I DIDN'T WAKE SCREAMING last night, like I did the night before and the night before that. As time passes, I expect that to happen less. Undoubtedly these anxious cries escape from a heart troubled by things I witnessed in the rubble of the mother of modern North American disasters. But my bad dreams are not about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They’re personal, about nightmarish things that could happen to me and my pets.

The author cuddles an orphaned umbrella cockatoo. (Photo by Dahlijah Rahm.)

To say that I've been affected is an understatement. How could anyone not be torn by seeing what happens to birds in cages when disaster strikes? Some drowned. Some died of thirst with food still in their bowls, some of starvation with a full water bowl. Some survived by eating their cagemates. We found some birds in time and moved them to safety.

I'm comforted tonight remembering a rooftop on New Orleans' Treasure Street near Elysian Fields. The scene is etched in my mind: empty cages, with doors wide open - and clear evidence of birds returning to eat and drink. Recently molted macaw and cockatoo feathers. Ringnecks, Quaker parakeets and a parrotlet in the trees overhead. We visited that rooftop time and again to refill the bowls.

The gathering storm
As Hurricane Katrina churned her way toward New Orleans, Donna Powell readily agreed to keep a friend's birds for him as he traveled to safety. It wasn't easy finding a place to stay when you were bringing along a dozen parrots, some of them babies still needing to be handfed.

Donna's Baton Rouge suburb was far away enough from Katrina's eye - 80 miles northwest of New Orleans - to ride out the storm, yet close enough to serve as a convenient, temporary shelter. Besides, she loved birds, and had only recently created a Web site and service, www.911parrotalert.com, to help reunite people with their lost pet parrots.

But one emergency pet-sitting job soon turned into something much more. As one of the largest, most powerful storms ever to hit a heavily populated area made landfall, one request soon turned into dozens of calls and e-mails, each with the same request. Could Donna’s 911 volunteer group, not quite a full-fledged, bona fide, on-paper Internet rescue organization, take in another bird?

The Superdome looms in the distance as the small convoy of bird rescuers enters New Orleans on a largely empty freeway. (Photo by Janelle Zorko.)

By Aug. 29, when the levees gave way and entire neighborhoods were flooded and the city of New Orleans was forced to evacuate, the requests became desperate pleas to find pets that had been left behind.

Donna's home was about to become the center of the busiest, most visible emergency parrot rescue operation in history.

Call for volunteers
On Sept. 9, I received an e-mail from the Humane Society of the United States that said workers with vans and up-to-date hepatitis and tetanus vaccinations were needed to retrieve animals from the abandoned city. Among the listed groups in need was www.911parrotalert.com.

A special plea was made for those with experience with "spiders and birds." Volunteers were instructed to bring boats if they had them, waders or high rubber boots, insect repellent, sunscreen, batteries, flashlights and gasoline. From what I had heard through the grapevine, I knew they also needed dog food - there apparently were roving packs of starving canines that police and the military were shooting to protect other animals.

The e-mail said calls could not be returned, only giving Donna Powell's street address, implying volunteers should simply hit the road, as soon as possible.

I was an ideal candidate: up-to-date vaccinations, no time clock to punch, and a new white Grand Caravan. Baton Rouge was only a 13-hour drive from my home. How could I not go? At the time, I didn't know how valuable my official-looking vehicle would be.

It took me two days to pack my portable outdoor aviary, a few hundred pounds of dog food, cat food, bird food, human supplies, and my 22-foot fiberglass ladder. It was 9/11 of 2005 and I was on my way to help 911parrotalert. Even a butterfly that fluttered around me and alighted on the van, keeping me company for over two hours while I packed, seemed like a good omen.

Rescuers smile with relief at the sound of live birds inside an abandoned building. (Photo by Mattie Sue Athan.)

Baton Rouge
By the time I reached Baton Rouge it was 12 days after Katrina and the town was flooded with people. Refugees fleeing the disaster had come first, then military personnel, federal workers, and finally us, the volunteers. Tempers were more electrified than batteries responding to the heavy humidity. Traffic was horrific. Everything took more time. Simply buying gas could take an hour. Who would have thought that cans of Fix-a-flat would become a precious commodity?

I arrived at Donna's around 3 a.m. on September 12, got a brief tour of the house and was introduced to the few people still up at that hour. Gail Hale of Aussie Bird Toys, a Bellevue, Wash., a bird toy wholesaler, had come to help, along with a friend, Janelle Zorko, a glass artist.

Nell and Larry Knapp of KnappTime Adoption, Rescue and Education, a bird rescue organization based in Warren, Mich., were there, too, and soon a parrot rescuer named John from Beaks and Wings in Weatherford, Texas, would join us, as well as several veterinarians and their technicians, including Dr. Fern Van Sant of San Jose, Calif., who would teach us how to microchip the incoming birds. There were many others whose names I did not get.

