Mozart Chronicles: Fluffy's Ghost

In this image, the contrast has been maximized to highlight the spectral images. I have added a circle around the part of the image where you can see the profile of Fluffy's head, and triangles where her flapping wings can be seen. Also, her son's smaller profile is highlighted in red. Compare this to the image I posted yesterday.

Mozart Chronicles: The Fluffy Flower, cont.

Six years after her death, I was unpacking this photo and took a new look at the odd white cloudy area on this photo. Almost instantly, I clearly saw the profile of a Moluccan cockatoo's head and wildly flapping wings.

Here is a close up of the area with the spectral image of Fluffy and her son just above Mozart's head.

Tomorrow, I will zoom in on this area and adjust the contrast so you can see the spectral images better.

Mozart Chronicles: Memoir of Two Moluccans, Pt. 3

Carefully I followed Dr. Ritchie's instructions and talked with my veterinarian about what I had learned. He agreed to aggressively treat Mozart's disease. Mozart began a long term course of antibiotics and antifungals, including a triple whammy cocktail my vet formulated just for Mozart. For six months he would stay on this to fight the initial onset of the disease. And it seemed to work. However, his neurological signs seemed to worsen. The infamous "PDD twitch" took hold of him and wouldn't let go. His head would twitch out of control. I decided to call on his body's reflexes once more as I had with the force feeding fear reflex. Instead of yelling at him to get him to involuntarily eat, this time when he twitched, I would squirt him with a squirt bottle. Mozart realized that he actually could stop the twitching if he really wanted. Very soon, just the sight of the squirt bottle would stop the twitching, and soon after that just my looking at the squirt bottle was enough and so on until finally the command 'no twitching!' was all it took to help him stop.

Eventually, he had trouble digesting the coarse-size pellets he'd been eating and had to switch to the cockatiel-sized pellets, or fine grind. He would stay on this diet for the next five years. But alas, the malabsorptive properties of the disease took their toll and after five years, Mozart was blind and could barely walk across his cage. He was depressed and only a shadow of the magnificent wild caught Moluccan he had once been. And finally one night he had a horrible seizure. I knew he'd fallen from his perch a couple of times when I wasn't around but this was the first time I'd witnessed one of his seizures. The total lack of self control was so undignified for this regal creature, the ignominious fall to the floor, the helplessness was more than I could take. On May 30, 2002, Mozart left this world while I held his claw in the lab at the vet's office with just myself and my vet and his two grown daughters in attendance. I wrapped him in a peach towel and placed him in the refrigerator to await cremation. I kissed the top of his head one last time and said goodbye to the greatest love and the most noble creature anyone has ever known.

Patti Henningsen is a professional animal communicator and freelance writer residing in Maryland with her 2 amazons, 2 ringneck parakeets, 2 parrotlets, Moluccan cockatoo and a macaw. She has written for BirdTalk, several animal welfare related newsletters and formerly was a national music critic. She avidly studies animal communication and energy healing to enhance the lives of her flock.

Mozart Chronicles: Memoir of Two Moluccans, Pt. 1

A Memoir of two Moluccans
"Eat!!!" I screamed and Mozart's beak popped open involuntarily in a fear reflex to my boisterous demand. In the blink of an eye, I shoved the piece of medicine-laden macaroni in his beak. With his tongue he 'fingered' this piece of pasta and the taste and smell of cheese proved irresistible, as I knew it would be. He swallowed it. I looked at the spoon I was holding. It had four remaining pieces of macaroni on it and I knew three of them had medicine in them as well. I picked one up and held it in front of my beloved Moluccan's face. "EAT!" I screamed again at the top of my lungs.

It was July 10, 1997 and Mozart had refused eating several days before following the death of his mate, Fluffy. She had died in my arms, starved to death, unable to pass food through her digestive tract. Her final radiographs showed two pieces of undigested macaroni stuck in her stomach, rotting. Her proventriculus had been enlarged grotesquely and wasn't functioning. It had been only three weeks since she had first appeared ill. And now her mate, Mozart, refused to eat. He had watched her die and looked at me with a deeply grave look on his 70-something year old face. But I knew that one thing Mozart could never resist was macaroni and cheese. And so there I was force feeding a wild caught geriatric cockatoo I was determined would not suffer the same fate as his mate.

