The noise from the basement could be ignored no longer. The finer points of parrot breeding, as explained by Tony Silva, were losing out to tropical noises filtering up from a subterranean jungle. Silva walked over to an intercom on the wall and pressed the ”listen” button. The squawks and screeches, amplified and distorted, echoed around the kitchen.
Silva leaned close to the intercom, pushed the ”talk” button, and yelled, ”QUIET!”
The birds let up by a decibel.
”Usually that works,” he says now. ”But they`re letting me know it`s past their feeding time.”
He picks up a stainless steel bowl of cooked pink beans and cut-up broccoli and directs a visitor down a narrow stairway into the basement.
The idea that this basement is some kind of jungle collapses. It is the very opposite of a wild environment. An assortment of bird cages are laid out on the grid plan, and, like high-rises, some cages are stacked on top of others. This is the Manhattan of the parrot world: subdivided apartments squeezed into every inch, baffling sounds and smells, ethnic diversity. And a certain watchfulness as to where one steps is advised. After all, this subterranean borough is home to some 100 parrots.
We`ve come to think that anyone who keeps a large number of pets in a house is probably a little off kilter. There have been so many stories of aged ladies who share their studio apartments with 34 dogs or 72 cats and all that that implies. The health department is called in, the humane society is contacted. Bad business for everyone involved.
But Tony Silva, a dark-haired, excitable man, is a mere 25 years old, in full possession of his faculties, and within the ambit of the law in the western suburb where he lives. These parrots get better attention and more love–Silva kisses his birds, on their beaks–than many children receive. They have enabled him to establish a reputation as a leading authority on parrots and one of the more successful records for breeding stubborn species in captivity.
”Hello, guys,” he says as he fills the food bowl in a cage of cockatoos with feather crests that pop up when the birds feel threatened. Their crests are standing straight up because a stranger is in their midst. In the cages Silva has already visited, parrots are gnawing on broccoli bits and peeling beans. They are fussy eaters. To an outsider, Silva`s menu seems unusual. Where are the seeds? Where are the saltines?
”They get seeds in the morning,” says Silva, whose quick movements and protruding eyes are–it cannot be denied–birdlike. ”But never dry seeds because they don`t eat them in the wild, only in captivity. I sprout my own seeds. Then in the afternoon they get their main meal. They need variety in their diet. In the rain forest, they would feed on 50 types of food in a couple weeks. Parrots love meat. People say they don`t, but that`s rubbish. They`ll eat a dead bird that washes up on shore. They`re omnivorous, like humans.”
Silva has had a basement full of birds for four or five years. He doesn`t keep track of the exact number of birds because ”if I thought about it, I`d say, `My God, I`m nuts. I could be doing better things–like chasing women.”` It all started innocently with one small parakeet, given to him as a present when he was a teenager. He has always loved animals, but something clicked with parrots. He liked the colors but he also appreciated their intelligence and curiosity. He started to read up on them, but the books he found didn`t satisfy him. That led him to look for more books and research articles. He started to buy more birds–bigger, more expensive birds. When he graduated from high school, he decided to skip college and teach himself aviculture.
But the real turning point came when pet-shop owners told him it was impossible for an amateur to breed parrots.
”That got me going because, dammit, nothing is impossible in this world,” he said with wide-eyed enthusiasm. ”I started writing and visiting breeders and then I tried it myself because you have to learn hands-on. Then, sure enough, I did it. It wasn`t that hard.”
He fell into the abyss. To establish a breeding program, you need at least three pairs of a species. The basement started to fill up.
”I`m a typical Virgo,” he says. ”I get carried away. I never do anything in moderation. Then there`s the guilt, too, that these birds are dying all over the world and might not be around. I feel I have to accomplish something.”
As he makes his rounds, going up and down the aisles and in and out of small storage rooms filled with cages, he has to shout to make himself heard. The air is filled with whistles, whines, cackles, cries, squeaks, squawks.
”A happy parrot is going to squawk,” Silva says philosophically. As the feeding progresses, the noise dies down. There are occasional flutters of yellow and green wings as disputes develop over the choicest beans. The mildly musty odor in the air is the smell of a basement, not of a roomful of parrots. After the routine feeding, Silva makes the rounds of his special cases, the abused birds he is nursing back to health. Cradling a protesting great-billed parrot in his arm, he squirts vitamins down its throat with a needleless syringe. Other birds get mineral supplements to strenthen bones and eggshells. His patients are sent to him by parrot dealers or other specialists in the field who know of his reputation for working near-miracles with parrots who have, for instance, been kept near a stove, plucked of their feathers, or malnourished by being fed only seed.
