Winging It

Last week we received an email from a customer very concerned about the morality of promoting a book that seems to implicitly advocate the entrapment and importation of wildlife – specifically, in this case, an African Grey parrot from Zaire. So, we went directly to the source – author Jenny Gardiner. Thanks both to Jenny for her thoughtful response, and to our customer  – we’re always grateful for the opportunity to reply to your concerns. Jenny will be at store Friday, September 10th; we hope you’ll come join the conversation – click here for more info. And to see how Graycie is doing for yourself, click here for some great videos.

Yes, Graycie is a wild caught parrot, from Zaire. However, she came to us two decades ago, when imported birds were quite common and available even at pet stores (although we were not fans of the idea of acquiring a bird this way and had chosen not to earlier in our lives). Unfortunately, Graycie was a surprise gift from my well-meaning brother in law, who had been living in Zaire and brought parrots home for the whole family for Christmas.

I make abundantly clear in the book that never have we been in favor of wild caught adoption, that birds, in my opinion, are meant to fly in the wild and not be caged in one’s home. But once this poor stressed baby grey showed up on our doorstep, basically, we had no choice but to do the best we could to try to make her life comfortable.

Trust me, my goal is not to enrich my coffers on the backs of a captured parrot. For  what it’s worth, writing books is hardly a profession that lines very many authors coffers anyhow; my children earned more money petsitting this summer than I earn as a published author. Rather I am a writer who had a story to tell, and that is what this book is about. I do not paint a happy glossed-over depiction of how it has been for Graycie or for us, but rather I tell the truth about what we both faced and how we both learned to accept each other, warts and all. And I do make the case for adoption of rescued parrots rather than acquiring domestically bred parrots, because there are so many unsavory parrot mills out there and perpetuating such an unethical and cruel practice is wrong as well. In addition, I have a short story in an upcoming Humane Society-sanctioned anthology of dog stories, and I chose a nearby parrot rescue sanctuary as my charity of choice on the page listing contributors animal charities. Truly, my family is all about caring for creatures. Trust me, if I had any way of returning Graycie back to her flock in Africa I’d have done it long ago. Short of that, we did what we could to give Graycie a happy life, sometimes under very trying circumstances for all involved.

I’ve received hundreds of emails and Facebook messages from parrot lovers and owners all over the world, and they were all touched by and completely related to the story, so I hope you will consider giving it a chance before outright discounting it as a bad book or me as a bad person, because –and I might be a little biased here, so  do forgive me–neither is true.

- Jenny