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Letter to the editor

Wings of freedom bring concern

By SHARON TUBBS
Published July 20, 2007

So on a recent morning, Heather Taylor is in her back yard sipping the morning coffee. Her parrot, Rocky, is perched inside the screened porch.

Heather hasn't done this before because Rocky's wings aren't clipped, but for some reason she leaves the door open to the back yard. He hops out to her, settles on her foot and breathes in the open air for the first time since he was just a tiny thing.

She sets him on her shoulder after a while and they head back into the house. They're almost there when some landscapers next door turn on lawn mowers. A house bird about 5 months old, Rocky has never heard anything like it. He darts away, flapping his emerald wings against the morning air.

He flies high, far into the sky.

"Like a real bird," Heather remembers.

He flits beneath the clouds and eventually lands on a neighbor's tall oak tree. She calls him, "Rooock-eee," coaxing him back to Mama. He can't talk yet, so he chirps, but he doesn't come down. She figures he doesn't know how.

It goes on like this for a couple of days. Heather and the kids, 5-year-old Emerson and 4-year-old Evans - and anybody else who hears the story - calling out to Rocky. A couple times they spot him in a neighbor's tree. But mostly they just hear his chirp, and Heather knows it's him because, well, what mother doesn't know her baby's voice?

Then the chirping stops.

Heather strides up and down the streets of Hyde Park, asking neighbors if they've seen a beautiful green little parrot with a red beak, the one her husband, Thadd, bought her for Mother's Day.

She'd seen him in a cage at the pet shop, just a few months old, a scrawny thing with gray baby feathers. She and Thadd weren't planning to buy a bird and, to this day, she can't explain why they did. They took him to their spacious house on Delaware Avenue, and soon he was cascading along the high ceilings, sailing to the second floor, swooping down suddenly to spook the family St. Bernard and the puppy mutt. He came to her for rest, nestling on her shoulder blade, losing his beak in her thick wavy hair.

But he's gone now and she remembers all this and, of course, she cries. She's still got the dogs, her cat, the rabbit and a guinea pig, though, so in the days to come, the 31-year-old homemaker keeps doing life.

She takes the kids swimming, visits friends, goes to the grocery store. At Target, she buys toys for her son's birthday. She notices a woman with a Yorkie with red barrettes in its hair and thinks how cute that is. And every time the family leaves the house, she has the kids roll down the windows and call out "Rooock-eee!"

This gets old to Emerson and Evans pretty quick. "Do we have to keep calling for Rocky?"

By Sunday night, Heather is on the Internet. She e-mails Animal Services to let them know she lost her pet. She Googles something like "Tampa lost parrot" and comes across a Web site with this listing:

Bird-Parrot. Beautiful Green, Very Tame, Very Affectionate, Found in Hyde Park Area.

Green parrot? Hyde Park?

It has to be him. But now it's after midnight, so Heather can't call. She dreams that a nice couple gives her Rocky back. She wakes up around 7 a.m. and waits as long as she can to call the number on the ad.

No one answers at 7:22 a.m., so she leaves a message. She takes her cell phone to the gym. She calls again around 9:30 and leaves another message, apologizing for calling so much. She runs more errands to bide the time.

At 12:34 - and she swears by the precision of these times - she gets the return phone call.

She gets the address and doesn't bother to ask questions. The woman doesn't get to tell how she saw this parrot during her evening jog last Thursday. It was standing on a car. She reached out and it immediately came to her, walked straight up her arm and nuzzled her neck.

She could tell the bird was a pet and couldn't survive on its own, so she knocked on some doors, asking if anyone knew whose it was. Finally, she took it home. She didn't know what birds eat, so she fed it some watermelon and broccoli. She called county Animal Services and the Humane Society, and put ads in local papers. And that's where the bird had been ever since, playing with her dog, Mini-Me.

But never mind the details. Heather whizzes over to S Albany Avenue, less than a mile from home.

A townhouse door opens and - can you believe this? - it's the lady from Target with the dog with the barrettes.

Her name is Robin Guess, and Heather now realizes they've met before through a mutual friend. She also remembers Robin from TV when she used to be an investigative reporter for WFTS-Ch. 28.

Robin directs her to the master bathroom, Rocky's temporary living quarters.

"Rooock-eee," Heather calls.

He chirps back.

The next day, she takes him to a vet, and Rocky's high-flying days are over.

[Last modified July 19, 2007, 09:00:40]