Auteur: Giles Watson
Beschrijving:
Only those who have heard a gang-gang cockatoo in full voice will appreciate why she was called Ratchet. Her aviary was not far from the house, and at times, it was like living next to a saw-mill. Ratchet was one amongst a host of parrots and cockatoos passing through our aviaries in the 1980s: king parrots red and green as sliced watermelons, eastern and crimson rosellas like airborne expressionist mannequins, sulphur-crested cockatoos with bills that pierced the skin like pliers, and galahs with bellies the pink of musk lollies – all jostled for space whilst their broken bones knitted back together. Sometimes, nestfuls of younger ones would arrive in boxes, and have to be fed on infant cereal, squirted direct into their crops by means of a piece of plastic tubing attached to a syringe. Their peepings competed with the persistent chelpings of baby magpies waiting to have their gullets stuffed with minced meat rolled in bran, and of baby blackbirds demanding mealworms.
It is as impossible to convey the beauty of native Australian parrots in words, as it is to describe the unspeakable agony when a parrot decides that it is time to rip a bit out of you with its inbuilt facial wire-cutters. Polly Pirate (pictured below in the comments) specialised in looking angelic as you scratched her head, but if you lost eye contact for an instant, she would draw blood without mercy, and then laugh at you with her cherry-pink eyes. Other parrots specialised in the well-timed screech, just as you had finished feeding them and had begun to turn your back. There are few creatures with voices designed to inflict physical pain, but a cockatoo in full voice at close quarters can be a daunting prospect.
There was compensation for such discomforts. Parrots have well-developed individual personalities, and only now are we beginning to understand their intelligence. There is something very mammalian – or perhaps human - about some of their antics: the way they respond so lovingly to a good scratch behind the ear, the way they hold their food upraised in one cocked foot and hold little conversations with each other as they eat, their equal capacity for affection and for malice. When it comes to the expression of individuality, only crows can compete with them.
If you grow up surrounded by parrots, it changes your perceptions. You start to realise that our ways of appreciating intelligence and beauty in other animals are not yet very advanced. Your perception of colour and of pattern is hypersensitized. You get in the habit of carrying sticking-plasters and bandages in your pockets as a matter of course. And when cockatoos like Ratchet start turning up in boxes on your doorstep, you start to consider carrying a set of ear-plugs around with you too.
Spend an hour with an aviary full of parrots, and the next time you see a human being, you have to resist the temptation to turn up the colour-contrast and the volume. Human beings suddenly seem so desaturated.
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