I FREE FLY my parrots outside. Why? Because I believe it is healthier for them, both physically and mentally, and because I thoroughly enjoy seeing them grow and live to their fullest potential.

I also believe that I can offer them this important aspect of their lives with minimal risks. I truly believe that I can train my birds to fly in a way that is as safe or safer than the life they would live with clipped wings.

Flash, a two-year-old flying mitred conure belonging to bird trainer Chris Biro, fetches a whiffle ball.

Flying Janis
I trained my first fully flighted parrot, a green-winged macaw named Janis, in 1993. My training techniques at the time were crude - I essentially flew her from a perch to me and back again. But they worked anyway because Janis was so young. She was only 12 weeks old when I got her from a breeder friend.

Even though I was making my living doing educational parrot shows, I had little contact with the world of aviculture back then. I had no idea where to find information about training birds to fly outdoors (as it turned out, there wasn't much).

So I made it up as best I could, learning by trial and error. With each mistake, I learned not only valuable lessons about training, but I also learned an awful lot about recovering loose birds.

When I began asking around on the Internet about keeping flighted parrots, it quickly became clear that anyone who claimed to know anything about caring for parrots adamantly opposed the idea.

Many told me, "I love my parrot too much to risk losing it," implying that I did not love my birds since I was willing to risk losing them. After one such Internet confrontation that resulted in my being unsubscribed from a prominent e-mail list, someone suggested I start my own list.

In 1999 I launched the Freeflight list at Yahoogroups.com. It has become a valuable source of information and support for people who wish to live with and train fully flighted birds.

Today I have nine parrots that I regularly fly outdoors at home and at fairgrounds across the country. After logging thousands of hours of successful freeflight time, last summer I lost my first bird. While performing in northern California, my very precious Senegal, Beamer, died when he flew into a window of a building off the fairgrounds.

What parrots need
So why would someone take such risks with their parrots? To get to the answer we must first answer some questions about parrots' needs.

Picture for a moment two species of animals, a slug and a hummingbird, say. The slug moves so slowly it spends its entire life inside a 50-foot area. The hummingbird travels so far and so fast that during its lifetime it sees several continents.

Now ponder how nature has provided these two animals with a different set of mental abilities and requirements. Even if they could switch lifestyles, would they be mentally comfortable living as the other? Could the slug adjust to making high-speed maneuvers or navigating across oceans? Could the hummingbird adjust to traveling at a snail's pace or living two dimensionally at ground level?

Nature has shaped parrots into creatures of incredible intelligence on par with monkeys, dolphins and whales. Wouldn't this high level of intelligence require adequate environmental stimulus to keep functional or from developing severe mental disorders, such as feather plucking?

Let's start with the sense of mobility that flying gives a bird. Can we simply turn this element off without causing serious side effects? The average parrot owner has never seen just how active and mobile a fully flighted parrot really is. My flyers are on the go all day long! They fly from this tree to that one and chase each other in circles around the house and orchard.

Cosmo, a four-year-old blue-and-gold macaw, flies to Biro's outstretched hand.

My free flyers are like finely tuned Olympic athletes who seem to relish the physical act of flying. As they dodge and weave between branches and over fences and around trees and buildings, it is as if they are going to the gym for a routine workout. The longer they have been caged, the more vigorously they fly when let loose the next time.

Scientific research has shown that a bird's respiratory system is so specifically designed for flying that it does not function at capacity until engaged in flight. If their bodies are so attuned to flying, is it not possible that their minds are equally attuned? We know that a high level of physical and mental fitness is important to the wild parrot’s survival. I suspect being physically fit would also keep a pet parrot mentally fit.

How important is fun to bird? It is immediately obvious to anyone who observes flighted parrots in action that they are extremely playful creatures. My birds get such apparent joy from playful flying that the first comments from visitors usually refer to how much fun the birds are having. It usually takes people a few minutes to regain control of their wide-open mouths as they watch the birds dodging and darting, twisting and falling, racing and gliding about the property.

How completely serious and serene the average clipped parrot seems by comparison. How does such a dramatic change affect their well-being and mental fitness?

Next page | Why I think pet birds should be allowed to fly | 1, 2

I FIND CHOOSING to allow a bird to fly outdoors to be tremendously problematic. Allowing birds to fly free in a non-native environment is dangerous both for the birds and for birds native to the locale.

Native raptors are especially adept at picking off cockatoos and cockatiels. John Vincent, an experienced and accomplished trainer who was practicing controlled outdoor flight last year in Colorado lost a beloved cockatoo in the blink of an eye.

I nearly lost an umbrella cockatoo right in front of my face to a Swainson's hawk when trying to recapture a cockatoo on the grounds of St. Thomas Seminary in Colorado in 1993. (I wrote about it in Guide to Companion Parrot Behavior, The Slightly Un-Saintly Bernadette, pages 212-216). In mid-dive, the hawk apparently changed its mind about snatching up the large male umbrella cockatoo, which I was using to try to lure the escaped bird.

It was a good thing, as I was huffing and puffing trying to outrun the dive (it was something like the scene from Gorillas in the Mist, when Dian Fossey didn't have the wind to get to Digit in time).

Consequently, I have never again used a bird outside the protection of a cage when trying to lure down a lost bird.

Bernadette, the bird we had been hired by the Catholic Church to rescue, fared much worse from a hawk encounter. According to the seminarians, she had been caught at least once by a raptor, and one of her legs had been pulled so far out of socket that when it was released, it snapped inside her body and grew adhered to the inside of the pelvis bone.

As a result, Bernadette required a femoral resection, a very invasive surgery. In her case, it required amputating the head of the femor and attempting to construct a pocket of muscle to hold the leg in place. It sort of worked. Bernadette can almost walk. Fortunately, she was placed in a home that could safely accommodate a flighted bird.

Flying parrots and the law
Additionally, it is illegal to introduce non-native species into the wild in the U.S. In California, you need a permit to free fly a parrot. While most other Wildlife Department agents take a hands-off approach to those who allow their birds to fly outdoors temporarily and then return to live indoors, intentionally not recovering a non-native species is considered similar to abandoning a dog.

The animal must learn to find food, water, and shelter, and in some habitats they do, especially Quaker parrots which have naturalized in quite a few parts of the U.S., to the chagrin of power companies in Texas, Florida, New York, and other states.

It is because Quakers are so good at adapting to the wild that ten states now make even possession of a Quaker parrot in their states illegal. The reason is some authorities still fear that nonnative species will drive out native birds. Biologists have debunked this theory concerning the Quaker - like pigeons, Quakers prefer living near people and nesting on manmade objects, so they do not seem to have an effect on native birds.

However, fear of disease is another reason authorities dislike nonnative birds, and this concern may have more merit. For instance, Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease appeared in wild populations of African parrots after the release of infected captive birds.

At any rate, our authorities officially do not appreciate free-flying parrots, and if we parrot owners flaunt the law, who knows whether other species would also be banned. Currently, it can be very problematic trying to transport a Quaker parrot from one part of the country to another if you're trying to respect the laws (and the individual bird's life, since they can be seized and killed if found in a state where they are not allowed).

For example, in England only a few years ago one particular cockatoo kept getting out so much and causing so much havoc in the town where it lived that the authorities required the owner to trim its wings.  Unfortunately, further measures to contain the bird were unsuccessful.  The bird was so accustomed to getting out and so focused on running around town that it was run over by a car!

Next page | Why freeflight is a bad idea | 1, 2