Halle at Vito's

As I've said, this bird was half bald. This left very little to the imagination. When Vito brought her home, he called her Pete. A Hahn's Macaw, she's non-sexually dimorphic. That just means you can't tell which sex the bird is by looking at it. So Pete it was. The other birds at Vito's were named Scooby (a sun conure), and Joe (an Amazon of some sort). Scooby was friendly but really not very bright; he had a song that consisted of a couple of notes, and that was it. Joe was an older bird, adopted after his person, a woman passed away. Joe was inclined to bite pretty much anyone, even after having been there for a few years. They all lived in the living room, and Pete's cage, now scoured clean but still enormous, made the room quite crowded. Though Scooby really wanted a friend, Pete really wanted someone to attack, and Joe, well forget about Joe. So they all had to be kept separated. But that didn't stop Pete (you know, Halle) from being the ringleader. The shreikfests were legendary. This made Vito's wife very unhappy. 

Vito was kind of the go-to guy when it came to birds in the Mid-Cape area, having taught the younger, more official bird rescue fellow there everything he knew. So when there was a drug bust in the area, and two birds were part of the seized property, our official fellow got the fully feathered cockatoo, and Vito got Pete. Naturally, Pete did not come with full medical records or even an adequate set of bird toys. This may explain the feather picking. Parrots are smart birds, Scooby being an exception. So they need things to do, things to shred and destroy, things to keep their minds occupied. Pete had none of that, and was raised by drug dealers. Thus the plucking. Feathers are toys when you've got nothing else. And pulling out feathers is an act of defiance, anxiety, or distress. It's possible Pete was addicted to whatever was being sold at the drug house as well. More about that later.

Spending time at Vito's, still doing some child care, I got to know and love Pete. While sitting on my shoulder the bird would groom me and try to eat what I ate directly from my mouth. When Vito saw this, and his wife complained bitterly about the noise level, things began to shift. Vito loved Pete, too, but the writing was on the wall. When I allowed as how I would be willing to adopt, it was no time at all before Pete became Halle Macaw and moved to my house. At this point my friends quipped that Halle was a transgender bird.