A mountain of donated bird food awaits use. (Photo by Janelle Zorko.)

I crashed on a sofa until 6 a.m., when the phone started ringing. Donna's house was stuffed with birds and people. The dining room housed small birds; her patio room sheltered large hookbills; her breezeway, bedrooms, bathrooms, and hallways were lined with bird cages, supplies, and human volunteers.

One back hallway was destined to become the avian veterinary care unit, complete with its own refrigerator for medications. Quarantined birds would be isolated in various locations throughout her ranch-style home, and the portable outdoor aviary I brought was set up for finches and other softbills on the north end of the driveway.

For awhile, sleeping was a haphazard affair. If precious space came open on a bed or sofa or mattress on the floor at the same time you happened to finish working (or collapsed from exhaustion), it was yours. The earlier you went to bed, the greater your chances of claiming an actual bed or sofa. Being a night owl, I usually grabbed a bite to eat some time between 9 and 11 p.m. and slept on the floor, or on a sofa if I was lucky.  After the Knapps left Sept. 18, I was able to join several of the volunteers who had staked out a personal sleeping place.

Donated cages spill out onto Donna Powell's driveway. (Photo by Dr. Julie Burge.)

Dinner, the only meal we came close to observing as a group, usually consisted of someone making a big pot of something so that each volunteer could grab a bowl when they came in. Although we were never able to sit down and eat more than two at a time, we had some pretty strange and wonderful gumbos; one night it was crawfish. The ice maker had conked out, so we got by on purchased ice, usually in short supply if there were any at all.

Conditions for volunteers were less than ideal, but we at 911parrotalert had it a lot easier than the volunteers at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center, the sprawling temporary shelter for homeless dogs and cats northeast of New Orleans in Gonzalez, La. Those people mostly slept in their vehicles or tents and didn't have access to a bathtub.

In Donna's neighborhood, trees had lost their limbs and homes only yards away were damaged. But Donna's house had remained intact. A small mountain of donated cages and toys arrived from generous individual and corporate well-wishers alike who had heard of our plight. It stayed on the front porch, then moved to the driveway to tents, then to permanent use inside the house, by our avian residents. With so much left behind and destroyed in the flood, it was a good feeling to know we would be able to return these birds to their owners with new cages, perches, toys, and all the supplies and accessories they needed for a fresh start.

Taking it day by day
Assignments were seldom made in those first few days at 911parrotalert; mostly, people had to be self-motivated.  You saw something that had to be done and did it - there was no time to communicate with someone else trying frantically to complete another task. 

My first official job was to take charge of Donna's house the morning everyone else went to fetch birds from Parker Coliseum, a sweltering Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine triage facility that was lighted 24 hours a day and had no air-conditioning - to accommodate avians. I was frankly terrified, having to find and administer medications to various sick birds, answer the phone on less than three hours of sleep, and feed the rescued budgie we affectionately called the "stomach with feet." 

Fortunately, the others returned by noon with Dr. Julie Burge, a veterinarian who had traveled from Grandview, Mo., with one of her vet techs to help with the effort. With them were about 40 pet birds, mostly small species, that were added to the hundreds of birds already at Donna's house.

Hundreds of orphaned Katrina birds fill Donna Powell's house. (Photo by Dr. Julie Burge.)

After that, I alternated days on and off-site: one day I would work at the over-crowded refugee city that was Donna's house, the next I would rescue animals from the toxic wasteland that New Orleans and its suburbs had become.

At the house, I ferried volunteers back and forth to the airport, sometimes several times daily, and served as a handyperson. I was constantly busy, climbing into the attic to turn up the hot water heater or trying to match up handles to fix the bathtub.

I ran errands, tore up exposed tack strips across doorways, extended the dryer vent past the un-airconditioned breezeway where many birds were housed, and hosed down carriers and cages for retrieval teams. I spent a lot of time jumping dead car batteries. Simply keeping our vehicles running turned out to be a major challenge in a city where debris flattened tires and high humidity challenged out-of-state batteries unaccustomed to the climate.

On my rescue days, I was part of a team that drove into New Orleans. Because there were rumors that no one was being allowed into the city, we worked hard to have everything in order so that we could get in. Anyone who glimpsed our little convoy could see our objective. Signs on the sides of our vans and SUVs said 911parrotalert or KARE Emergency Rescue or Positively Parrots Rehabilitation and Adoption (the last being my consultation business). There was no mistaking our red lights or 501(c)(3) numbers across our tailgates.

