Laura Ainsworth gets a typically enthusiastic greeting from Sydney the lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo, one of 11 parrots who live with Ainsworth and husband Pat.

SHE WRITES about parrots. She also paints them. She and husband-comedy-team partner Pat Reeder work into the wee hours of every morning in their Dallas home to the aural backdrop of 11 birds, many of them rescues, singing, squawking and talking.

Laura Ainsworth's life is permeated with parrots and she wouldn't have it any other way. "Birds are just about the most interesting thing that's ever happened to me," the Texas native says in a soft drawl.

Ainsworth, also an actress and singer, and Reeder run their own syndicated gag-subscription business for disc jockeys called The Comedy Wire. The two spend part of each day and most of each night writing irreverent quips in response to wacky events of the previous 24 hours. (Sample: For a news item about a 200-pound marble statue of a nose disappearing from St. Petersburg, they wrote, "It was spotted in Colombia, snorting 50 pounds of cocaine.")

All-night party
Ainsworth finishes writing and turns in around 3 a.m.; Reeder gets to bed at 4:30 a.m. after doing final edits and sending the material off so East coasters will have it in time for their morning radio shows. The couple's birds, on perches scattered throughout the two-story house, stay up too, providing entertainment.

Because they got their start in radio writing commercial jingles, the couple has eclectic tastes in music that rub off on their birds, says Ainsworth. One of them, a cockatoo, "likes reggae and strong rhythyms." One of their African greys mimicks Ainsworth doing vocal exercises. The birds have also learned the silly voices Ainsworth and Reeder practice around the house for their occasional commercial voice work.

The birds get covered around 2 a.m. and sleep in until 1 or 1:30 p.m. the next day. To make up for the unnatural schedule, the couple provide the birds with full-spectrum lighting.

The flock, many of whom have show-biz names, consists of Raymond Bird, a 12-year-old Jardine's and Ainsworth's first bird as an adult (she had budgies as a child); Sydney, a lesser sulphur-crested male cockatoo; Dorian Gray, a Congo African grey who knows hundreds of words; Mercedes, a Timneh African grey adopted seven years ago from a couple whose two-year-old daughter was allergic to him; Little Bird, a Senegal; Ernie, a moustache parakeet named after Ernie Kovacs; a budgie named Ally McBeal because "it's pale with skinny legs"; Lucy, a lovebird found in a parking lot and named after the crabby Peanuts' character; Minnie the Pacific parrotlet; and 'Nary the canary, who needs frequent antibiotics due to an immune deficiency problem.

Some of the birds have arrived from out-of-state via readers of Ainsworth's column, "The Bird House," which she writes for Companion Parrot Quarterly.

Handicapped but happy
These rescued birds include the cockatiel Cady (named after Kate Keller, whom Ainsworth portrayed in a production of the "The Miracle Worker"). Cady is the "center of the whole household," according to Ainsworth. "I don't know what my life would be like without him. He's the center of our world."

Mercedes, a Timneh African grey, joined the Ainsworth-Reeder household seven years ago after her previous owner developed allergies.

In his previous home, Cady flew into a hot skillet and lost his feet to the burns. He now lives in a horizontal cage on a "waterbed" Ainsworth designed for him - a large Ziploc freezer bag filled two-thirds of the way with water and covered with a baby blanket. For weeks after she got Cady, Ainsworth had to take the bird to the vet every two days to get its bandages changed.

"When I write at night in bed, he can climb out of his cage and walk all over the bed. He's so happy. It seems that he knows he's lucky, after all he's been through," she says of Cady's life now.

For a while, Ainsworth, a self-taught artist, was commissioned to do oil paintings of pet birds, but there's not much time for that anymore, what with the humorous book the couple has been working on called The Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers.

They're also renovating the 90-year-old 2700-square-foot house they moved into three years ago.

In the meantime, Ainsworth and Reeder keep up their topsy-turvy schedule - aided by a singing, talking feathered family every bit as turned on to show business as they are. And they're looking for more birds to help. The next addition might be a blue-front Amazon who leads a solitary life in a cramped cage at a local pool-supplies store.

"He's such a soft touch," Ainsworth says of Reeder, who was been won over to parrots. "He reads the classifieds on Sunday to see if there are any birds we can rescue."

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