When Sara Hood's nanday conure disappeared into the evening sky, she thought she'd never see him again.

ONE SULTRY EVENING last August, Sara Hood walked into the living room of the home she shares with her parents in Tomball, Texas, and deposited her parrot, Okra, on her mother’s shoulder. She didn't want to risk Okra, an unclipped nanday conure, flying off when she stepped outside to retrieve her sandals.

A moment after opening the back door, Sara heard wing beats. Okra flashed past his owner and flew into the back yard.

Sara frantically called her bird, but he was already circling higher and higher in the sky, squawking all the while. He headed out and away from the Hoods' house, flying high over the neighborhood. Okra soon became a speck in the distance. Finally, he disappeared, and Sara couldn't even hear his squawks anymore.

In the space of a few terrible minutes, her beloved Okra, raised from a fledgling, was gone.

“It was almost like a movie,” she recalls now. “Flying off into the sunset, never to be seen again.”

Son of Rascal and Roxie
Nandays are small green South American birds with black heads and bright red thighs. Okra, named after the favorite southern vegetable, was the offspring of Rascal and Roxie, two nandays abandoned at a pet store where Sara worked when she was 16. Sara adopted the birds, and last year the devoted nanday couple produced Okra.

Distraught owner Sara Hood found herself shedding tears over this baby picture of her missing nanday conure, Okra.

Okra grew up to be a playful, affectionate bird who liked to land on people’s heads. When he disappeared, his feet were black, the mark of a young bird. He was only three months old.

Searching the skies
In the days after Okra’s disappearance, Sara plastered posters all over Tomball, a town of 160,000 located 28 miles northwest of Houston. She alerted friends and neighbors and posted a lost bird ad online at Bird HotLine.

“Soon I had a large network of bird people who knew about Okra that didn't even know me.”

Every time Sara, 21, left her parents’ house, where she works selling discount insurance, she found herself searching the skies for Okra and listening for his odd but endearing squawk.

“His squawk isn’t typical,” she says. “It’s almost as if, ‘I’m a nanday conure, but I don’t know how to squawk like one, so I’ll just squawk like this.”

But the months passed and Okra did not turn up. By January, Sara became convinced that Okra was either dead or had been kept as a pet by someone else.

“A Houston winter was setting in and I didn't think he could make it in the wild. Temperatures were in the forties.”

"I have your bird"
One Friday night in February, as Sara lay sick in bed, the phone rang. A woman began leaving a message on the Hoods’ answering machine: “Hi, this is Donna, I found a bird that matches your description."

Sara leaped out of bed and picked up the phone. The woman said that two weeks earlier, her cousin had been standing in his yard in Rose Hill, a tiny farming community five miles west of Tomball, when a green bird landed on his head.

The woman had been keeping the bird in an old cage when she saw Sara’s “lost bird” poster at the local PetSmart with Okra’s picture and description. She told Sara she had Okra.

It had been six months since Okra left home.

“I was amazed, bewildered and excited, but skeptical,” Sara remembers now. She jumped in her car and drove to the woman's home to see for herself.

Grey feet
Donna let the little green parrot out of its cage. It flew to Sara, crawled up her arm, and gave her an affectionate nip on the neck. “I looked him over, cuddled him, and made kissy noises.”

The bird looked like Okra except for his feet, which were grey, not black. But that made sense. Grey was the right color for a nine-month-old nanday’s feet on their way to becoming the flesh color of an adult bird’s.

Over the next few days, other clues told Sara that her “sweet, quirky” Okra had finally come home. The cuddly bird burrowed in the folds of her clothes, playfully poked his head inside her open fist, and ate only orange and red Zupreem pellets, just like Okra did.

At night, when she put him in Okra's cage, which she had kept, he crawled into the “birdie tent,” which Okra had always loved.

“I was sure he was my Okra,” says Sara.

On the Monday following his Friday recovery, Sara whisked Okra to the vet’s. There he got a complete physical, his wings clipped, and a microchip implanted. Except for an overgrown beak and claws, he was in fine shape.

Unsolved mystery
Where had Okra been all this time? Sara thinks that either a kind-hearted homeowner kept a bird feeder filled for him, or he found a temporary home with someone and escaped again.

“Either way, he received some kind of protection because I tend to think he would have died on his own.”

A relieved Sara has just one message for fellow bird owners.

“If you have a bird that is not banded or does not have a microchip, don't think that just because you're very careful that he will not ever get away from you. Get your bird ID’d.”

ParrotChronicles.com

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