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| DATE | 2016-01-31 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] Parots and Post Tramatic Stress Disorder ... fuck
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/what-does-a-parrot-know-about-ptsd.html
--early 30 years ago, Lilly Love lost her way. She had just completed
her five-year tour of duty as an Alaska-based Coast Guard helicopter
rescue swimmer, one of an elite team of specialists who are lowered into
rough, frigid seas to save foundering fishermen working in dangerous
conditions. The day after she left active service, the helicopter she
had flown in for the previous three years crashed in severe weather into
the side of a mountain, killing six of her former crewmates. Devastated
by the loss and overcome with guilt, Love chose as her penance to become
one of the very fishermen she spent much of her time in the Coast Guard
rescuing. In less than a year on the job, she nearly drowned twice after
being dragged overboard in high seas by the hooks of heavy fishing lines.
Continue reading the main story
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Love would not formally receive a diagnosis of severe post-traumatic
stress disorder for another 15 years. In that time, she was married and
divorced three times, came out as transgender and retreated periodically
to Yelapa, Mexico, where she lived in an isolated cabin accessible only
by water. She eventually ended up living on a boat in a Los Angeles
marina, drinking heavily and taking an array of psychotropic drugs that
doctors at the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center
began to prescribe with increasing frequency as Love proved resistant to
traditional treatments like counseling and group therapy. One night,
after her fifth stay in the center’s psych ward, she crashed her boat
into a sea wall. Finally, in 2006, she was in the veterans’ garden and
happened to catch sight of the parrots being housed in an unusual
facility that opened a year earlier on the grounds of the center.
‘‘This place is why I’m still here,’’ Love, now 54, told me one day last
summer as I watched her undergo one of her daily therapy sessions at the
facility, known as Serenity Park, a name that would seem an utter
anomaly to anyone who has ever been within 200 yards of the place.
Continue reading the main story
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Inside one mesh-draped enclosure, Julius, a foot-high peach-white
Moluccan cockatoo with a pink-feathered headdress, was madly pacing,
muttering in the native tongue of the Korean woman who, along with her
recently deceased husband, had owned him. Next door, a nearly
three-foot-tall blue-and-gold macaw named Bacardi, abandoned by a truck
driver who was spending too much time on the road, kept calling out for
someone named Muffin, before abruptly rising up and knocking over his
tray of food to surrounding squawks of delight. Across the way, Pinky, a
Goffin’s cockatoo, the castoff of a bitter custody battle between his
original female owner and the husband who threatened to spite her by
cutting off her beloved pet’s wings, was mimicking a blue jay’s
high-pitched power-saw plaint. More screams rang out and then, in the
ensuing silences, random snippets of past conversations: ‘‘Hey,
sweetheart!’’ ‘‘Whatever.’’ ‘‘Oh, well.’’ ‘‘Whoa! C’mon man!’’ Soon,
from a far corner, came the whistling, slow and haunted, of the theme
from ‘‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’’
‘‘They had me loaded up on so many kinds of medications, I was seeing
little green men and spiders jumping out of trees,’’ Love continued, as
a six-inch-tall female caique parrot from the Amazon Basin named Cashew
dutifully paced across her shoulders. Back and forth she went, from one
side to the other, in determined, near- circular waddles.
For the next 10 minutes, Love, her eyes closed, her arms still at her
sides, continued to engage in one of the many daily duets she does with
each one of Serenity Park’s winged residents, listing her shoulders up
and down like a gently rocking ship, Cashew’s slow, feather-light
paddings all the while putting Love further at ease. Now and again,
Cashew would pause to give a gentle beak-brush of Love’s neck and ear,
and then crane her head upward toward Love’s mouth to receive a couple
of kisses. She made a few more passes, back and forth, then abruptly
climbed atop Love’s head. Smiling broadly, Love let her loll around up
there on her back for a time, Cashew using the same upward scooping wing
flaps that caiques employ to bathe on wet rain-forest leaves.
In the wild, caiques, diminutive dollops of luminous yellow, white and
deep blue-green, fly in huge, tightly knit flocks whose collective wing
feathers make a singular whirring sound above the rain-forest canopy.
Cashew, however, for reasons unknown, had her wings overclipped by her
former owner, who had bought her as a pet and then abandoned her. So
each day now, Love helps her learn how to take to the air again.
