Wild Parrots. Yeah, Sure

You are familiar with the situation. It’s early morning and you are snuggled all warm and comfy-cozy in your bed. The alarm is not going to ring for a while yet. The covers are a hundred times softer and warmer than when you got beneath them last night, and the bed seems to have molded itself to your contours and is wonderfully … SCREECH! SCHEEECHH-EEEAAACH!!

The first time I was rudely jerked awake by these ungodly vocalizations, I had absolutely no idea what they were. Were there screech owls in Southern California? Some neighbor with a de-barked dog? No … that’s right, they cough like a consumptive. Annoying but hardly the stuff to jerk you out of your bed and leave you clinging to the ceiling by your fingernails.

Upon telling my new friends the tale of my hideously disturbed morning’s snooze (we had just moved to La Cañada) they all burst out laughing and finally informed me it was “The Parrots.”

Wild parrots. A flock of them. RIIIIGGGHHHTT. And the Chupa Cabra slinks up and down our streets devouring Great Danes and joggers. Supposedly the parrots escaped from some collector and began breeding and now there’s a whole flock of the things.

I no more bought that story than I did the tales of donkeys the size of collies that are housebroken and smarter than Lassie. Then the one that used to live somewhere near the top of the Hampton Road “crook” took to braying in the early mornings. There was no mistaking that sound. And when I later met her owner, she assured me she was the best pet she’d ever had. The woman claimed to have trained Donkey Cakes to eat weeds but not the roses. I cannot vouch for that part of her story.

Meanwhile the parrots woke me occasionally in the springs and summers, but I never caught a glimpse of them. Then, about 20 years ago, I was driving up Chevy Chase when I was forced to a stop by a band (I know La Cañada’s vet, Dr. Woody Walker, has a poster in his clinic giving the correct plural for all animals, i.e., a covey of quail and a murmuring of turtle doves and a suspicion of ravens, but I cannot remember all of them) of rabbits, as they slowly (why slowly?) hopped across the road. There were black ones and white ones and Dalmatian-spotted ones and (I SWEAR, I am NOT making this stuff up) one that looked like a Siamese cat, but with long ears and a cottony little tail.

The story on these is that they too escaped and began interbreeding (doesn’t everything that escapes start interbreeding? It does in the movies and apparently in the Foothills) and have been growing the herd (well?) ever since.

But I still wasn’t convinced about the parrots — till today.

I was catapulted up at the crack of dawn by their shrill and incredibly piercing screams, and I was cranky about it. The day was jammed full of picking up my minivan down in LA after having it serviced before the run up to Cal to get our oldest and bring her home for the summer. The dealer told me I NEEDED four new tires and since he neither sold them or had any suggestion of who did, I believed him. So I dropped the car at Firestone, hoofed it home and made it to the youngest daughter’s softball game. Valiant try, but they lost, leaving the tying run on third and the winning run on second. Then it was off to the carwash and the gas station in order to finally set out to show our French exchange student’s parents (our house guests for the past two weeks), Hollywood.

After Hollywood it was Beverly Hills, then UCLA and lunch in Westwood. The coup de grace was Muscle Beach in Venice. The traffic home was horrendous as befitted a Saturday at 6 p.m. I pulled into the driveway half, no, ¾, dead. As I opened the front door Royal and the youngest burst through calling something about ice-blocking down the grassy hills at Montrose Park at 8:30 that night.

Upstairs, I flopped face-down onto the bed and was just drifting off for a nap (before watching a group of 13- year-old girls risk their necks and their limbs sliding down steep hills atop blocks of ice) when SCREEECHHH!!! SCREAAAAACH!

At that very minute Royal bounded up the stairs and out onto the balcony yelling, “I see them. Come look.”

And there they were — a (mated?) pair atop the two highest branches of Kevin and Vivian Hughes’ birch trees. Royal grabbed his baseball watching binoculars and homed in on them. Handing them to me he said he’d seen a flash of red-orange but couldn’t tell where it came from.

They were amazing, brilliant green with red-orange under their wings. They seemed to be feeding each other (actually, it looked like they were necking). We watched them for about five minutes, until they fell off their branches in unison and swooped into the tall pines and oaks.

Wow. Now all I’m waiting for is to finally see the fireflies Fereva Kaiserman SWORE she saw in her backyard a decade ago. Oh yeah, and that Chupa Cabra thing. By the way, that ice-blocking thing was a total hoot.