Romulus: The Old Man in the Sea

My name is Romulus and I'm an Asiatic Veiltail Carp or goldfish. I am 13 years old! I could live to be 25!

I am over a foot long now! Most people do not realize how long goldfish can live if they let us.

My human rescued me from a tank full of goldfish meant to be turtle food or food for bigger fishes. She brought me home and added me to her 10 gallon fishtank which was on top of her piano.

Well, I disappointed her bitterly when I killed all of the Angelfish and Swordfish in the tank with me. She wasn't that knowledgeable about fish, otherwise she would have known that I would do this--plus there was just enough room for me in that tank!

However, she admired my strength and beauty and took very good care of me. Each night, she would practice the piano--remember my tank was on top of it--and I would critique her playing. When she would make a mistake, I would thrash angrily and stare viciously at her. So she would try very earnestly to play beautifully. I especially loved Chopin for his flowing notes to which I would stretch my fins and yawn quite widely! I do NOT like Bach though because his music is so choppy, that is more for humans than fish!

Making Waves to Music

At the end of each practice session (some of them lasted eight hours or more), my human would play my own special song she always played just for me. I knew then that she was finished practicing and would wag my tail. Yes! I do! That song was Mozart's "Ah Tutti Contenti," from The Marriage of Figaro.

After five years of being in that tank, I had grown to be nearly six inches long and my human decided to get me a bigger tank. I moved into a 29 gallon tank with large blue gravel which I enjoyed piling into mountains and rearranging every week. My human was now becoming much smarter about fish care--measuring the pH in my tank and adding only distilled water during water changes, which she'd do every month.

Someone to Call My Own

But I was becoming lonely. My human now had two parrots to whom she was paying more attention. She didn't come over as often and pet me (yes, she'd put her hand in the tank and I would swim under her hand for a pet). So she decided to get me a mate. That brought Rhiannon, the egg-shaped goldfish, into my lonely life. Rhiannon grew very quickly and soon was the size of a honeydew melon! We became very chummy but needed more room so we moved again--this time into a 55 gallon tank! Now I'm over a foot long!

I still listen to my human practice the piano when she has time. We have known each other 13 years now and that is a long time for a fish and a human. I know her parrots pretty well too. They like to look at me in the tank and I like to look at them. I'll swim over to near where they're sitting and weÕll stare at each other communicating and exchanging ideas. It's fun!

Taking care of me is a LOT of work and is also expensive. My human has to spend nearly a whole day a month cleaning my tank and measuring ammonia and nitrite levels in my water. She is careful not to use tap water in my tank, which can contain residual chemicals from winter runoff (do you humans really drink that stuff?) which can kill me rather quickly. Actually, once I got tuberculosis from this and my human nursed me through it. Not many fish survive that! She was vigilant though and I made it!

pictured above: Romulus, the goldfish, lived to be 13 years old!

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. 2

I rushed home from work every day to be with her as long as I could. I held her and hand fed her, gave her medicine, promised her it would be all right. On that last day when I rushed in, she had been waiting and an obvious look of relief came over her face as she saw me. I held her. It was clear to me now that this was the end. She fought a little bit, her eyes rolling around in her head, I closed them. "Let go" I whispered and she raised her head up and let out a growl and then she let go.

We returned her body to the vet for a necropsy. Tissues were sent out for a histopathology and eventually, the results came back as confirmed for Proventricular Dilatation Disease. And then I began my whirlwind education with Dr. Branson Ritchie of the Emerging Diseases Research Group of the University of Georgia.

One perk to my job was that we had an ISDN internet connection and would often have a lot of seasonal downtime. While others read horoscopes and gossip columns, I was learning everything I could about viruses and discovered a number of scientific papers by Dr. Ritchie and the EDRG about PDD whose reading required a medical dictionary which I had since I worked at a medical publisher. Flipping through a bird magazine, I saw an add for a 900 number (no longer available) one could call to talk with the Ph.D. veterinarian, Branson Ritchie, about bird health. My phone bill was about to go up. I called Dr. Ritchie regularly and practically begged for information on how to keep my Mozart alive. He explained how viruses worked to me, explained about the immune system and supportive care and the importance of easily digestible high quality foods. He sent me a brochure about PDD with a picture of a Moluccan on the front who had been experimentally infected with PDD. The bird just lay there, unable to move, totally paralyzed. I was determined this would never happen to Mozart.