”Sometimes I wonder why people get parrots,” Silva said. ”To match their drapes? Some people are cruel, but other people just don`t know. One of the things I hope to get people to realize through the projects I`m doing is that a parrot is a pet you have to make a commitment to for a long time. They can outlive people. The oldest parrot lived 121 years.”
Silva and artist Gracia Bennish have collaborated on a poster for the Field Museum of a Mexican military macaw (Bennish did the larger-than-life pastel drawing and Silva supplied the text). Now they are working on a large, illustrated book of about 70 species of parrots. If the book is published, they realize it will probably sit unread on many coffee tables, but, says Bennish, ”We feel by appealing to people`s sense of beauty through the illustrations and their minds through the writing, we might educate some people and get them to take responsibility for what is around them.”
The effort to make parrot owners better caretakers is only part of Silva`s mission to improve the lot of the creatures he loves. Wild parrots face a potentially graver threat.
”The biggest threat to parrots is loss of habitat,” he says. ”You know, every day, acres and acres of jungle in Central and South America are cut down. That`s that much less territory for parrots.”
Throughout the tropics, governments are sanctioning the clearing of vast tracts of rain forest to increase cultivable acreage, and in many places
–Panama, for one–natives prey on parrots for their colorful feathers, which are used in headdresses.
A rare New Zealand parrot, the flightless, nocturnal kakapo, has been reduced to a population of about 50 because predatory animals that were introduced by European settlers–mainly cats–have ravaged the species. Silva, who has traveled throughout the South Pacific and Central and South America to research and lecture, says the government has transferred 24 of the birds to a small island that has been cleared of cats.
”The process is called `marooning,` ” said Silva, laughing at the word. ”But I don`t know. I think it`ll become extinct. The numbers are just too low, and they don`t breed every year.”
The only answer to extinction in the wild, in Silva`s opinion, is to increase breeding in captivity. That has failed with the kakapo so far, but of the 340 or so species of parrot, 314 have been kept in captivity successfully, and most of them have reproduced. Silva has been responsible for at least a small part of that good record. He was the first to breed slender-billed conures in captivity, for which he won the 1981 breeding award of the American Federation of Aviculture.
”Nature has certain rules you don`t violate,” he says in explaining his breeding success. ”If a pair is very strong, you don`t put them in a colony. If they`re deep-forest birds, they`ll want to be secluded, so I put them on the bottom row or I isolate them. I had a pair of African grays that used to be very nervous. They`d rush into their nest (metal containers that are attached to most of the cages) at the slightest sound. So I moved the cage to a more secluded area and now instead of just two birds a year they`re producing six.”
It is impossible not to wonder how a young man can afford to spend all of his time in bird work of one sort or another. Aviculture, when carried to Silva`s extreme, is not a cheap vocation. A bright-blue hyacinth parrot with foot-long tail feathers like the one in Silva`s aviary can cost $7,500, although prices fluctuate widely. Lecturing, breeding, judging parrot contests and writing a monthly column for Pet Dealer magazine (”Words on Birds”) do not add up to a lucrative living.
”I couldn`t do it without my parents,” said Silva, whose father owns a company that makes electronic components for televisions. ”Without them, this wouldn`t be possible. But they`ve always felt it was better for me to be doing something with myself instead of getting stoned and getting into trouble. They figure it`s better for me to get into trouble in the Amazon looking for birds.”
His last ritual of the afternoon feeding is the rinsing of the sprouted seeds he keeps in big plastic buckets. The ”guys” cock their heads at the noise. Back upstairs, beets are cooking on the stove for tomorrow`s feeding. The advance preparation is necessary because he`ll be in the Loop arranging visas so he can travel to Brazil after the holidays.
”It really is a full-time job,” he says as he flips through the day`s mail, which has brought its usual crop of letters decorated with foreign stamps. ”I get calls about sick parrots from neighbors and letters from all over the place. Here`s one from Brazil about the trip. I got some research results the other day from an acquaintance in Poland, and someone in England has asked me to read the manuscript of his book.
”The parrot world is pretty small, really, so you get to know everyone. Someone in Hungary sent me his new book as a gift, and I don`t know what to do with it. I don`t read a word of Hungarian.”
