In celebration of National Bird Day 2016, Barry Kent MacKay, Senior Program Associate for Born Free USA and lifelong bird enthusiast, is writing a special five-part blog series. Below is the second installment.
© Wild ConnectionAround 150 million years ago, a group of climbing reptiles with strong hind limbs began the long process of evolving into the bird species as we know them today. Of course, everything else changed along with them as they co-evolved and adapted to their diverse home habitats. Now, there exist thousands of bird species. They live on every continent, and vary hugely in form and behavior in order to adapt to their widely varying environments: deserts, misty jungles, arctic tundra, tropical beaches, temperate grasslands, and the list goes on! After millions of years of evolving and adapting, each species is in beautiful, harmonious tune with their respective environments with both instinctive behavioral responses and a degree of cognitive—or intelligent—response, as well.[teaserbreak]
Then, along come humans. We catch and cage them, take them from where they belong, and put them into our hard-edged and very foreign world… not for their sake, but for ours. And, when they try to cope—when they react, drawing on those ancient instincts that were forming when dinosaurs roamed—people take videos, post them online, and are highly amused.
Have you ever seen a parrot in the wild? I have. Many parrots of many species. And, when I do, I’m not inclined to laugh (unless from the sheer joy of entering their world). Imagine the flock of white-crowned parrots I saw in a leafless tree on a ridge in Costa Rica, their breasts glowing with a darkly rich purple iridescence in the hot sun, in contrast to the shimmering bronzy green atop their wings. They were not being cute, they were not confused, and they were not doing silly stunts, performing for somebody’s amusement. They were just being parrots: alert, at home, naturally belonging where they were. They took flight and arrowed in loose formation across a wide, forested valley, and out of view in a distant treetop. That is how things should be. That is how birds should live, and should be viewed. Wild.
The ‘pet’ birds we see in online videos are interacting with a world profoundly different from what they evolved to occupy. Unsurprisingly, they struggle to cope with the limitations and frustrations imposed upon them—by us. The results are ‘antics’ we laugh at, showing that we only see these wild animals from our own perspective, not theirs. These ‘antics’ commonly derive from frustrated sexual displays, meant to challenge males or attract females, but that are corrupted by a lack of appropriate context to have the meaning or completion that nature intended. They screech without meaning, imitating us in the absence of understanding, bonding with humans from loneliness and confusion. Many become obsessed with objects, mirror images, toys, or trinkets, trying to understand a world alien to what they were meant to inhabit. Some are so driven to psychosis that they mutilate themselves by pulling out their own feathers: an obsessive behavior that, once started, is nearly impossible to stop.
But, we rarely see those featherless birds in videos online—perhaps because they are no longer ‘cute.’
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry