"KEN, YOU'RE GREAT!"

The man standing before us did not have time to acknowledge the compliment. He was too busy petting a parrot. He worked his fingers into the feathers on the bird's head. The macaw, perched on a T-stand, half closed his eyes. The fingers massaged. The feathers stood up. Oh yeah, this bird was into it.

The Bird Whisperer aka Ken Globus has stirred controversy with his hands-on approach to bird training.

So were we.

Five minutes earlier, the same bird, an enormous blue-and-gold bruiser named Jupiter, had wanted to make mincemeat out of his admirer, trainer Ken Globus. As aggressive as he was beautiful, Jupiter had telegraphed all the signs of a bad bite coming. He flared his wings. He bobbed his head. He lunged, beak open.

Now, after a few waves of Globus's hand, Jupiter was a love bug.

"Wow," a woman near me exclaimed under her breath as we watched Globus work his mojo. "Awwww," several other audience members said softly. Apparently, Globus had tapped into some part of Jupiter that craved love.

"You rat!" Jupiter's owner, Irish Waters, muttered jokingly - at Jupiter, not Globus. Jupiter had never allowed his mistress to touch him, not like this. Now Waters was watching Globus pet Jupiter on the head, stroke his body, even plant a kiss on the bird's face. Globus, a stranger, had pulled off what Waters thought impossible. And he had done it in about five minutes.

The Bird Whisperer
Turning belligerent birds into love sponges is all in a day's work for Globus, aka The Bird Whisperer. The same day he made friends with Jupiter, Globus calmed seven other birds brought by their owners to a bird-taming workshop in Columbia, Calif.

Globus says he can gentle just about any bird in minutes. We came to see if it was true. For the most part, it was.

Not everyone appreciates Globus' way with birds. He has detractors, mostly on the Internet, who use strong words to describe his techniques: cruel, abusive, manhandling.

To begin a session with Jupiter, an unfriendly blue-and-gold macaw, Globus offers his head to "absorb the aggression".

It's true Globus does not pussyfoot around. Comparing bird taming to helping people overcome phobias, he says, "People avoid doing all the things that make birds uncomfortable. I do just the opposite."

Unlike other trainers, who reward correct behavior with gently proferred treats, Globus tackles birds' fear of humans head-on. If they won't step onto his hand, he extracts them protesting from their cages. If they try to leap away, he grabs a leg and doesn't let go. If Globus thinks he will be bitten, he wears gloves.

The direct approach is kinder in the end, says Globus. "Some of these birds can spend weeks, months, even years living in fear of their owners."

Why are they afraid? Birds' natural instincts simply do not mesh well in domestic situations, says the Bird Whisperer. "Owners make their birds nervous, when all they really want to do is love that thing. The birds bite. It snowballs, and the bird and the owner build on each other's fears."

"I could wind up looking bad"
Clearly, Globus is not your standard-issue modern-day bird behaviorist. Not only is he unapologetically hands-on, the former actor and part-time screenwriter is a bit of a showman, too. There's the name, of course, a not-so-subtle capitalization on the movie title, The Horse Whisperer. Globus' also gives his training techniques catchy names: "bubble of fear," "crystal ball," and "ear swipe," among others.

Jupiter reacts badly - at first - to the "crystal ball" maneuver.

Globus asks workshop participants to bring their most difficult birds, which he meets for the first time at the event. Working without a net, as he calls it, is a dramatic way to show off his skills - and a time-honored show-biz tactic for building suspense. "It's risky," he admits. "I could wind up looking bad."

Usually, Globus winds up looking good. People call him a miracle worker and compare his demonstrations to magic acts. For the Columbia workshop, some attendees drove for over three hours to bring their parrots to Globus, like modern-day pilgrims hoping this new holy man of bird taming could lay hands on their pets and make them loveable again.