My regular vet had been on vacation most of this time. I remembered the young vet at the emergency clinic when we first took Fluffy in and his glib reaction after reviewing her xrays, "It's PDD. She's going to die. There's nothing you can do. You need to separate her from her mate." He showed me the xrays and I could easily see something was wrong. I was used to seeing lots of xrays (they're properly called radiographs) at my job at a prominent medical publisher. He briefly explained that she would be unable to digest food and would eventually starve to death. I didn't believe him. It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, no one was going to tell me that this bird I had gone to such lengths to rescue was now going to perish, this bird who had waited 13 years to find happiness and was now finally happy, would perish. But she did.

In those three weeks, I dragged her to no less than five different vets, every vet in the mid-Atlantic known to treat birds at the time seeking for one, just one, who would even treat her aggressively like I wanted. And I did not separate her from Mozart. I could think of nothing more cruel to do to a living being than separate her from her greatest joy in life. And besides, he was already showing some of the same symptoms.

to be continued tomorrow...

Pictured: Mozart (left) and Fluffy (right) pose sweetly for a family portrait during the happiest period of their lives. Two wild caught cockatoos, so many tens of thousands of miles from home, who have finally found each other and a reason to live. You can see how Mozart has trouble perching due to arthritis and old age.

Mozart Chronicles: The Fluffy Flower, Pt. 3

Incredulous, I sat up while the moonlight filtered into the room through the cracks in the shade, and looked long and hard at Mozart and the ghost of Fluffy. Finally, Mozart shifted on his feet and said, "Pat!" and then very firmly emphasizing each word, "Write it down."

"Yea yea I will Motzie." I marvelled at the specter of Fluffy snuggled up next to her great love, Mozart. I had never seen a ghost before or since.

And on the second anniversary of her death, we found ourselves coming home that day with arms full of new flowers and once again hanging a pot full of pink flowers up over her nestbox on the stoop. "There it is," Chris said proudly after hanging it, "the Fluffy flower."

"And today is the day you know, July 8th," I said. I knew he hadn't remembered consciously.

"That's weird," he frowned and looked at the flower. That evening we sat on the patio and Chris softly played guitar while I sang the song we had written three years earlier for our Fluffy girl.

Fly away Fluffy fly Away from the pain, away from the hurt
Fly away and don't forget to come back this same day
Be Free Be Free Be Free

It had been six years since Fluffy had died and now Mozart was gone too. We had just moved into our new house and I was making sure that precious photos of them were carefully stored in a safe place. Amid all the boxes to be unpacked, I wanted to put a photo of Mozart, deceased only weeks before, on a nearby box as I unpacked so I could see my dear old friend.

I picked the little framed picture up and noticed again for the umpteenth time, the white blob in the photo above Mozart's head. Gazing absentmindedly at it, I realized I could see the shape of a cockatoo's beak and head and then a dark spot where the eye would be and wings flapping. It was Fluffy! Her spectral image had been in this photo all this time and I had never realized it!

I ran to show the picture to Chris. "Chris look at this white blob right here, do you see this dark spot?" He saw it immediately, "It's Fluffy!" he yelled, "Oh my God!" He gave me a startled hug and both of our eyes misted up. I looked at the calendar and gave another start, "And today is the day!" We looked out at the sizzling hot day and waved to the pink sunset, "Namaste Fluffy! Namaste Mozart!"

I returned to the task of unpacking and carefully unpacked the gold plated mug from Tiffany's which an opera composer had once given to me and in which I had kept Fluffy's eggs all this time. I picked up the egg which sat on top of the two other eggs in the cup. Holding it in my hand, with a sudden sting of sorrow and remorse I realized it was heavy and not hollow like the others. It had been fertile! Inside it were the remains of a baby chick, Mozart and Fluffy's child! I cried suddenly, I had not only lost Fluffy, then Mozart but also their baby who also appears spectrally in the photograph mentioned above with his back toward the camera, just below Fluffy's head as the brightest spot in the picture.

That night I dreamt of a golden haired boy who was trying to call me at work. I didn't want to take the call and my assistant said "it's from a young man who says you met him only right after his father died." I knew it was Mozart's son, who had died in the shell of that egg, contacting me from wherever it was that he and Motz and Fluffy all lived now; Camelot.

Mozart Chronicles: Do You See What I See?

This is the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail which caused Mozart to become very upset. We were never able to watch just anything on TV again after he came to live with us. Any violence, even if he could not see or hear the TV show and even if he was upstairs and we were downstairs watching with the volume on low, he would still see whatever we saw as if he were seeing through our eyes, which he was in fact doing.

