With lots of smarts and long lives, parrots were once favored by Baby Boomers, but more of the former pets are now wild, passed from owner to owner or ignored altogether in cramped cages without the feathered mates they crave, rescuers said. Karen Windsor, executive director of Foster Parrots, which runs a sanctuary in Hope Valley, Rhode Island, hears just about every excuse for giving up a parrot: divorce, marriage, babies, kids leaving home, kids moving back, “the bird hates me,” age, disease. So has Mira Tweti, executive director of the national Parrot Care Project based in Los Angeles. “The lucky ones end up in rescues. Others are released to fend for themselves, But the vast majority are neglected to death or passed around from home to home and then neglected, sometimes relegated to garages where no one hears them screaming for attention,” Tweti said. The sanctuary Windsor runs with her husband, Marc Johnson, is full, like hundreds of other parrot rescues and sanctuaries around the country. Part of the problem is the larger varieties of parrots can live from 25 to 100 years or longer (the bigger the bird, the longer its life). And they can be demanding, aggressive, loud and in need of a lot of space. No one has exact numbers, but millions of parrots were bought between the 1960s and 1995, when the pet bird boom subsided, said Tweti, who owns one herself and wrote a book, “Of Parrots and People,” in 2008. There are about 370 known species of parrots. The most common is the parakeet, but Macaws and African greys are also popular, Tweti said.
