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The Parrot Diaries - The Butter Wars

by Mira Tweti

Lories, a variety of parrot, are nectar and pollen eaters. Their diet is similar to Hummingbirds. They are beautiful in their many colorful varieties which even includes black lories. In their pursuit of pollen and nectar they pollinate many species of flowers in the jungle areas of Australia and New Guinea where they primarily are found.

In captivity, Mango, my rainbow lorikeet companion, does his best by trying to pollinate my table flowers. There, though they live a harmless existence, they are terrorized by deforestation, poachers and locals, children and adults alike, armed with slingshots who knock them out of the trees, tear of their wings, cook them and eat them (though they are not needed for sustenance). The birds are also coveted for their feathers to use in native costumes. I contemplate these fates often when I feel guilty keeping this beautiful creature in a cage (albeit a large, toy-filled one next to a window).

Plus there is the issue of lifespan. It is supposed that the birds live longer in captivity though there is no knowing because not enough of any species of parrot have been banded and tracked for the length of their lifetimes. I have been told that rainbow lorikeets could live to 35 in captivity but I have never heard of one doing so and especially on a captive diet.

Speaking of dietary issues… Mango and I ritually have breakfast together and beyond that there is something else we have in common...

It all started one morning when he and I simultaneously discovered he loved butter. I turned around to find him beak deep in the yellow stuff. He was making the bird equivalent of a purring sound as he gorged himself in my tub of unsalted whipped. Of course, I took it away immediately. His body can’t really process fats (as was witnessed by the fact that the bottom of his cage was covered with butter the next day -- it had gone right through him, his little body not knowing what to make of it). I couldn’t believe he actually liked it. Where would he see anything like it in the wild? A girlfriend of mine pointed out that it’s not good for me either but I like it too.

Things have escalated since then. I still like to have butter and he doesn’t know how to take “no” for an answer. Now, when I want to have some on a piece of toast (a simple enough wish) for breakfast I brace myself and begin a new battle in the BUTTER WARS.

Mango eyes me constantly while we eat breakfast. Covert operations are needed if butter is to make it to toast, and then to my mouth without being intercepted. First I give him fresh Lory food. He eats out of bowls on the kitchen counter (like a dog or cat would). While he’s busy eating I quickly sneak the butter out of the fridge, hiding it behind me as I go past him. When the toast is ready I butter it, my back to the bird, across from him on the opposite kitchen counter. I glance over my shoulder, huddled over my meager piece of toast in the hopes that he doesn’t sight the yellow stuff. But old eagle eye is not easily fooled.

Usually, while I’m still clandestinely buttering at breakneck speed he’s flown onto a shoulder for a better view of my activities. If he spies anything resembling butter he’ll streamline down an arm faster than you can say the word and eat it out of my hand. He is persistent to say the least. If I switch hands, so does he. Over my head doesn’t help because he’ll try to land on the toast -- he can fly remember. The usual result is a Mexican stand-off: I get a couple of quick bites, he manages to get a little butter off the top, the toast then goes in the garbage and we both settle for a neutral bowl of cereal (milk and soaked bread is what the first imported Lories were fed by British merchants who brought them home to England).

I recently found myself hovering over a piece of cherished warm buttered toast in a corner of my kitchen glancing over my shoulder to make sure he was none the wiser until I realized that I was being terrorized by a bird the size of a banana.

Leave him in his cage you say? It’s hard to break a bird (or a person) of habits, especially ones they enjoy. Breakfast with me is one of the things Mango looks forward to. When I’ve tried to leave him in he lets me know in his loudest voice --while he paces back and forth in his cage like a little Napoleon -- that he wants out, especially if he sees me eating without him so I feel twice as guilty (does this make me avian co-dependent?). He doesn’t like butter substitutes so that is one recourse. But, then neither do I.

The sad truth is Weight Watchers is calling my name so the butter wars with Mango may be my karma to giving up the fattening yellow stuff* myself.


*I have since gone vegan and the fattening yellow stuff is now a thing of the distant past...