He would complain loudly at our poor choices of television viewing and make moaning sounds to let us know he was disappointed. We would call up to him, "Motz! It's ok! It's just a movie! It's not real!" He was quiet and happy though when we watched family oriented programming. He also exhibited precognitive powers. Once we were watching Seven Years in Tibet which we'd just bought on video. From upstairs, he was quiet right up until the end of the Christmas party scene. Then he started screaming inconsolably. We looked at each other. The very next scene was the attack on Tibet by the Chinese and the movie became dark and violent from that point on. How did he know this? Had he seen the movie before through our eyes when I had originally seen it in the theatre? I didn't even have him then! Was he tapping my subconscious past? Had he seen it through the eyes of the collective human consciousness? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Whatever and however he was able to foretell such plot turns in movies and TV shows, one thing is clear, his level of awareness was far superior to our own, almost to the point of being a super intelligence. And here he was, a little (about 1.5 pounds) pink cockatoo parrot from the Indonesian rainforest. A denizen of our very own Planet Earth with powers of heightened awareness that could teach us lessons to supercharge our own development as a species and yet, sadly, he is an endangered species and his homeland is being illegally logged at this moment. Plans to drill for oil off his home island's shores will surely spell doom for the one island on this planet where these great beings dwell. As the gospel according to Thomas reads, "The kingdom of Heaven will not come by expectation. The kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the Earth and men do not see it."

Let's hope we can learn from Heaven's pink angels before they disappear forever.

Mozart Chronicles: Moonbeams & Cockatoo Dreams

Mozart was a very old wild-caught Moluccan cockatoo from Indonesia. He abhorred captivity, it broke his heart he would say many times. He had been imported by a breeder but the breeder soon removed him from the breeder flights. He wouldn't breed. Grey eyes like little moons hid darkly behind black lenses full of the wisdom of the aged. Mozart's eyes, when seen in bright light, up close, shone like silver discs. I asked him once "why do you have grey eyes my friend?" His thoughts leapt out at me, "Because I'm old!" I believed him. He ought to know so who was I to doubt him?

Moluccan cockatoos, as well as other types of cockatoos are the only kind of parrots whose sex can be determined by their eye color, for the most part. Hens have dark, fiery red irises while males have chocolate brown irises. But some Molly men (male Moluccans), and probably some Molly women, have been observed to have light grey eyes lurking behind those black lenses. The cockatoo lens is dark but not opaque and it can be hard to tell the eye color unless one is very close and preferably has the advantage of streaming sunlight to aid in observation.

We would often stand such, eye to eye, him perched high on top of his cage, leaning his head down to just above my eye level. Our eyes only inches apart, I would stare into his eyes, or eye, rather as he would do the famous sideways parrot zoom, and he into mine. I always thought when we did this, he was trying to tell me something and I just was choking and couldn't hear his thoughts. What was he trying to tell me?

Starry, Starry Night
Distracted my eyes would often wander upwards to look at the glow-in-the-dark star-shaped stickers I had placed on the ceiling above his cage. There were stars, comets, asteroids, little planets and a full moon all carefully placed to give the impression of a crystal clear night far from any city and any light pollution. Before turning in for the night, I would shut off the light and the little star show would brightly glow. Mozart's head would roll backwards as he gazed lovingly at his 'night sky.' The moon in particular was his favorite. Marveling at the Earthern satellite, I could feel his memories quaking and rolling through a troubled heart, a wild heart that had been plucked from its home in its golden years and whisked eleven thousand miles away for the purpose of creating a captive population of these rainforest angels. Oh Sorrow thou hast pink wings!

Oh Sorrow thou hast pink wings!
Since I knew that birds admire airplanes, I thought Mozart might enjoy a new documentary coming on TV that year about space travel to the moon. "From the Earth to the Moon" had begun showing ads with a nice big shot of the moon. I pointed to the TV and explained to Mozart, "See that? We humans have made big ships and have sent a couple of men to the moon," I pointed emphatically to his 'moon' on the ceiling.

Mozart had been listening politely, more interested in the picture of the moon on the TV, his eyes narrowed slightly as he took in the video clip of a rocket headed toward the moon which was followed by a man standing on the moon. He looked at me again and then at the moon on his ceiling and suddenly his entire being became animated. His beak opened and his eyes widened as wide as they could, his wings spread slightly. Taking widely spaced, dramatic steps, one at a time, he started walking across the top of his cage toward me. His crest was tightened down close to his head. In his little boy voice, he said out loud very slowly, his voice shaking with incredulity, dawning realization spreading throughout his consciousness like someone who has just found the Holy Grail, "You've...been...to...the..moon?!!!"