To ensure ultimate hygiene, Mozart moved into the bedroom with his cage right next to my bed. This way he would be separated from our other animals and their germs and I could monitor his health all the time. I bought a heater and kept the room at 75 degrees at all times. I bought full spectrum lights for the ceiling above him and meticulously cleaned his cage and bowls every day.

I ordered some Harrison's High Potency formula to be Mozart's high quality, highly digestible food while waiting for my vet to locate the prescription Roudybush diet made specifically for PDD birds. Mozart refused to eat this too. The picture of the rotting macaroni in Fluffy's stomach haunted me and I knew I would have to stop feeding him regular food immediately or risk the same fate for him. He wouldn't eat the Harrison's, after all he was a finicky cockatoo with a penchant for cheese. I went to work one day and sat at my desk crying all day. I called my vet and scheduled to have Mozart euthanized the next day. I wasn't going to watch him starve to death like Fluffy. That night as I lay awake in bed crying, I heard Mozart walk over to the dish full of pellets and begin eating them. I canceled the appointment.

to be continued tomorrow...

Pictured above: Mozart, right, preens Fluffy, left, much to her delight during the magical days

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: The Fluffy Flower, Pt. 2

We decided to wait a bit to introduce Fluffy to Mozart. At every opportunity though, once she heard him squawk from upstairs, she tried to run or fly upstairs. So we brought his cage downstairs and set them up in neighboring cages. Mozart had been accustomed to snuggling at night with his 'girlfriend' which was actually a large dog toy that oddly resembled a large parrot. Fluffy quickly became jealous of this girlfriend and attacked it one evening severing the rope from which it hung and throwing it to the ground. She would hop back and forth from cage to cage shrieking and leaping like a huge bullfrog. We had never seen a bird hop so far and so high and thought she truly seemed to be a pink velosa raptor.

Mozart was an unwilling suitor. He tried to ignore Fluffy, tried to just sit there and do nothing. But she would have none of it. She began trying to make a nest in the newspapers of her cage so we got her a nestbox made from a half of a large whiskey barrel which we sanded and painted pink for her. Turned upside down in her cage, it seemed ideal. She started laying eggs right away. Much of their relationship was hidden from us but we would eventually catch glimpses of them preening and cuddling each other. Winter evenings that year spent in the living room watching TV or reading were shared with two very large, very pink birds very much in love. Mozart finally came out of his shell and became a loving mate to Fluffy.

But it was not to last. She was diagnosed with a fatal disease thought to be caused by a virus and lived only until that July, losing her battle on July 8, 1997. Her desperate desire to have a mate, lay eggs, have chicks and raise them and her desperate battle to live would haunt me for many months, even years. The day after she died, that hot July afternoon, I found myself sitting on the front stoop looking at what had been her nestbox, now a flower box. We'd taken it away and put it outside and used it as a flower box when she had first gotten sick only a week earlier.

Above it in a hanging flower pot hung the dead remains of a pink impatien plant which was now a year and a half old. A second glance showed me that this flower, meant to only last one season, had suddenly come to life and had one tiny pink flower in full bloom! This impatien was one and a half years old and had lain dead since the harsh winter! Now it was blooming!

I knew it was her soul re-animating the flesh of this flower! I brought the flower pot inside and hung it in the bedroom near Mozart's cage. A knowing, wise look from him was all I needed to be sure of this miracle. Later I told my husband, Christian, about it. He nodded sadly.

Then on the anniversary of her death the following year, the same impatien, having lain dead all winter, bloomed fully again! I was still grieving heavily for Fluffy, tears would well up in my eyes and my heart would seem to squeeze and tighten at the thought of the injustice of her life, waiting 13 years to finally find happiness and to only have it for a few short months. I lay in bed one night sleepless as usual, and rolled over to see Mozart standing on the edge of his cage, in the dark he seemed to glow as he looked down at me with a loving cockatoo smile on his face. Then he turned and walked across the cage and sat next to...himself! Mozart was already over on the other side of the cage! "Mozart!" I called out, "is that Fluffy?" "Yea yea!" he said in his little high pitched voice, "she's here right now!"

to be continued tomorrow...

(pictured: Mozart sits atop his cage with the spectral Fluffy and her chicks flying above and to the right of him)

Mozart Chronicles: The Fluffy Flower, Pt. 1

"You know you really should breed him. He's an endangered species and he's wild caught. He's important to the gene pool. He's really a fine specimen, a really big guy."

These words from the parrot rescuer I'd adopted Mozart from came over the phone sounding totally foreign to me. As someone involved with animal rescue, breeding is strongly discouraged. But bird rescue is different. True, breeding is still strongly discouraged for most species not suited for a life in captivity, but in those days, bird overpopulation wasn't as well understood as it is now.

"I thought he had been at a breeder and didn't want to breed?" I asked.

Mozart's rescuer continued, "Yes but cockatoos, especially Moluccans will spend their entire lives in the wild searching for the perfect mate and then mate for life. He probably just didn't like any of the females he'd been put with. It's not like he had any choice," she replied. She was working me over pretty hard it seemed. I thought this must be really important, after all, her resumé was and still is probably the most impressive I've seen for any professional animal handler, including a Master's in animal psychology. She went on, "You know we've searched all over the country to find a teenage wild caught female for him, they're very hard to come by."

Gullible as I was in those days, I began searching immediately for a wild caught female Moluccan cockatoo who needed a home. I thought I'd be searching for years from the way this woman made it sound, but I found one in only a few months. A pair of vets, a husband and wife team, in Minnesota were looking to place their 13 year old Moluccan hen with a nice male. She was very sexually frustrated they said and plucked and shredded her feathers. Mozart's quarantine time was up and it didn't seem like Fluffy needed to go through one coming from such fine vets who had only two birds of their own, a macaw and a middle aged amazon.

I flew to Duluth, Minnesota and arrived in February 1997 on one of the coldest days on record. The vets, who bred show collies on the side, were excited for Fluffy's future and picked me up and brought me to their farm to meet the little lady.

Fluffy was very sweet and took to me immediately. She was completely tame. That night in my hotel room, I gave her a shower and carefully dried her with the hair dryer on cool setting so as not to burn her. We cuddled and allopreened that evening. It was a magical night. It is hard to describe snuggling with a large bird, it's like meeting an angel and getting a big hug. The next day, the vet picked me up and dropped me off at the airport. I had a health certificate and airport carrier and Fluffy was riding in the cabin with me. I had to take her out of the carrier so they could inspect it for bombs (there had been a recent incident with bomb scares on domestic flights) and Fluffy climbed to my shoulder and exulted in the shower of 'oohs' and 'aahs' from the other passengers. We became instant celebrities. The flight went well and soon enough we were home in DC.

(pictured above: Fluffy sits atop her brooding box)

to be continued tomorrow...

Mozart Chronicles: The Pink Slug

Slugs are descended from snails and more properly are just snails who have lost their shell. They are mollusks and also referred to as 'molluscans.' They are blind for the most part but can detect light and dark. There are many kinds of slugs living on land and in the sea some with beauty to rival the most beautiful flower. The vision of the many antennaed pink slug Mozart sent me is not so unrealistic as sea slugs do exist with many, many antennae and of as many hues as the visible spectrum (as far as we know). I believe the many glowing antennae symbolized the number of years he had lived in his rainforest home, here only about ten or so appear in this illustration.


Slugs were used in divination by various cultures and also symbolized writing because of the curvy, curious trails they leave. They are a symbol of the Hermetic Path, the ancient way of alchemists, mystics and such.

Mozart Chronicles: Splish Splash!

Splish Splash, I was taking a bath...Mozart enjoys a good dunking in lukewarm water. A good thorough soaking helps control the prodigious production of down powder cockatoos are famous for. It also helps reduce the itching they feel when they have too much of a powder buildup which can lead to plucking, self-mutilation and more. Such bathing is not a panacea for these problems but are certainly a step in the right direction.

At the time of this bathing excursion, Mozart was very feeble and also blind. Nevertheless he relished times like these. He was never much a screamer or even a squawker, and was a man of few words, but he gurgled and mumbled during baths and other times of high excitement. He seemed to have three 'voices'; one that sounded like a little boy somewhat similar to the voice of cartoon character, Felix the Cat (many cockatoos also have this same voice); and he had his own birdy voice which sounded raspy, deep throated, and chilling, and lastly, he had the old-man-Moluccan voice which he most liked to joke around with which sounded just like Jimmy Durante.