The flight lessons are usually administered at the end of Love’s daily
rounds. Each morning at dawn, she arrives at Serenity Park from her boat
at the marina. For the next four to five hours, she, like the six other
veterans in the work-therapy program there, brings food and water to the
parrots, cleans their cages and nuzzles and coos and talks and squawks
with them. Love, by far the most animated of the veterans that I met at
the park, flits from enclosure to enclosure, miming each bird’s
movements, mimicking their individual voices and attitudes and, as with
Cashew, tries to restore what was taken from them.
Photo
Phoebe, Dino and Kiki, three umbrella cockatoos. Credit Jack Davison for
The New York Times
She had only to say her student’s name once that day and Cashew was
upright in Love’s right palm, a knowing head tilt signaling her
readiness. Love set Cashew on a nearby perch and with the thumb and
forefinger of both hands took hold of each wing by the tip and moved
them up and down a few times as though priming a pump. She then extended
an index finger, held Cashew briefly aloft and with a quick thrust
upward let her fall free. Some frantic flailing quickly morphed into
firmer flaps, Cashew’s wings finally gathering just enough air for her
to gain the netting on the far side of her large mesh home. ‘‘You see,’’
Love said, beaming. ‘‘She can actually go a little distance.’’
Taking hold of Cashew once again, she cupped her against her cheek.
‘‘Their spirit gives me the will to get up and do it another day.
They’re all victims here. Kind of like what the veterans have been
through, in a way.’’ Love lowered her hands and watched Cashew roll over
once more on her back, a play position known as wrestling that is
peculiar to caiques. ‘‘They don’t belong in captivity,’’ Love said,
rubbing Cashew’s white breast feathers. ‘‘But they have a real
survivor’s mentality. These forgotten great beams of light that have
been pushed aside and marginalized. I see the trauma, the mutual trauma
that I suffered and that these birds have suffered, and my heart just
wants to go out and nurture and feed and take care of them, and doing
that helps me deal with my trauma. All without words.’’
Abandoned pet parrots are twice-traumatized beings: denied first their
natural will to flock and then the company of the humans who owned them.
In the wild, parrots ply the air, mostly, in the same way whales do the
sea: together and intricately. Longtime pairs fly wing to wing within
extended, close-knit social groupings in which individual members,
scientists have recently discovered, each have unique identifiable
calls, like human names. Parrots learn to speak them soon after birth,
during a transitional period of vocalizing equivalent to human baby
babbling known as ‘‘subsong,’’ in order to better communicate with
members of their own flocks and with other flocks. This, it turns out,
is the root of that vaunted gift for mimicry, which, along with their
striking plumages and beguilingly fixed, wide-eyed stares, has long
induced us to keep parrots — neuronally hard-wired flock animals with up
to 60-to-70-year life spans and the cognitive capacities of
4-to-5-year-old children — all to ourselves in a parlor cage: a broken
flight of human fancy; a keening kidnapee.
There were 34 parrots at Serenity Park when I was there last summer —
representing a range of the more than 350 species in the psittaciformes
order — a majority of them abandoned and now deeply traumatized former
pets that had outlived either their owners or their owners’ patience. A
parrot separated from its flock will flock fully and fiercely to the
attentions and affections of its new human keeper. And when that
individual, for whatever reason, fails to uphold his or her end of such
an inherently exclusive relationship, the effects are devastating.
Up and down the aviary-lined corridor of Serenity Park are the winged
wreckages of such broken bonds. On and on they go: the ceaseless pacing
and rocking and screaming, the corner-cowering, self-plucking and
broken-record remembrances. And yet at Serenity Park, the very behaviors
that once would have further codified our parrot caricatures —
‘‘birdbrained,’’ ‘‘mindless mimicry,’’ ‘‘mere parroting’’ and so on —
are recognized as classic symptoms of the same form of complex
post-traumatic stress disorder afflicting the patients in the Veterans
Administration Medical Center. They’re also being seized upon as a
source of mutual healing for some of the most psychologically scarred
members of both species.
Photo
Bobbi, a Goffin’s cockatoo who was kept in a kitchen drawer by her
former owner. Credit Jack Davison for The New York Times
‘‘The problem with parrots is that they’re so intensely attuned,’’ Lorin
Lindner, the psychologist who founded Serenity Park, told me one
afternoon as we stood watching Julius pace back and forth, speaking in
Korean. ‘‘Parrots have so many social neurons. Their brain is filled
with the capacity to mirror their flock. It’s so crucial for survival to
be able to know what the flock is doing, to know what the danger signs
are, when they have to get together, when night is falling and they are
called to roost. They’re so attuned to being socially responsive that
they can easily transfer that to us. They have the ability to connect,
to feel this closeness with another being, another species.’’