"You've been to the moon?!!!"
As I watched him slowly approach me, I too had a realization. He was really impressed, more impressed, in fact, than anything else I could possibly have told him. Apparently, birds, flying creatures who probably cover more distance in their lives than any other type of living being, have probably dreamed about space travel silently along with us through the eons. Suddenly I felt guilty, "No Motz, I haven't been to the moon, these guys went to the moon way back when and I don't even know them. Only about five or so humans have ever been to the moon." But he didn't care, my species had gone to the moon and he was awestruck.

Now standing just in front of and a little bit above me, he paid me the highest honor a Moluccan can bestow on another being. Leaning over, he gently began preening the top of my head. He'd never preened my head before. I knew this meant something special, like he was deferring to my species which he now considered to be worth his time to try and understand a little better. I stood there enjoying it while I could.

The Target of Dark Forces
Later that night, I turned off the light and we settled in for a sleep. His stars glowed brightly and he happily filed his beak, a sound that made me happy. But that night I was worried and distraught. We had been looking for a new home to move to and I was up most of that night worrying, as I did many nights, about whether the harrassment I had suffered at the hands of radical conservatives would follow us to our new home. At that particular point in history (1998), it seemed, people had nothing better to do with their lives than to watch reality TV and try and ruin other people's lives with little or no reason. It was just the sport of the day, pick a target, break every privacy and harrassment law there is and pursue someone who is different from you, who might espouse some ideal or some futuristic thinking that poses a threat to corporate governance. And I was the target. Too bad they didn't pick terrorist subversives instead.

As I fell asleep, I knew my dreams would just be a continuation of the negative thoughts I had been experiencing. I dreamt of moving to a new home and being followed by a posse of corporate zombies who were trying to kill us. But in the dream I was most worried about Mozart, whom I carried everywhere on one arm. I was desperately trying to keep him safe from the anthrax that this posse was spreading everywhere. Suddenly, I went outside onto our new lawn and realized Mozart was no longer on my arm. He was in a tree in the front yard, the only tree in the yard and the tree was oddly sort of rectangular shaped. It was dusk and getting darker by the second. Above this tree was an array of stars glowing in the night sky but the stars were only above the tree and nowhere else.

A Posse of Corporate Zombies Who Were Trying to Kill Us
Mozart called to me and I went over to him. I was still upset by the nightmare I was experiencing, so he said in his sweet little voice, softly and soothingly, "Pat, let's look at the stars together." Then he turned his head and looked at the stars above his tree. I instantly became calm and relaxed. We stood there and gazed at the heavens together until I woke up.

Upon waking I remembered the dream in its entirety. I contemplated it for a while. I thought about how it had suddenly changed tone from a nightmare to a pleasant experience with Mozart. How I had been terrified the whole dream that someone was trying to kill Mozart and then how he suddenly appeared to be fine. I thought about how the stars were only above his tree and how his tree was shaped oddly like his cage. Then I realized, I would never dream that stars were in one spot in the sky, only he would dream that. I would never dream that a tree was rectangular shaped, only he would dream that. He had come into my dream and transformed it from a nightmare into a wonderful experience!

He Had Come Into My Dream
I rolled over in bed and looked at him. He stood there on top of his cage with the most satisified, smug look on his face. I said to him, "Mozart, you came into my dream last night didn't you?" He filed his beak for a moment and then in his sweet, little voice he chimed out loud quite clearly, speaking each word slowly and surely, "I...said...hello!" Yes, he had said hello alright. He had just popped into my dreams and taken control of the show. He had said hello and so much more.

Mozart Chronicles: The Spaghetti Incident

Mozart had been living upstairs in the bedroom with us for his three month quarantine period.

His cage was too big to put anywhere else really. So we set him up for the winter right next to the bed and bought him an infrared panel heater to keep him warm.

Mozart enjoyed eating and when we first adopted him, he was rather portly. He would tell me years later that the only good thing about captivity was the food. I learned quickly that his favorite food was macaroni and cheese. After giving him a bowl of it one evening, I walked away down the hallway when he called after me "Thank you!" at the top of his lungs which means it sounded like he was using a megaphone, "THANK YOU!"

I decided to try giving him other pastas. So after a spaghetti with meat sauce supper one night, I took his bowl and filled it with some leftovers. I expected him to start scarfing it down immediately but instead he gave me a kindly compassionate look and ignored the dish entirely.

I was puzzled. "Mozart," I asked, "don't you want to even try the spaghetti and yummy meat sauce?" He used one of his big black eyes to zoom in quizzically on the bowl, tilting his head to one side. Now that he was sure he had my attention, he put his head in the dish and began to eat.

Or so it seemed.