For some, it all adds up to a tantalizing image of healer, a pied piper for the psittacine set. For others, Globus' direct approach alone is ample reason to attack him. "I am sure there is a little special place in hell for those who do such things," went one unforgiving post on an Internet message board.

Globus is used to being pilloried by people who have never watched him work. "People think I’m macho and mean," says Globus, who has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times and on several TV news shows, including Inside Edition. "I do what I do because it’s the best way to help these birds."

Pleased to meet you
With opinions about him so divided, I wanted to see Globus for myself. So I decided to catch his Sept. 14 appearance in Columbia, which had been arranged by the Gold Country Avicultural Society, a small bird club in nearby Sonora, Calif.

When I pulled into the dusty parking lot of St. Angelo's meeting hall at 7:30 a.m., I immediately recognized Globus from the pictures on his Web site, www.thebirdwhisperer.com.

Rather than the horns and forked tail I half expected after reading some of the less-than-glowing Internet posts about Globus, I saw a pleasant-looking bespectacled man in khaki shorts, black t-shirt and sneakers. He looked a bit lost. "Are you Chris?" the Bird Whisperer asked hopefully, confusing me with his hostess for the event.

Globus demonstrates how palming a bird's beak protects from bites.

Hollywood connections notwithstanding, the Bird Whisperer travels modestly. To reach this gig, his seventh workshop so far, Globus had flown into the Sacramento International Airport the day before, rented a car and driven 2 1/2 hours before checking into the Fallon Theatre & Hotel, a Columbia bed and breakfast. This morning, he had walked from the nearby hotel to the meeting hall.

Globus and I had already talked for a couple of hours on the phone. We chatted for a few more minutes before the first bird-taming demonstration of the day was scheduled to begin.

In person, Globus exudes normalcy with a twist of self-deprecating humor. He calls himself the Bird Whisperer not as a form of self-aggrandizement, but because it's what his first client, a family friend, dubbed him after he tamed her feisty eclectus.

Improved "a thousand percent"
That first session, in 2000, took a little over an hour. "My techniques were not polished then," says Globus. "In the last two years I've improved a thousand percent."

Globus bases his taming techniques on practical experience gained at his parents' pet store, Jobil Exotic Fish and Birds in Inglewood, Calif., where he worked for most of the 1980s. That's where he says he discovered that simply handling birds was the best way to gain their trust - even if the initial contact was stressful.

Taming three wild-caught umbrella cockatoos purchased for the store in 1979, he "took one out to groom it, which required subduing it. I put it back in its cage and waited on customers for awhile. When I went back, the two birds I had not groomed were flopping all over the cage. The bird I had already handled was not."

A light bulb went off. Globus realized that "surviving a situation makes a bird less afraid of it. They learn something from the experience."

Globus spent the 1990s as an actor and musical director in Europe and Israel, and as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Then came the fateful call from the eclectus owner. After this success, Globus decided to try offering his bird-taming services to others. He mailed 400 letters to veterinarians and pet stores throughout southern California introducing himself. Only one, a Petco, replied. But since then, Globus has steadily added clients.

A formerly surly Jupiter decides a scratch on the head isn't so bad.

Helping Spielberg
Some clients have been high-profile. Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg hired Globus to help his wife, actress Kate Capshaw, learn how to handle their son Scudder's parrot, an Amazon named Blanche. When Globus reported to the Spielberg homestead for a training session, he found himself the star of a home movie being shot by Spielberg, armed with a camcorder. ("I get the feeling he films lots of things," Globus deadpans.)

Globus doesn't come cheap. He charges $150 an hour for one-on-one sessions. His four-hour workshops are more affordable: $50 for observers and $75 for participants with birds. Before each workshop, he offers a free hour-long session open to the public, during which he briefly demonstrates a few of his taming principles on two or three birds. In the workshop, he handles up to five or six additional birds.

In Columbia, I got to see Globus work with a range of psittacine personalities and species, including Jupiter the macaw, several cockatoos, several African greys, and an Amazon.

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