Listening to Julius that day reminded me of a story I read not long ago
in the journal Current Biology about a 22-year-old male Asian elephant
named Koshik that resides at the Everland Zoo in Yongin, South Korea.
Separated from the two female Asian elephants he was raised with in
captivity, Koshik lived alone at Everland for seven years, a period
during which he construed a way of speaking perfectly intelligible
Korean words by sticking his trunk in his mouth and then using his
tongue to shape his own plosive trumpetings into the language of the
zoo’s workers and local visitors. Such ‘‘vocal learning,’’ the
researchers who wrote the paper concluded, isn’t an attempt to directly
communicate with us so much as it is a way for a highly social species
like the elephant ‘‘to cement social bonds’’ with the only other species
available.
It’s one of those unlikely natural outcomes of the so-called
anthropocene, the first epoch to be named after us: the prolonged
confinement of intelligent and social creatures, compelling them to
speak the language of their keepers. And now, in yet another unlikely
occurrence, parrots, among the oldest victims of human acquisitiveness
and vainglory, have become some of the most empathic readers of our
troubled minds. Their deep need to connect is drawing the most severely
wounded and isolated PTSD sufferers out of themselves. In an
extraordinary example of symbiosis, two entirely different outcasts of
human aggression — war and entrapment — are somehow helping each other
to find their way again.
Lindner, a 59-year-old native of Queens, N.Y., knew little about parrots
when she first came to Los Angeles in 1976 to finish college and go to
grad school in behavioral sciences at U.C.L.A. Then one day in 1987, a
week before Christmas, she received a call from a friend who knew of her
deep affection and affinity for animals. ‘‘He was looking for someone to
take this female parrot he heard about named Sammy,’’ Lindner recalled.
‘‘She was living alone in a Beverly Hills mansion. The owner had put the
house up for sale and decided to leave Sammy behind. The bird matched
the place’s décor, and he thought the new owners might like that. He was
sending his driver over once a week to feed her. When I went to get her,
the feces in her cage were piled up in a pyramid that reached her perch.’’
The following year, Lindner started a private practice in Westwood and
began to do pro bono work with the increasing number of homeless
veterans she encountered in the community, many of them living at that
time in encampments under the nearby 405 freeway while awaiting
appointments at the West Los Angeles V.A. medical center. Overwhelmed by
their stories, she began devoting herself full time to veterans,
eventually enlisting the backing of the state to head a nonprofit
homeless-veteran-rehabilitation program, known as New Directions, at a
residential treatment center.
Photo
Lilly Love with Julius, a Moluccan cockatoo. Credit Jack Davison for The
New York Times
Spending more and more time at work, Lindner soon decided to take in
another orphaned cockatoo named Mango as a ‘‘flock mate’’ for Sammy.
Before long, she was tending to both New Directions, which was relocated
in 1997 to a newly refurbished building on the grounds of the V.A.
center, and a sanctuary for homeless parrots that she started that same
year with a friend on a four-acre plot an hour-and-a-half drive north in
Ojai. One morning, near the end of 1997, Lindner found herself leading
yet another veterans’ group-therapy session that was getting nowhere.
‘‘The guys are sitting around, all stoic, arms crossed, not saying
anything,’’ she recalled. ‘‘They’d been like that for a number of weeks.
So for a change, I took them up to Ojai to help build some new aviaries
there. All of the sudden these same tight-lipped guys are cuddling up to
the parrots and talking away with them.’’
Lindner was soon repeating the same exercise with other veterans. The
transformations she saw in both species were so pronounced that she
promptly set about persuading the V.A. to allot her the grounds of an
old outdoor basketball court just down the hill from the medical center
so she could move the birds from her Ojai sanctuary and start a
work-therapy program there. (Veterans are paid a stipend to work in the
sanctuary; some, like Love, volunteer their time.) She began with two
25-foot-high aviaries; there are now nearly two dozen. Some hold as many
as three or four birds, like Kiki, Phoebe and Dino (a.k.a. the Three
Stooges), a now inseparable troika of umbrella cockatoos who spend their
days cuddling and grooming one another. Others contain just one bonded
pair like Mandy and Kookie, a female and male eclectus parrot couple, a
species native to the Solomon Islands, or Jester and Tango, one
Harlequin and one green-wing macaw, who never leave each other’s side.