Wiggling his butt happily in a waterfall, Mozart must have been thinking about his old home in Seram where daily rainstorms provide natural bathing opportunities and high humidity.

After the tub filled, Motz (pronounced "moats"), walked around in the water. It took him great effort at this point in his life to walk around much on his cage due to his arthritis and general infirmity, but in the water, near weightlessness allowed him to move around easily and have a little fun at the same time. I would hook my finger in his beak and pull him from one end of the tub to the other for a quick jaunt as well. I made sure he was completely soaked from head to toe and would even massage his feet under the water to soothe his tired, old bones.

With the hair dryer on COOL setting, I could put it close to his skin without burning him and dry him nearly completely before returning him to his cage. That's how it was with winter time baths so he would not catch a chill or one of his famous sinus infections. He would spend a good hour or so preening happily when this was all done and then we'd both be ready for a long winter's nap.

All contents and photographs © 2007 Patti Henningsen. Use is strictly prohibited.

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: I Can Hear For Miles

Mozart was very upset when I returned to the job which I had disliked so much. Not only that, but I became even busier, taking classes in design and working with rescue groups. It seemed like we didn't have very much time together but every spare minute that I was in the house, I spent with him.

He began to complain about it. I would leave for work in the morning and tell him, "Bye Motzie, I'll see you later. I love you." And he would sadly whine, "You don't love me." I would always reply, "Yes I do love you."

This went on for years. Finally one day after I'd said, "I love you," only to have him declare loudly, "You don't love me!" I confronted him. "Mozart," I demanded, "why do you always say I don't love you? I love you more than anything else in the world so why do you always say that I don't?"

He leaned down over his cage and put his big head next to mine, zooming one big black eye in on me and said solemnly, "You don't THINK about me!"

I realized that he meant that while I was busy running around doing a million things that I do in a day, working, cleaning, cooking (well sometimes, ok not very much), volunteering, taking classes, that my mind sped along a zillion miles a minute planning out the week ahead. During none of this time did I ever think about Mozart. It wasn't until I got home that I focused on him completely, if then. I looked up at him sadly defensive. "But Mozart," I replied, "I have to go out and make money so you can eat and so I can pay your vet bills, and I have to go to school to keep up with my job, I have to help rescue animals because YOU taught me to and I have so much to take care of, I am so busy and I have to think about a lot of other things a lot. But I love you very much and I'm very sorry you feel neglected."

I knew that Mozart was in tune with me 24 hours a day regardless of how much distance there was between us. I could be at work and he would know exactly what I was thinking. Sometimes I would even get uncannilly strong clairaudient messages from him while I was away.

So to make him feel more loved, I took a picture of him (the one at the top of this page) and put it in a little frame and took it to work. I put it on my desk next to my computer monitor and during the day, I would take mental breaks and look at his picture and send him loving thoughts. I even hooked up our home phone message machine next to his cage and would call him during lunchbreaks and leave him messages! He never said, "You don't love me!" again.

All contents and photographs © 2007 Patti Henningsen. Use is strictly prohibited

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: Who Was Mozart the Moluccan?

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. Unlike many male Moluccans in a breeding situation, he never harmed one of the females he was caged with. Instead, he mashed their eggs. So the breeder removed him and brought him inside to be a pet.

There he was ignored for 10 years. When I adopted him the rescue coordinator explained his egg mashing behavior to me. She said they joked that he was gay. But contrary to this, I received my first instantaneous communication from Mozart, "he doesn't want his children to be born in captivity," I told her.

Later when Mozart and I were to appear on the Pet Psychic with Sonya Fitzpatrick, she confirmed that he didn't want any more girlfriends and that for this reason he might be gay. Mozart wouldn't have cared what anyone thought about his sexual preferences, like any good Buddha, as long as he didn't have to propagate under duress.

