PARROT PEOPLE

Stewart Metz: from workaholic doctor
to champion of parrot welfare

An animal lover since childhood, Stewart Metz left a medical and teaching career in 2000 to join the parrot-welfare movement.

TEN YEARS AGO, Stewart Metz was every mother’s dream son.

He was a doctor, a graduate of both Yale University and Yale Medical School. He was a scholar, publishing articles in prestigious medical journals and impressing his peers. And he was a teacher, imparting the mysteries of endocrinology to medical students in universities here and abroad.

Only one thing was missing: a life.

“I was working a minimum of 80 hours a week,” remembers Metz now. “My whole life was medicine. I just put everything into that. Looking back, I had almost no social life. How can you have a social life unless all your patients are taken care of? Unless all your manuscripts are finished? Well, they’re never finished. None of it is ever finished. You have to just keep going and going and going.”

Epiphany at Parrot Jungle
Metz would probably have kept going for the rest of his life. But in 1992, while teaching at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison, he made a rare and fateful decision. He decided to take a vacation.

Metz went to Miami to visit his parents and sister. An animal lover since childhood, he wanted to visit the zoo. But his sister was too tired. So she, Metz and their father went instead to Parrot Jungle, a 20-acre attraction south of Miami. At its center was an area where visitors were permitted to feed cockatoos and macaws.

Metz, who had never before communed with any form of parrot, took a handful of seed and approached a cockatoo. It stepped onto his arm.

“I was smitten,” says Metz. “I didn’t want to leave. My father and sister went to lunch and I didn’t go with them. I just stayed there….(The cockatoo) seemed to be so empathic and interactive and curious. It could have gotten the seed without stepping up, but it wanted to interact. And it was very bold in going for it. To me, it was just magic. The power of that interaction still stuns me.”

Thus began a journey that would eventually lead Metz to stop practicing medicine, write the widely disseminated “Parrots Bill of Rights,” and dedicate his life to parrots, parrot conservation and the welfare of companion parrots.

A "domain of joy, light and love"
Now 54 and living outside of Seattle, Metz writes for parrot publications, supports parrot advocacy groups and works to preserve parrots in the wild. His current focus is on the ethical treatment of captive parrots. Early this year, he helped set up the World Parrot Welfare Alliance, an offshoot of the World Parrot Trust, to draw attention to the issue.

Metz also serves as a conservation consultant for Project Bird Watch, an organization dedicated to saving the Seram cockatoo (also known as the Moluccan cockatoo) in its native Indonesian habitat.

Since his epiphany at Parrot Jungle, Metz has traveled to Africa, Central and South America, Antarctica and Australia to see native birds and wildlife. Currently, he is writing a children’s book, The Flight of Cornelius Cockatoo, about a cockatoo coming to terms with issues that confront wild cockatoos, such as trapping and logging.

Metz with one of his three cockatoos, China, a Moluccan.

Through it all, he has been inspired and motivated by three parrots he added to his household in the early 1990s.

Metz found Basil, an umbrella cockatoo, at a pet shop in Wisconsin. China, a Moluccan, and LaJois, a cape parrot, came from the same shop after being given up by their previous owner. The three now live in splendor in a rope-slung room connected to an outside aviary looking out onto the trees in Metz’s backyard.

“You are entering the domain of joy, light and love,” proclaims a sign above their door.

A feathered family
These birds have become Metz’s family. He credits them with teaching and healing him in ways that his profession as a doctor could not.

“I spent 30 years of my life teaching and healing other people, and the only beings that have been able to teach and heal me back are animals,” he says.

“They’ve taught me a different outlook on life. When I was an intern and a resident, I was doing all this work, messing up relationships right and left. I had a long history of depression and my whole life was my work. They’ve given me so much joy. They are the best anti-depressant.

“They’ve taught me things about this planet and how incredibly important it is that people don’t destroy it. They’ve taught me that I don’t need a lot of money to be happy. I’m happier now that I’ve ever been. They’ve taught me to appreciate things. Even the ugliest sparrow - I realize now how precious it is from knowing my parrots.”

Farewell to medicine
Metz quit medicine last year. His colleagues were shocked. His mother and sister wondered whether his interest in parrots had perhaps become a little excessive. But he has not looked back.

Above all, Metz says, his parrots have given meaning and purpose to his life. “I know why I’m here now,” he says. “I think I’m on this earth to try and do something for animals.”

In October, Metz went to the Indonesian Island of Seram with Project Bird Watch to reinvigorate the group’s eco-tourism venture there. The project has been on hold since civil war halted tourism to Indonesia.

To their delight, Metz and his group found that the two villages participating in the project had largely kept their promise not to trap birds. The cockatoo population had actually increased.

“It was the trip of my life,” says Metz. “Their (the cockatoos’) calls take over the forest. It’s like they’re singing at the top of their lungs, ‘I am cockatoo! Hear me now!’” And you think (to yourself), ‘You’re right. This is your forest. No one can take your forest without killing you.’”

Seeing parrots in the wild left Metz feeling some guilt and sadness about his own captive little flock.

“Even if you’re doing the best possible thing for your birds, you realize you can never get close to giving them the kind of life they have in the wild,” he says.

“You can’t duplicate the forest. And putting a creature like that into a cage…it made us all think that no one should ever have taken a parrot from the wild. The best we can do (for caged birds) is far too little.”

Parrots helping people
Part of the Project Bird Watch mission is to bring educational and medical equipment to participating villagers.

While Metz was there, a shipment of medicine arrived, but without instructions for its use. Briefly, Metz became a doctor again, sitting down with a village nurse to teach him what the medicines were for, and how to administer them.

It felt good to use his skills as a physician in the service of something he loves. Metz credits the cockatoos of Seram. Without them, no medicine would have been sent. Without them, he would not have gone to the island in the first place.

In his view, it was just another case of parrots, helping human beings.

ParrotChronicles.com

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