And then there are the quarters of the inveterate loners, birds still
caught somewhere between their inherent, wild selves and their captive
ones: Cashew, Bacardi or Julius, who is afraid of other parrots because,
as Lindner explained, ‘‘he doesn’t think he is one.’’
As I stood talking that day with Lindner, who is warm and effusive, with
long blond hair and bangs, I watched Jim Minick, a former Navy
helicopter-squadron member who did three tours of duty overseas and
suffered severe upper-body injuries in a fall from his chopper, get his
fingernails cleaned by Bacardi, the blue-and-gold macaw. In another
enclosure, Jason Martinez, a wheelchair-bound Army veteran, sat
alongside Molly, an African gray, resting on her perch, the two of them
just staring at each other.
Love approached. She was holding an elderly Goffin’s cockatoo named
Bobbi, a bird kept most of her life by her owner in a kitchen drawer.
She looked like a tiny plucked blue chicken, her only remaining plumage
some straggly wing and tail feathers and a frayed skull cap of the ones
she couldn’t reach with her beak to mutilate. Love held Bobbi aloft on
her index finger and then went dashing down the path between the
compound’s two rows of aviaries, shouting, ‘‘Fly, Bobbi, fly,’’ giving
her fruitlessly flapping charge at least the semblance of flight.
Continue reading the main story
‘‘You can look in their eyes,’’ Love said, returning with Bobbi, ‘‘any
of these parrots’ eyes, and I myself see a soul. I see a light in there.
And when they look at you, they see right into your soul. Look around.
They’re all watching. They notice everything. It’s intense.’’
I turned to take in a multitiered array of stares, feeling at once
beheld and uplifted by creatures a fraction of my weight. I couldn’t
place it at first, the slow-swiveling sideswipe of their gazes, the way
they’ll dip their heads below their own bodies and then crane smoothly
upward, like a movie camera pulling focus. And then it came to me: They
reminded me of those C.G.I. velociraptors in films, except that the
scales have turned to feathers and the stunted forelimbs to vibrant
wings. Time, all at once, lurched wildly backward and ahead, depositing
me right back where I’d been, in that moment, and yet deeper and more
present.
‘‘God is a parrot,’’ Love said. ‘‘I know that now. God supposedly
interprets and mimics what we do on earth, right? Is a reflection of us?
So I believe God, if she exists, must be a parrot.’’
Animal-assisted therapy is hardly a novel prescription, having been
employed at least since the 18th century, when the York Retreat for the
mentally ill opened in England in 1796 and began allowing patients to
roam the outside grounds among farm animals. At his office in Vienna,
Sigmund Freud regularly had his chow Jofi on hand during psychoanalysis
sessions to reassure and relax his patients, allowing them to open up
more readily. The U.S. military used dogs as early as 1919 as a
therapeutic aid in the treatment of psychiatric patients at St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington. Still, what distinguishes the
mutually assuaging bond that the veterans and parrots are forming at
Serenity Park is the intelligence — at once different from ours and yet
recognizable — of the nonhuman part of the equation.
There is abundant evidence now that parrots possess cognitive capacities
and sensibilities remarkably similar to our own. Alex, the now-deceased
African gray parrot studied for years by his longtime companion, Dr.
Irene Pepperberg, a psychology professor, is regularly held up as the
paragon of parrot intelligence. His cognitive skills tested as high as
those of a 5-year-old child. He mastered more than 100 words, grasped
abstract concepts like absence and presence (Alex excelled at the shell
game) and often gave orders to and toyed with the language of
researchers who studied him, purposely giving them the wrong answers to
their questions to alleviate his own boredom. Alex was also given to
demonstrating what we would characterize in ourselves as ‘‘hurt
feelings.’’ When Pepperberg returned to Alex one morning after a
three-week absence, he turned his back on her in his cage and commanded,
‘‘Come here!’’
Continue reading the main story
Slide Show
Slide Show
Of a Feather
CreditJack Davison for The New York Times
Stories like these are, in fact, legion among those who keep and work
with parrots. Dr. Patricia Anderson, an anthropologist at Western
Illinois University, told me that her expertise in anthrozoology, the
study of human-animal relations, is daily tested by her own cadre of
adopted, orphaned parrots, including the first bird she decided to take
in nearly 30 years ago, a Quaker, or monk, parrot named Otis.
