Winnie, a yellow-crown Amazon, prepares to take to the skies from Marilyn Pon's windowsill in Berkeley, Calif. (Photo by Robert Noel Blau.)

THE TWO AMAZON parrots were already frequenting Prince Street when we moved here more than 20 years ago.

We used to wake to their raucous squawking every morning and called them "the two caballeros" after a Disney cartoon of our youth. Other neighbors were not as amused by their noise, but we found them charming and fantasized about relating to them in some way.

Six or seven years ago one of them disappeared. We had witnessed aerial battles between the parrots and a band of crows, but they seemed more bluster than substance and no one was obviously hurt. We had also heard rumors of a red-tailed hawk, but never saw it ourselves. For whatever reason, the remaining parrot, whom we arbitrarily assigned a male gender and the name Wilson, was alone.

We had long had a feeding tray suspended outside our bedroom window for other local birds, and the mix included sunflower seeds. One day, to our surprise and delight, we saw the parrot, just a few feet from our bed, snacking on them. Bit by bit he got used to our movements and finally even let us reach out to replenish the tray, now with peanuts, apple slices and banana slices. We actually offered him every kind of fruit and nut we could think of, but he reacted to them with varying degrees of suspicion and alarm - recoiling in real horror at a fig cut in half.

The next complication was that blue jays and squirrels began to raid the tray for the peanuts, even when the parrot was there. That meant we had to sit with him when he visited. By this time he would let us reach out and around him to threaten or throw things at the very bold jays and squirrels. Clearly, he now saw us as allies, if not actual patsies.

Then one wet winter day the tray was full of water and the parrot's head was drenched. Looking miserable, he bypassed the tray and landed on our window sill, where we fed him by hand and he stayed for some time out of the rain. The next day we made a small table that we fitted onto the sill and extended into the room, and he adopted it permanently.

After that we made other furniture for him, always with a perch feature that he could curl his toes around comfortably. It's very awkward for him to walk flat-footed. He began to spend most of the time on a perch on top of the dresser, munching and making quiet, conversational noises. He came twice a day - an hour or so after sunrise (which made us avid supporters of daylight-saving time) - and an hour or so before sunset.

He allowed us to sit very close to him - 3 or 4 inches from head to head - but did not like us to get behind him and definitely ruled out touching, except for two or three weeks in the spring, which we took to be mating season, when he would allow me to massage his neck and shoulders after he cooed and crooned and assumed a rather suggestive posture.

He was particular about my wardrobe - preferred me most of all to wear flannel pajamas or nightgowns with small flower patterns. If not that, at least I could not wear anything with a pattern that could be snakes or bugs. If I did, he screeched to a halt on the windowsill and refused to enter the bedroom until I covered it with a robe. One pair of silk pajamas with an undulating pattern of white and black was particularly offensive.

Eventually he began to hang around a while after eating, and when we handed him small objects - such as a pocket comb, a pencil, a piece of Kleenex - he would approach them carefully, pick them up, wrestle them to the ground, then draw himself up and look at us triumphantly.

Wilson becomes Winnie
Ten years of Wilson visiting us through our bedroom window has come and gone. Last year, we found out he was a girl.

We were told that her behavior - turning her back to me, bending over and presenting her bottom and making a particular kind of "chuffing" sound - was typical of female parrots. Wilson was rechristened Winnie and immediately began to seem much more feminine.

I learned that I can put my hand under her wings and around her body and squeeze gently while I lightly massage her neck and shoulders, plus the top of her head, which makes her especially dreamy.

After a few minutes, she shrugs me off, turns around, draws herself up and stares at me as if to say, "We're going to say no more about this," then casually picks up a peanut and starts to munch. I believe she wants to mate with me. She is definitely jealous of my real mate, Bob.

Recently she was about to fly away after a long visit when Bob came up and put a hand on my shoulder. Winnie turned around on her platform, marched back to her perch and bent her head close to mine, talking softly and urgently, as if warning me against him and all his ways and reminding me that she is my only true friend.

During mating season she frequently draws my attention to the open top drawer of the dresser. She sits peering into it and then clucking at me, as if urging me to consider moving into it with her and setting up a nest.

Winnie also likes to subjugate our cat, Katy, a formerly feral Burmese mix. They have had three or four encounters on the roof of the garage next door, where Winnie alights before flying through our bedroom window.

Marilyn Pon lays out a feast on top of her bedroom dresser for Winnie the wild Amazon. (Photo by Robert Noel Blau.)

Just the other night Winnie was sitting on her perch on the dresser when Katy entered the room and jumped up on it to look out the window. Winnie turned to face her. I picked Katy up and removed her to the bed, whereupon Winnie took two unshelled peanuts in her bill, hopped over to the cat/bird seat, facing Katy, and munched on the shells in a pointedly proprietorial manner before returning to her perch for some banana.

Many people who have written to me about Winnie have suggested I offer her toys. Much of the year she is all business, eats quickly and quietly, and is impatient if I don't keep the supplies coming. However, in the spring and summer there are times when she lingers, making conversational noises and exploring the immediate environment of the dresser, sometimes for as long as an hour.

I've made up a little basket of toys for her, which she sometimes actually requests. She likes to chew on (and destroy) wooden clothespins and wine corks. She also likes to pick up and drop small plastic and metal things and watch me retrieve them - like a baby in a high chair. She doesn't seem to have much strength in her talons, or maybe that's just ambivalence about whether she really wants to touch something strange.

Her main method of investigation is her beak. She hasn't bitten me yet (fingers crossed!), though she occasionally makes a token biting gesture when she's impatient with me or when Bob passes too close to her perch.

Winnie is still very conservative about her diet. For a brief period during the summer she deigned to eat oranges, in addition to her usual peanuts, sunflower seeds, apples and bananas. She has also agreed to taste a cracker, a piece of whole wheat bread, a slice of cucumber and a piece of cantaloupe after I demonstrated that I could eat them without falling dead.

In the end, they all failed to please her, as have all the other things well-meaning people have suggested. Their domesticated pets may have sophisticated tastes, but Winnie is suspicious of any such prepared delicacies. I know that she eats plums from the neighborhood trees when they are in fruit, because her beak leaves a purple stain on her apple. I've also seen her in the date palm trees, and in our backyard fig tree, but I don't know what she finds in the winter.

She also continues to have strong views about my wardrobe. There are several blouses that I have had to change before she would come off the roof into the house, after protesting with alarmed scolding about the snakes and poisonous bugs she apparently saw in their patterns.

An independent bird
Winnie is still bright-eyed and her feathers remain glossy, but I imagine she is a little slower-moving and a little more awkward with her landings. We have no way of knowing how old she is, and we're not getting any younger ourselves. I wish I knew where she spends the rest of the day, whether anyone else feeds her, where she was born and how she escaped.

We have rigged up various boxes and perches in the hope that she might be tempted to spend the night sometime, especially in the dead of winter when it's so cold and wet outside. We've long hoped Winnie would consider our place for a retirement or semi-retirement facility, but so far she still prefers her independence. We would never dream of capturing her against her will, although I think we could rather easily.

If she remains free, I imagine that one day she will just stop coming around and we will never know what befell her. If, on the contrary, she outlives us, I hope she'll find and trust someone else to help her out when times are hard.

Marilyn Pon is a retired nurse who lives in Berkeley with her cat, Katy; her partner, Robert Blau; and, sometimes, Winnie. This story originally appeared as two in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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