Mozart Chronicles: Reality or Something Like It

Practical Advice on Modern Living from a Geriatric Cockatoo
Sometimes I tell people how Mozart talked to me, out loud, in English, in complete sentences and fully cognizant of what he was saying, and I get a half-cocked grin in reply, especially from people who have parrots themselves. The ones who have parrots themselves get mad or jealous. Their parrots don't talk to them like that, they say. "Well," I reply, "maybe they don't because they know you think they're just a bird brain or that you think you're some advanced being when actually it's them who are the advanced being."

That's usually the end of the discussion. But sometimes I know the person is a true bird lover, who really does admire the intellectual capabilities of their feathered friends. And to them I say, "Well I think that maybe deep, deep down part of you doesn't really believe they're as intelligent as yourself. You maybe think they are somewhat intelligent but you still think you're smarter." Then that's usually the end of the discussion. Then there are the two or three people I've met and heard about over the years, who believe in the deepest parts of their soul that their precious feathered friends are not only equal in intelligence but also in every other way. And those people and I get really excited when we talk to each other because we've had similar experiences. Then there are those people who nod silently, who 'know' but are afraid to speak up for fear of being labeled a nutty bird owner. And lastly there are the people whom do have these experiences with their feathered friends and simply ignore them, unprepared for what it may mean.

Fourteen Years of Silence Broken
I don't know why Mozart decided to start talking to me this way. He'd never spoken before in his fourteen years of captivity until the day we brought him home. I feel he sensed my deeply seated belief that his life and my life were on equal planes. But, as I've noticed some animals do, he probably watched the movie of my life which is playing above my head in my crown chakra in an endless rerun and saw that one day when I was eighteen years old and walked into a pet store. I hurried through the store looking for a certain kind of fish food for my goldfish, Romulus, when I came around an aisle and stopped dead in my tracks. There in a much too small cage, as is so often the case, in front of me, was a majestic Moluccan King Lory looking out at me.

His eyes held me captive. In them, I saw an intelligence, a sentience, a depth and a sorrow of which magnitude I don't often even see in the eyes of my fellow humans. I choked, his sorrow filled my heart with a profound sadness and a sense of injustice. This is the surge of clairsentience that any true animal lover is familiar with. For weeks afterward, his eyes haunted me. I never forgot him. Today, my heart still pangs with remorse for the fate of this gorgeous, wild being who should have soared his whole life over the mountainous gorges of Seram, Indonesia. So maybe Mozart saw that moment in my life, or other moments like it when I've connected with a nonhuman intelligence and been haunted for days and weeks afterward and been forever changed, forever pivoted into another being's point of view and unable to ever really go a full 180 degrees back to my own, wracked by some gross injustice I was powerless to stop.

But talk to me he did. Not very much at first, just simple stuff like saying 'thank you' and requesting favorite foods. I noticed his pronunciation was not that great though and I set about to help him speak more clearly. Parrots learn more about mimicking the sounds of human mouths by watching how those mouths actually form the sounds than by listening to them. So one afternoon, I set about to teach him one of the hardest sounds for a parrot to make, the 'b' sound, a plosive, as it's called. With my mouth close to his, as he hung off the side of his cage, I said distinctly, "Mozart, you have a black beak. Your beak is big and black," emphasizing the b's. He turned his head to one side and zoomed a big black eye up next to mine and said slowly but clearly in a sweet little voice reminiscent of Felix the cat, "And you don't have one?"

An Intelligence That Mirrors Our Own
My eyes opened wide and my jaw loosened and then dropped. I stared into his eye for a moment or two. In that big black eye, I saw glimmers of wisdom earned from years of jungle living and untold, harrowing adventures in short quick flashes. I thought about how this incredible bird was older than me, older than my parents even, and smart enough to be able to engage in conversation with a totally dissimilar species. But I didn't want to lose this moment. I fumbled and thought 'what do I have instead of a beak?' I parted my lips and bared my teeth, "No I don't have a beak, I have teeth," I said and tapped on my front teeth with my fingernail to show him the hardness of them. His focus turned to my teeth which truly fascinated him. He leaned out, reaching his beak forward and gently tapped one of my big front teeth with the curve of his huge beak. The two biological tools we shared, meant for rending food in some manner, clicked together and then he straightened up. His question was answered. He understood.