‘‘He was so bright,’’ Anderson told me. ‘‘I taught him to say ‘thank
you.’ Very anthropocentric of me, I know, but he generalized it
appropriately to anything I ever did for him. He never said it randomly.
He only said it when I did something for him, so it appeared to have
meaning to him. There appeared to be some cognition going on, and this
totally blew my mind.’’ Anderson read extensively about parrots and
learned that anytime she left, she should say, ‘‘I’ll be right back.’’
‘‘I started saying that, and then whenever I began to put my shoes on in
the morning to get ready to go to work, he’d say: ‘Right back? Right
back?’ ’’
Though the avian cerebrum possesses only the tiniest nub of the
structures associated with mammalian intelligence, recent studies of
crows and parrots have revealed that birds think and learn using an
entirely different part of their brains, a kind of avian neocortex known
as the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale. In both parrots
and crows, in fact, the ratio of brain to body size is similar to that
of the higher primates, an encephalization quotient that yields in both
species not only the usual indications of cognitive sophistication like
problem-solving and tool use but also two aspects of intelligence long
thought to be exclusively human: episodic memory and theory of mind, the
ability to attribute mental states, like intention, desire and
awareness, to yourself and to others.
Nature, in other words, in a stunning example of parallel or convergent
evolution, found an entirely other and far earlier path to complex
cognition: an alien intelligence that not only links directly back to
minds we’ve long believed to be forever lost to us, like the dinosaurs’,
but that can also be wounded, under duress, in the same ways our minds
can. In one recent psychiatric study conducted at Midwest Avian Adoption
and Rescue Services, a parrot sanctuary and rehabilitation facility in
Minnesota, a captive-bred male umbrella cockatoo who had been ‘‘exposed
to multiple caregivers who were themselves highly unstable (e.g.
domestic violence, substance abuse . . . addiction)’’ was given a
diagnosis of complex PTSD. ‘‘When examined through the lens of complex
PTSD,’’ Dr. Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist and ecologist and an author of
the study, wrote, ‘‘the symptoms of many caged parrots are almost
indistinguishable from those of human P.O.W.s and concentration-camp
survivors.’’ She added that severely traumatized cockatoos ‘‘commonly
exhibit rapid pacing in cage, distress calls, screams, self-mutilation,
aggression in response to . . . physical contact, nightmares . . .
insomnia.’’
Veterans, of course, share similar psychological scarring, but whenever
I asked any of them how it is that the parrots succeed in connecting
where human therapists and fellow group-therapy members can’t, the
answer seemed to lie precisely in the fact that parrots are alien
intelligences: parallel, analogously wounded minds that know and feel
pain deeply and yet at a level liberatingly beyond the prescriptive
confines of human language and prejudices.
Photo
Cashew, a caique. Credit Jack Davison for The New York Times
‘‘They look at you, and they don’t judge,’’ Jim Minick, the badly
injured helicopter-squad member, told me. ‘‘The parrots look at you, and
it’s all face value. It’s pure.’’
One afternoon at the sanctuary, I went up the hill to the V.A. hospital
to talk with Leslie Martin. A clinical social worker and a director at
the center’s trauma-recovery services, she often recommends parrot
therapy for patients, including those who are ‘‘treatment resistant,’’
like Lilly Love. I asked Martin if the primordial nature of the parrot’s
intelligence might have a particular effect on certain veterans.
‘‘Everyone knows these animals are very sensitive, like children,’’ she
said. ‘‘The pure, primitive nature of their feelings, their emotions,
activates your primitive brain. And then when they speak to you, it’s a
real high.’’
Previous studies have shown that effective trauma therapies can help the
brain construct neuronal bypasses around the scarred areas of a
traumatized brain. ‘‘They’re only just starting to do research on this
now, but there are phenomena that are operating in the prefrontal
cortex,’’ Martin said. ‘‘There are some physiological and chemical
changes happening that are real, that are measurable.’’ Lindner says she
would like to one day enlist researchers to study the brain science
behind the efficacy of parrot therapy and whether it is the parrots
themselves that are helping the veterans or whether there are other
variables at work. For now, however, she uses as her measure the nearby
veterans’ garden just across from Serenity Park. For years, afflicted
veterans were brought to work in the garden as a way of treating their
trauma, essentially working in the same tranquil setting as the veterans
at Serenity Park, the one obvious difference, of course, being the
parrots. Lindner said she thinks that, using conventional measures of
improvement for veterans suffering trauma — the ability to stay clean
and sober; keeping up with their case-manager appointments; reuniting
with family; finding gainful employment, and so on — the veterans who
have been working with the parrots are doing better than those who spend
time working at the garden.