In amazement, I watched as the huge bird spent nearly an hour tenderly picking each tiny piece of beef out of the pasta sauce and placing them all to the side of his bowl in a little pile.

I couldn't believe my eyes. One after the other, a seemingly infinite number of tiny little pieces of meat made their way through his beak away from the spaghetti and into the little pile beside it. He was so careful that not a single piece of the meat was bruised or broken.

Mesmerized, I sat down near him and watched him as he continued this daunting task. The little pieces of beef seemed endless in number. Yet he kept on, with the same patient gentleness extended to each piece of meat.

Finally he was done and then, and only then, he began to eat the now cold spaghetti. He sat back on his perch and slowly sucked a long piece of pasta up into his beak. I stared at the pile of ground beef which had been extracted so painstakingly from the pasta sauce and noticed that he had also carefully licked off all the pasta sauce from each piece of meat. Each piece of meat was now as clean as it was before it had been cooked. The little pile of meat was not a pile, it was a funeral mound.

He looked at me, smiling a cockatoo smile, his cheek feathers curled up around his beak in contentment. My eyes watered. I knew that he had been teaching me that he considered each little piece of meat to be sacred, that it had once been a cow and that he respected that cow, that he was honoring the soul that had once animated this flesh and that he would never, ever eat the flesh of another being.

I lowered my head and felt ashamed. Here this gentle bird, who had the capacity for such destruction, had used his powerful beak in gentleness to honor a life that I had not even considered for one minute. I looked at my huge pink bird with new eyes.

"Are you a Buddhist or something?" I asked him.

His cheek feathers curled up even more totally concealing his beak in a big smug smirk. From then on we began calling him our "Buddha bird" and wondered to ourselves how we, people who dedicated all of our resources to helping and saving animals, could have turned our backs on those on our dinner plates. And so we began to struggle with our diet and started a long, arduous journey towards becoming vegetarians.

Five years later, and only about a month after Mozart had left his body and traveled into spirit, we sat in the sun room of our new house. It was a difficult time. We had lost our beloved Mozart, a pet who had become our mentor and sort of our grandfather, and we had moved into our new house without actually owning it yet due to the incompetence of our mortgage broker. We were trying to celebrate and lift our spirits a little. Chris had bought a couple of steaks and grilled them up. I didn't want any but I knew Chris was not ready to become a vegetarian and bringing this up now would only add to his stress. So I remained quiet.

Chris put the plates on the table and sat down. He picked up his cutlery and began polishing it with his napkin. "I wonder," he perused, "if we're going to get ripped off in this real estate deal."

From our neighbor's yard came a loud scream! It wasn't a human scream! It was the unmistakable territorial yell of a Moluccan cockatoo. I knew it was Mozart, his spirit had been hanging around for weeks making incredible things happen. He was watching over us. But would Chris realize this also?

"What was that?" Chris asked, startled and rattled. I said nothing. "That sounded like Motz!" he added.

"It was Motz," I said quietly.

Wide eyed Chris looked at his plate. He was not surprised that our cockatoo friend had the ability to still manifest in the physical world. I waited while he stared longer at his steak. I could hear Mozart now in my head, his deep but soft voice was gently urging me, "BE-come vegetarians..."

Finally I broke the silence, "What are you thinking about?" I asked.

"I'm thinking about Mozart picking all those little pieces of meat out of the meat sauce," he answered incredulously. I knew it! I knew Mozart was right there, working us both over as best he could. But would he really be able to get through Chris' sometimes very thick skull? And his selfish attachment to flesh food? Yes! He was that powerful.

"He wants us to be vegetarians doesn't he?" Chris looked at me rather dolefully.

"Yes dear, he does. Can we be?"

"We'll work on it," he replied.

It would be another year and two Moluccans later before Chris' realization would become reality. Chopin would come and go and then Happy, the 9 year old domestic raised Moluccan, would join us. He and Chris became extremely close and somehow, Happy managed to pick up where Mozart had left off, and Mozart was able to continue his work through Happy! For one summer day after spending the entire afternoon snuggling with Happy, Chris announced during dinner, "I think we should do it. We should get ready and take the plunge and become vegetarians. I think it's the right thing to do."

Silently I rejoiced. Now Mozart wasn't the only Buddhist in the family. We all were.

---

As I prepared to write this story, one I have told to many friends and acquaintances over the years, I sifted through old photos of Mozart. I was stunned to find this photo which is an actual photo of The Spaghetti Incident and clearly shows the pile of ground beef in a little funeral mound in his bowl. Surely Mozart planned everything carefully, including my finding this photo.