During that first week he shared with us, we immediately learned he abhorred any type of activity with the slightest hint of violence to it. One evening we sat back to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Mozart. A favorite scene came on in which two knights engaged in a standing joust. As the knights heaved and hoed back and forth between thrusts of their lances, Mozart imitated and leaned back and forth and groaned and moaned much like anyone you might see watching a prizefighting match. Then one knight put his lance through the eyehole of the other's helmet and gallons of blood then gushed forth out of the lanced knight's helmet. Mozart froze, looked at both us to see our reaction and then screamed! He screamed and screamed in protest until we finally acquiesced and changed the channel. This type of violent entertainment was totally unacceptable to him.

The Parrot Pacifist
We soon learned that other unacceptable, seemingly violent, programming included basketball, hockey, and football. Any hint at all of physical contest and especially prizefights were totally unacceptable for us to watch with Mozart. Even if my husband, Christian, and I were to watch television downstairs with the volume turned down, he still knew what we were watching. We finally figured out he could see everything we could see and hear regardless of where we were physically. He would scream with a loud, angry shriek that was truly deafening. Even cracking an egg to make scrambled eggs on the weekend would elicit an angry shriek from the little Buddha Bird watching us in his mind's eye from upstairs. Our penchant for blowing away virtual people and creatures on my Playstation was just as unacceptable. Finally I would explain to Mozart over and over again, "Motz! (pronounced Motes) They're not real! It's ok! They're not real! It's just a game (movie, etc.)." After several years, Mozart was able to handle television violence and Playstation games a little better but he still had a tolerance threshold. During that time we discovered the antidote for all this horribly upsetting behavior was to watch ballet or Riverdance or some such programming. Elvis movies were a favorite. He stood transfixed in front of the television gently swaying his head back and forth in the true Moluccan cockatoo waltz as he watched Celtic dancers or ballerinas seemingly float across the stage, and Elvis too.

The Humorous Buddhist
As Mozart loosened up a little with his Gandhi-like approach to life, he displayed a sense of humor too. Playing with Chris one evening, he playbit him softly on the thumb. Chris seized the opportunity to admonish our little peace loving friend, "Hey you bit me!" he cried to Mozart in mock indignation, "I thought you were a Buddhist!" Mozart swung his head out near to Chris' and said smilingly, "I am!" After living with Mozart for about four years, I had come to rely on him for practical advice on daily living. Thinking he could foretell future events, I asked him about returning to a job I had very much disliked. "Pat," he said sadly, "don't go back." I ignored his wise advice and went back to that job, needing money very badly at that point. Six months later, I lay sleepless in my bed, pulling my hair out as I reviewed the day's events of working at an abusive corporation. Agonizing over the verbal abuse I dealt with daily, I could think of nothing to ease my mind and remove the heartless corporate vampires from my thoughts. At last, around 3am when all hopes of a restful night's sleep were lost, Mozart piped up from his cage, next to my bed. "Pat!" he said softly, gently, "they're not real."

Relief from Reality
Nothing in the world could have relieved my mental agony at that moment, nothing! But those three little words caused me to burst into hysterical laughter! I buried my face in my pillow and laughed as heartily as I have ever laughed in my whole life!

Of course he was right! They really weren't real! They were just hollow shells of non-awareness, judgmental sticks in the mud, stuck in the drudgery of the corporate rat race! They were just caught in the matrix of a slave world where people expend almost their entire lives in pursuit of the bottom line trapped behind a desk for fifty or sixty hours a week like captive birds in a pet store. I was still real. I hadn't sold out and lost my humanity in the process and caused others to suffer mental agony for the purposes of my own advancement on the corporate ladder.

I had learned from my sweet feathered friend that there is an entire reality of intelligence and altruism existing in natural harmony with the universe, the world of nature. I had learned that animals and every living being attunes easily, with almost no effort, to the universal intelligence to achieve whatever goal it sets for itself according to its desires. I had learned that wild animals living in nature were as evolved as they wanted to be and that we seemed to be more a pawn of our own evolution than truly free within it. The real world was the world where Mozart had come from, the rainforest, and in that place, spoken language is not a measure of intelligence, it is a veil that conceals the meaning of life which is simply to feel alive. I went to work the next day and put a sticky note up next to my computer monitor which read in large, bold letters, "They're not real." When the corporate vampires walked by, they saw it and looked unsettled. Who knows what they thought. It was their turn to lose some sleep.