‘‘There’s definitely something different going on at this place,’’
Lindner said. ‘‘We know that what’s preserved across species, all
vertebrates truthfully, is the ability to feel compassion. As for birds
and humans, we both have sympathetic nervous responses. We react the
same way to trauma on the physiological level and in terms of the
reparative nature of compassion and empathy. That’s what is doing the
healing. That’s what is bringing the broken halves together. We don’t
know what the actual healing factor is, but I believe that it has to do
with mental mirroring. That the parrots get what the veterans are going
through and, of course, the veterans get them, too, because, hey, they
are all pretty much traumatized birds around here.’’
One afternoon at Serenity Park, a white pickup truck roared to a stop
behind the work shed. Lindner emerged from the passenger side with a
wooden box containing the ashes of her first parrot, Sammy, who died
last March after living with Lindner for 27 years. Sammy was to be
buried at the park later that day. The truck was driven by Serenity
Park’s manager, Matt Simmons, a tautly built, square-jawed 43-year-old,
who came to the sanctuary in 2006 after making little progress as a
patient in traditional group therapy at the V.A. When his therapist
first instructed him to visit the aviary down the hill, Simmons thought
he was going to be ‘‘dealing with chickens,’’ he later told me. What he
found instead was himself, through the eyes of the park’s winged trauma
victims. He began devoting his days to caring for the parrots, forming
attachments that gradually drew him out of his sense of isolation and
mistrust and allowed him, in turn, to start connecting with people as
well. He and Lindner grew increasingly close, and in 2009 they were
married at the sanctuary. Sammy was flower girl. Lindner held a bridal
bouquet made of fallen parrot feathers.
Continue reading the main story
Simmons built his first computer in grade school. He joined the
peacetime Navy right out of high school, he told me, to spite his
father, who wanted him to go straight to college and then law school. He
scored so high on his recruitment aptitude tests that the Navy wanted to
assign him to a nuclear submarine. Simmons managed, instead, to secure
what he believed would be a relatively easy tour as a yeoman —
essentially an administrative and clerical position — on an aircraft
carrier, until that ship made a sudden turn in early 1991.
‘‘We’re told we’re headed for Puerto Rico,’’ Simmons told me at dinner
one night with Lindner. ‘‘And the next thing I know is the sun is behind
the ship and the announcement comes that we’re off to the Persian Gulf.
I wound up in Bahrain, in-country, on a top-secret mission, tethered to
the belt of Navy SEALs. My secretary job was now to document beneath the
thick smoke all the slayings and how many targets the planes had
accurately hit. For months it looked like night during the day. I saw a
lot of killing, and things I wish I hadn’t.’’
Upon his return from active duty, Simmons enrolled at the University of
Cincinnati and studied literature and philosophy. He started his own
software company while still in his junior year and starred at
quarterback under Rex Ryan, now head coach of the Buffalo Bills, until
being permanently sidelined by a knee injury. At first, he attributed
the night terrors and cold sweats he began to experience in his last two
years of school to the stress of course work and managing his new
company. But he soon started drinking heavily, and by his late 20s
became addicted to heroin and prescription drugs. Growing increasingly
estranged from his first wife, he eventually was divorced, sold his
company to LexisNexis and then hopped in his B.M.W. one day and headed
for California, where he ended up spending a year in jail for assault
after nearly killing a man in a bar fight.
The PTSD stemming from his time in the Navy wasn’t formally diagnosed
for another two years. A friend suggested that he visit the West Los
Angeles V.A. for help. Simmons told me that until then, he had no idea
that what he was experiencing had to do with his military service. The
regimen of new drugs that were prescribed by a psychiatrist there proved
ineffective, and he grew increasingly closed off in therapy sessions
that were dominated at that time by long-ignored Vietnam veterans with
issues entirely different from those associated with the Gulf War. ‘‘I
told my therapist this,’’ Simmons said, ‘‘and he basically said that if
I didn’t go down and help out at the sanctuary, he was going to stop
treating me.’’
