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. 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...