 | | A love story, avian and human, anchors The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. (Book cover courtesy of www.wildparrotsbook.com.) |
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The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill [A Love Story...with Wings]
By Mark Bittner
Harmony Books, New York, 288 pages, $22
ALMOST EVERYBODY knows one: the guy who wont grow up. Whos 38 and still living in his parents basement. Or 40, and never had a real job. A fundamental obstinacy often lies at the root of this predicament. Probably, it began as a youthful refusal to conform. But then it calcified, as the years went by and the choices diminished, into a lonely and complicated paralysis.
Such a guy was Mark Bittner.
"I was on a spiritual journey, which precluded me from taking regular work," he rather disingenuously explains at the beginning of his book, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. It is the one false note in this otherwise remarkable and fascinating account of how Bittner, an impoverished, anachronistic drop-out, came to be discovered, befriended and ultimately redeemed by the unlikeliest of entities: a city-dwelling flock of wild, exotic parrots.
When first encountered by Bittner, the flock was an oddity, a motley collection of mostly cherry-headed conures, native not to San Francisco, but to Ecuador and Peru. Founded by wild-caught birds imported for the pet trade and then somehow released into the Bay Area, it was beleaguered by a strange virus that crippled and ultimately killed its juveniles. The flock needed help surviving. Bittner, solitary and depressed by the general emptiness of his life as the caretaker of a house in the wealthy enclave of San Franciscos Telegraph Hill, was uniquely situated to provide it.
But this book tells a larger, more important tale: the story of the flock. Based on journals in which Bittner recorded more than 10 years of careful observation, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill may well be the most comprehensive and detailed study of its kind. And fortuitously, because Bittner never trained as a scientist, it lacks the dry, pedantic language that commonly afflicts such histories. It manages instead to be accessible and entertaining as well as vastly informative from a scientific point of view.
This very quality, however, will doubtless cause biologists to cringe. All the parrots, for example, have names. Bittner assigns these on the basis of each bird's unique personality traits, habits and flock status -- details he memorizes while watching them vie for position during feedings he commences on his fire escape. "The most notable thing about Sonny," he writes of one parrot, "was that he was a bully.
"The cherry-heads fought among themselves constantly, but most of it was just squabbling or play-fighting. Sonnys attacks, on the other hand, were often cold-blooded. As the weaker birds roamed the fire escape waiting for their turn at the bowl, he wandered among them, ruthlessly assaulting any bird without an ally. Because of his broken nose and outlaw behavior, I thought of him as a parrot mafioso, so I named him after Sonny Corleone of The Godfather.
Insightful, gossipy and thoroughly absorbing, Bittner's chronicles of flock politics, fights, feuds, negotiations, couplings, separations, illnesses, births and deaths form a kind of ongoing avian soap opera impossible to put down. "Scrapper and Scrapperella," he announces at one point, "have gotten a divorce.
"Id never seen that before. I searched my diary and found an entry that described an intense fight shortly before the breakup. This wasn't an instance of one bird abandoning the other for somebody else. Both birds were single now. I couldn't help but imagine that they'd quarreled over Scrapperellas obsessive feather-plucking. She'd kept promising to quit, but couldn't. So Scrapper left her."
Bittner speculates about the parrots' motives and viewpoints with unsophisticated wonder and refreshing empathy. At the same time, he instinctively respects that they are a species apart, essentially wild and, on a certain level, unknowable.
As the parrots grow to trust him, Bittner becomes a kind of member of the flock himself, inserting himself into arguments and protecting some of the birds from each other. He also begins taking in and nursing the sick. In so doing, he forms deep, emotional attachments. "I know there are people who will think it childish for a grown man to be so distraught over the death of a bird," he writes of one such experience. "But Id put a lot of worry and care into Tupelo, and she had looked to me for protection and sustenance. It created a bond between us that was just as real as any that connects two human beings."
Bittner's efforts to help the parrots, along with his thirst for knowledge about them, gradually expand his world. He meets a librarian who teaches him how to use a computer, and befriends the bird curator at the San Francisco Zoo. He gets to know local birdwatchers and naturalists and the proprietors of various bookstores. His reputation as a protector of the cherry-heads grows, attracting all kinds of people. One of them is a filmmaker with whom he becomes romantically involved. In short, the parrots bring him purpose, company, work and love not a bad return for an aging iconoclast who one day, finally, decided to look out the window.
Happily, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill contains Bittner's beautiful photos of the various avian characters described therein. Unhappily, in what can only be described as a stupid and shortsighted economy by the book's publisher, these photos are in black and white. Color photos of the parrots, along with a link to Bittners ongoing journals, can be found on the Web site, www.wildparrotsbook.com.
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Laura LaFay shares her home in Richmond, Va., with two monk parakeets, Gaspard and Coco. |