Simmons instantly connected with the yellow-headed Amazon, Joey, who had
adopted and raised from infancy two other birds at the sanctuary — a
pair of female lilac-crowned Amazon parrots that had fallen from their
nest — regurgitating his own food to feed them. For a male parrot to
raise two females from another species is a rare display of altruism,
Lindner told me, a behavior long thought to be exclusive to humans and
other primates.
Photo
Kookie, a green eclectus. Credit Jack Davison for The New York Times
‘‘Joey came to Serenity Park around the same time I did,’’ Simmons told
me. ‘‘That’s the first thing we had in common. I had learned that
yellow-headed Amazons are not that friendly, so when Joey made an effort
to befriend me, that meant even more. We were different species, but we
got each other. I was shy, burned by humans, isolated, angry. Joey had
what seemed to me the same attitude. So we bonded. He let me touch him.
Only me.’’
Within weeks of his arrival at Serenity Park, Lindner told me, Simmons
had pretty much taken over the place. He was up at 3 a.m. every day in
the New Directions kitchen, preparing breakfast for all the veterans.
Then he came down to the sanctuary and worked there until 6 in the
evening, clearing out the compound, building new aviaries and expanding
the existing ones.
When I asked Simmons to describe what happens to him when he is with a
parrot, he instantly went into one of his signature high-speed
soliloquies. ‘‘Here we go,’’ he said. ‘‘Write it down. There are things
I have seen that will never leave me. There’s this huge sack of guilt
and shame and pain that I carry with me, and I got it when I was 18
years old in Bahrain. Now, when I’m with a parrot, it’s not a total
time-change thing, but I do have to act like a 12-year-old boy again.
And here’s why. Because parrots are not domesticated animals. They
haven’t been bred for hundreds of years to be at my feet.’’ Simmons
paused for a sip of Coke, the third one of the night. ‘‘So in order to
have a relationship with a parrot, that parrot has to select me. In
order for that to happen, that parrot has to be comfortable. I have to
come in open and quiet and calm. Much like that 12-year-old boy that met
the mean dog next door and never had a problem. Much like that
12-year-old boy that went hiking and saw a mountain lion. I’m acting
like the 12-year-old boy again around the parrots, and what that does is
help me confront my trauma rather than carry it around. Because now I’m
with a psychiatrist, and I’m talking about how this bird didn’t feel so
good today and wasn’t very comfortable and was kind of hiding in the
back of the cage, and the psychiatrist goes, ‘Hmm, you’re starting to
talk about emotions.’ I’m talking about how the bird was feeling, but
I’m also transferring my own emotions. So being with the parrots allows
me to take that third-person look at my own trauma, which you can never
do when you’re whacked out on Vicodin and Budweiser and living under a
cement highway bridge.’’
We often think of empathy as a skill rather than the long-ago,
neuronally ingrained bioevolutionary tool for survival that it actually
is: the ability to inhabit the feelings of fellow beings (the word
empathy derives from the Greek en, which means ‘‘in,’’ and pathos,
meaning ‘‘suffering’’ or ‘‘experience’’); the ability to feel, for
example, their fear over a threat; or thrill over a newly found food
source; or sorrow over a loss, which has as much to do with the fabric
of a community as any other. Empathy, in this sense, can be thought of
as the source of all emotion, the one without which the others would
have no register.
The more time I spent at Serenity Park last summer, the more I came to
think in terms of the expansive anatomy of empathy. And not just the
shared neuronal circuitry that has now been mapped across species, from
us to the other primates to elephants and whales and, we now know, to
creatures with entirely different, nonmammalian brains, like crows and
parrots. I thought, as well, of the extraordinary capacity conferred by
that circuitry to recognize and respond to the specific infirmities,
both psychic and physical (although those are essentially one and the
same) of another species.
Photo
Matthew Simmons with Kiki and Phoebe. Credit Jack Davison for The New
York Times
I got a sense early on at the park of which parrots and veterans seemed
most drawn to one another. The way, for example, Simmons said that the
lilac-crowned Amazon, Dagwood, came to life around Jim Minick, the
former Navy helicopter crewman. But I learned only later about the true
depth of such bonds.
