Those Messed Up Male Psittacines

April and I agreed to take in a four-year-old male Yellow-fronted Amazon named Kahuna, ostensibly that he might befriend and perhaps bond with our 12-year hen, Tasha Lyn, who has been rejected by her mate in favor of a younger female Amazon.

Kahuna and Tasha were introduced in a large 20ftx12ft planted aviary with lots of diversions and secluded foliage places to get away from each other if necessary. Like many Amazon parrots, they were tentative in their early friendship and of course, slept in different preferred spots at night.

What soon became apparent, however, was that Kahuna is an obvious human impressed former hand-fed pet - one with a huge slate of odd behaviors and dysfunctions. He screeches like a cockatoo, laughs like his former lady keeper, sings, “You Are My Sunshine,” all the way through four verses, and babbles on daily in humanspeak whenever he wishes to express himself. Tasha, meanwhile, is not particularly enamored of all this odd vocalization, since she is one of our third generation Yellow-fronts with over ten years experience in Amazon communications gleaned from role models who are her ancestors. She has free flown some, knows the appropriate warning calls and joy expressions of her kind, and to put it bluntly, seems put-off by Kahuna’s inability to commune with her on a parrot level.

Read more in the magazine…