering a wire and died of electrocution.<\/p>\n
My friend isn\u2019t hyperactive in animal advocacy and rescue like just about everyone else I know here, but he\u2019s at least as softhearted. \u201cIt has to be a parrot\u2014this is awful,\u201d he moaned.<\/p>\n
Of course, it would\u2019ve been sad if it had been a crow, or a starling, or a chickadee. Any encounter that an animal, wild or domestic, has with the practical applications of technology is tragic. But this was a Southern California wild conure\u2014 intelligent, playful, impish and iconic. We\u2019re familiar with their domesticated cousins who live among us as companion animals. They\u2019ve been talked about and squawked over and written about extensively\u2014the Long Beach Post<\/em>\u2019s Kelly Puente wrote about Belmont Shore\u2019s \u201clove\/hate relationship\u201d with them when she was a reporter at another publication<\/a>. Their genesis as wild animals is wrapped in urban legend\u2014a truckload of them escaped when the vehicle went off the road, a bunch of them escaped a house fire, their owners released them into the wild so that they could escape a brushfire. Peacock sightings, like Elvis sightings, may spark interest, but these noisy little flockers are our <\/em>parrots.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re a bunch of little rebels who know they\u2019re not supposed to be here, but they come anyway,\u201d my friend Sharon said.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve had a couple of them in our attic, whom we named Chuck Conure and Hilda Greenfeather-Conure. We thought the whole thing was cute until one of them chewed through a telephone wire. We had to wait until their hatchlings were of age and had flown the coop before we disinfected the space and boarded up the windows. They came cussing and yelling at us the next day.<\/p>\n Seeing one of these upstarts hanging lifeless on the wire\u2014for all we knew, it was one of our erstwhile tenants\u2014saddened our hearts. That was nothing compared to the next morning, though, when we were walking back from breakfast and saw the widow or widower pacing back and forth on the wire next to the deceased mate, seemingly trying to make sense of the whole thing. We knew the feeling. I never wanted to use the word poignant <\/em>in any way in anything I wrote, but there\u2019s no other feeling to describe it.<\/p>\n\n My friend moaned again, which brought out a neighbor. \u201cHe\u2019s been doing that all morning,\u201d he said of the surviving parrot.<\/p>\n We worried about the mate, but we discovered that, like some humans, they mourn for a while, and then they pair off with another bird.<\/p>\n
![\"Lone](\"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Parrot-225x300.jpg\")