‘‘You know, Jim does a great job of hiding how wounded he was,’’ Simmons
told me. ‘‘He has tattoos all over the elbow he can’t use anymore, and
he won’t talk about it, but at one point he was sitting on the edge of
the bed with a shotgun in his mouth and tears rolling down his face. On
that same night, he drove his car into a tree, drunk out of his mind. So
he comes to Serenity Park, and Jim doesn’t know the history of any of
the birds, and which bird loved him at first? Dagwood, the one with a
screwed-up wing and a crooked beak. There’s no way to explain it.’’
Jason Martinez, who suffered traumatic brain injuries parachuting into
Afghanistan and now suffers from epileptic seizures, was immediately
drawn to Molly, an African gray, the only parrot at Serenity Park, he
learned only later, with epilepsy. And then there were the daily
cheek-to-cheek murmurings between the bedraggled, drawer-bound Goffin’s
cockatoo, Bobbi, and a blond 21-year-old ex-Marine named Josh Lozon.
‘‘Let’s talk about Josh,’’ Simmons said. ‘‘A good-looking guy with curly
hair. He’s a little scary. He’s so broken, all of his wounds are still
hidden. Who gets along with him best? Bobbi, mostly naked, bleeding from
her remaining feathers. A bird who looks like a damn pterodactyl that
went through a buzz saw.’’
Of all the veterans I encountered at the sanctuary, Lozon was by far the
most skittish. The one time I was able to chat with him at length was
when I found him early one morning atop an elevated wooden porch, one
flight above a work shed, scrubbing the bars of an empty bird cage with
a brush. My decision to head up the narrow steps that lead to it
effectively trapped him up there.
He joined the Marines, he said, because he ‘‘wanted to hurt somebody.’’
He told me he received an exceptional score on his recruitment aptitude
test, which landed him an office job working with computers, a post
suited to his intellectual abilities but not his disposition. Sent to
the V.A. for evaluation after frequent episodes of insubordination and
erratic behavior, he was prescribed mood stabilizers and antipsychotics,
neither of which, he sheepishly confided, he was presently taking,
thanks to Serenity Park.
He was not able to put into words what exactly went on between him and
the parrots. All he kept saying was, ‘‘It’s something about the cages.’’
Feeling his growing discomfort, I descended the stairs. Back on the
ground, I looked up at Lozon, who was peacefully cooing and chirping
back and forth with Koko, the Australian Adelaide rosella. He suddenly
looked down at me. ‘‘They’re in these cages and helpless,’’ Lozon said,
‘‘and it’s not their fault.’’ He paused, and I started away. ‘‘But for
me,’’ he continued, ‘‘I think it’s also that when I’m alone with them in
those cages, I feel I don’t have to conform to what everyone expects of
me. I’m free to be an animal again.’’
In the late afternoon on my last day at the sanctuary, I seemed to be
the only one around. I passed Koko in his cage, sounding his particular
strains of the park’s ongoing symphony of stranded human speech. I
thought then of the numerous anecdotes people have told of wild-parrot
flocks learning, via ‘‘cultural transmission,’’ to speak the human words
taught to them by reintegrated former pets. In the parks of Sydney,
Australia, where there are native wild-parrot flocks, people regularly
overhear a ‘‘Hello, darling’’ or ‘‘What’s happening?’’ sounding from the
trees above. The early German naturalist explorer Alexander von Humboldt
wrote of encountering, during his travels in South America toward the
close of the 18th century, a parrot that was the last living repository
of the language of the extinct Atures Indian tribe.
All alone now among the sanctuary’s parrots, I got a sudden glimpse of a
possible future. One long beyond us and our traumas. A world of winged
dinosaurs, soaring and chatting back and forth, their different local
dialects inflected here and there with the occasional broken shards of a
long lost one: ‘‘Hey, sweetheart.’’ ‘‘Whoa! C’mon man!’’ ‘‘Whatever!’’
Nearing Serenity Park’s exit, I decided to turn back and step inside
Cashew’s quarters for a moment. I had only to nestle close to her perch
and she immediately hopped on my back. Crisscrossing my shoulders as I
had watched her do with Lilly Love, she stopped at one point for what I
assumed would be the parrot equivalent of a kiss. Instead, she began to
clean my teeth: her beak lightly tapping against my enamel, the faint
vibrations strangely soothing. Immediately afterward, she took a brief
nap in my shirt’s left breast pocket — it felt as if I’d grown another
heart — then re-emerged and crawled to the top of my head. She strolled
about there for a time before plucking out one of her own deep
blue-green feathers and then descending to gently place it on my left
shoulder. I have it still.
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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