Mango, the butter-lover :

Posted by Mira Tweti on 06/25 at 12:28 AM
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The Parrot Diaries - A Lory Story

by Mira Tweti

A Lory Story is the first piece I wrote about my amazing parrot companion, Mango. I'm sharing it here for the first time in some time. Now that WPT has asked me to blog for them I thought it would be a perfect place for the series of life-with-parrot stories I've written over the years, some published (like this one and The Butter Wars, entry #2) and some not. I expect to write new ones for this space - incidents and situations I've been documenting in notes (and photos in some cases) but haven't had time to write in full. Now I have an impetus -- a blog space waiting for them. I hope you enjoy these first true tales as much as I loved living them.

Mira Tweti, Los Angeles, June 24th, 2007 11:06 p.m.

A Lory Story

I was a cat person from childhood. My mother fed perhaps a dozen strays in our Manhattan brownstone’s back yard. We knew them all by name, disposition and dramas. Years later, when I broke up with my long term boyfriend he got the ever-shedding Persian and I bought a pair of easy-to-care- for Finches. That was the end of cats and the beginning of my life with birds. If anyone had told me then that I would find a bird smarter than any of the smartest cats I’ve owned, with a personality as distinct as a human’s and more fun loving than most of the people I know, I would not have believed them.

One July, as I had for several years, I went to the Lotus Festival at Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles. The local Buddhist temple I belong to has participated in this neighborhood get together of Pacific Rim culture for many years. The festival is a lively and colorful mix of food, performances, Dragon Boat races and vendors of all kinds. My teacher leads the procession of monks in the ritual to open the “eyes” of the dragon figures on the boats so they’ll speed their rowers to the winning circle.

Over the years I bought several more pairs of finches (if anyone had told me my beautifully decorated living room would sport flight cages to harbor an ever increasing variety of finches I would not have believed them either) from two very nice guys, that breed all kinds of birds and have a booth at the festival each year. They have since become my friends.

This particular year I went to say hello to them and saw the most beautiful bird I had ever seen standing atop one of their cages. He was about eight inches high, had purple and black on his crown, a bright yellow band around his neck, light green on his back and red and black stripes on his chest. I was told he was a hand fed baby Rainbow Lory. I just couldn’t get over him. It was love at first sight. Here, you can see why:


My girlfriend said “You don’t need another bird,” which was absolutely true. He was nowhere near as inexpensive as any of my finches, and I was in the process of getting divorced and on unemployment to boot. But I looked at him again and he cocked his head to look at me and that was that.
As we were leaving the park with the bird in a cage we saw one of the monks; an ever smiling, gentle man from Sri Lanka. He saw my Lory, commented on his beauty and wished me luck with him.

A couple of weeks went by and I realized I could not keep my finches. It was just too much work having four large cages in a not huge living room. Plus, the finches and the lory were on different diets (seed and liquids respectively). I decided to donate the finches to my temple’s large garden aviary.

The monk who had been at the Lotus Festival was there to open the gate for me when I arrived. As we walked to the garden aviary he asked how my new bird was doing. I told him how Mango (my Lory’s name) followed me all around my apartment, waddling along behind me like Charlie Chaplin. How he would lie on his back, feet kicking in the air, allowing me to rub his tummy with a finger as he tried to catch it with his feet. How he’d hit a ball to me with his beak. And what an amazing personality he had. Without hesitating the monk said: “You’ve known him in a previous life.” Needless to say I was surprised to hear that. “Are you sure?” I said. “Yes,” he sais. “When an animal ends up having extensive interaction with you, like living in your home, it’s not accidental. It means you have some Karmic connection to each other.” I commented that maybe it wasn’t so great that he came back a bird and not a human this time around. In Buddhism one strives for enlightenment which is hard enough to accomplish in a “precious” human birth and theoretically much harder from a bird life – though, in time I would come to find out Mango was much more enlightened than I am. The monk replied, “Look how hard and complicated your life is. Look how easy his is. You take care of him and he gets to play with you and he has no worries. A lot of people come back as animals to have an easy life in between human lives.”

Needless to say, there’s no way to know for sure. But after that I often thought of who he might have been in a previous life? I’ve become convinced from the way he behaves that in his last life he was a runway model for a high fashion designer, like Giorgio Armani. He religiously bathes every day (and is out of sorts if he misses a bath), he will not allow a tiny feather to be out of place in his perfect coif, and he oves the feel of silk so much I get bitten if I try to stop him from rolling on my expensive silk shirt when it’s laying on the bed.

Posted by Mira Tweti on 06/24 at 11:57 PM
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