Kenya Sue, the Jardine’s parrot, is a celebrity hound in feathers.  Her favorite pastime is schmoozing with famous writers.  Behold her ultimate dream, a day with Robert Olen Butler.  He’s the actor turned Pulitzer Prize winning author who wrote “Mr. Green”, story of an inherited parrot, and “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”. 

             Mr. Butler told Kenya Sue the story of Cosmo, a Mexican Redhead with a modest vocabulary of human words used with understanding.  Like most companion parrots, the meanings of the words Cosmo used were Cosmo-assigned meanings.  Simple, creative, understandable.  The word  “cracker” wasn’t just crackers, but rather crackers and almost any other yummy, nut- or seed-like food.

Being an Amazon, of course, Cosmo was well acquainted with water.
Knew and used the word “water”.  The meaning here, traditionally Amazonian,  was “Wow, wonderful wet stuff!”

               The first time the young parrot was given a grape, when beak broke through fleshy skin, Cosmo was squirted in the face.  He eyeballed the unfamiliar goody,  which had both hard and wet properties, and christened it “crack-water.  From then on, his food vocabulary included “crack-water” for grapes, based on  its dual characteristics, and “crackers” for other foods.

Mr. Butler also remembered a day when he didn’t have time to pick up a solicitous, demanding, wing trimmed nanday conure.  Now nandays don’t have the best reputation for successful adjustment as human companions.  Maybe most humans aren’t up to it.  This particular bird had climbed off a  t-perch on to an adjacent table
 that was covered by a towel.

Daddy was busy, would pass by, stop to say a word or two, bending over, staying just out of reach.  The bird stretched and stretched and tried to reach Dad.  When he wasn’t successful, without hesitation, the little bird started bunching the towel into a mound.  

He climbed up on the mound then stretched and stretched some more, but still was not high enough to gain access to that busy, neglectful birdy daddy who's face occasionally appeared, just out of reach.  He climbed down the mound kept working, bunching the towel up into a higher mound.  Then he climbed up really high, stretched and stretched, and FINALLY got picked up.  Because his wings were trimmed, he ignored his "instinctive" solution to get from a low place to a high place -- by flying -- and came up with
 a clearly task-oriented, intelligent solution. 

                Ken rode with Mr. Butler to the airport,
 then watched him fly away.

Click here for more of Kenya Sue's adventures