Neil Powell prepares to squeeze by cages lining a hallway in his mother's home dubbed "lovebird lane". (Photo by Dr. Julie Burge.)

Every day, FEMA would block the entrance to the freeway, and we would explain our mission. And every day, the highway patrol and the military let us in. They could see we were there for the birds, but we wound up picking up any animal that needed help. As we told the handsome young men in uniform over and over, "Sure, we'll help you with that dog," or, "Of course, we're equal-opportunity pet rescuers."

My van alone brought back to Donna's three blue-and-gold macaws, one umbrella cockatoo, several cockatiels and several budgies – but three times as many dogs and cats, one large African cichlid, several gorgeous boa constrictors, a couple of tortoises and half a dozen of what appeared to be gamecocks.

At the abandoned houses, there was no electricity and many of the windows were boarded up. Everything was covered with black goo or mold; going inside was like entering a cave.  We wore coal miners' lights on our heads and carried big flashlights.

In the only photos I managed to take, all the birds inside were dead, and I promised myself I'd use those sparingly, and only for talks, not publication.  When we found the birds alive, they were barely alive and we did not stop to take their pictures. We grabbed them up and tried to get fluids into them.  Eventually our cameras stopped working anyway.  We were all using digital, and the batteries fritzed out in the humidity. 

We had trouble getting from address to address because many streets were flooded. The maps at gas stations were expensive and sold out.  We noticed that the utility workers and military seemed to have a ready supply of maps, so Dahlijah Rahm, a volunteer from Canada, offered to give one young soldier a foot rub in exchange for his extra map.  We didn't have to go without maps after that. 

Parrot rescue volunteers exchange animals with Seattle's Pasado's Safe Haven to save each group a trip to a checkpoint. (Photo by Janelle Zorko.)

We began working closely with Pasado's Safe Haven, an animal rescue organization from Seattle. After we agreed to take care of the cichlid they had rescued, and they witnessed our skill in moving an umbrella cockatoo into a transportation cage, we got together with them at the end of every day at an abandoned gas station and swapped animals.  We gave them our dogs and cats - which saved us from having to drive them to the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center. And Pasado's gave us their birds, turtles and snakes, which we were better equipped than they to care for.

Gradually, people found their way to Donna's to claim their birds. One day a woman showed up to retrieve her cockatiel, a Quaker and a mouse, which had been rescued in a paper bag. As we loaded up bags of food and toys for the birds - the mouse went home in big, beautiful Habitrail donated by Petco - I had a few moments to speak with her. She was a nurse on duty at a hospital when everything went to dirty-water-no-plumbing-no-electricity-no-phones hell. She hadn't been allowed to leave, and now it felt good to be giving her back a small part of her life.

Katrina's unexpected lesson
For me, Katrina was more than a volunteer boot camp, a daily struggle to rescue helpless pets caught in a balance of life and death. It marked a change in basic philosophy. The open cages on Treasure Street made me reconsider a long-controversial practice: whether to trim a bird's wing feathers.

Although for a long time I advocated trimming wing feathers for safety reasons, in recent years I had increasingly counseled careful clients to allow flight to improve their birds' mental health. Now it was time to reexamine safety issues.

In-home accidents kill many flighted parrots – who drown in sinks and toilets, and fly into ceiling fans and swinging doors - but these are preventable. Maybe it was time for behavior consultants like me to counsel better in-home safety, flight-training, harness-training, and retrieval techniques rather than reach for the scissors.

Lupe the lovebird is reunited with her young owner with help from Donna Powell. (Photo by Dr. Julie Burge.)

Every year I have come closer to a radical shift in philosophy. I haven't trimmed my own birds' wing feathers for years. Now I no longer recommend it. Yes, there are a few circumstances in which trimming wing feathers may be in the bird's best interest, but in the future, I plan to tell all my clients to let their birds remain flighted.

While it is not my place to question or judge anyone who did not release their birds during the hurricanes — many people were running for their own lives and did not have the luxury of time needed to make decisions about their birds — I must send special congratulations to the people on Treasure Street and to others who, when the barometer was falling, the winds and waters rising, released their birds to the sky to freely find their fate.

Some of those pet birds eventually will be recaptured. Others will naturalize, becoming a wild-living part of the environmental gumbo on the Gulf Coast. But compared to their cage-bound and clipped brethren left in the rising waters, these were among the lucky birds of New Orleans. They could fly, and they were set free.

Mattie Sue Athan is a companion parrot behavior consultant and best-selling author of bird-care books such as Guide to a Well-Behaved Parrot. She lives with six parrots, three wiener dogs, Larry the cat and, at any one time, two or three birds in rehabilitation and on their way to a new home.

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