Santa Rosa man opens home to rescued birds

Raucous squawking signals that you’re close to John Lloyd’s busy, little rented house on West Avenue in southwest Santa Rosa.

Lloyd appears at the front door with a dear friend on his shoulder. It’s Boo Boo, a magnificent, vanilla-hued umbrella cockatoo with sunshine yellow on the undersides of his wings.

Pretty soon, the bird leans to offer a visitor a kiss.

“If he ain’t kissing, he ain’t happy,” says Lloyd, a stocky, soft-edged fellow who for most of his 61 years has worked as an electrician and drawn his charge in life from colorful - in multiple respects - tropical birds.

He mentions that Boo Boo, who’s 13 and could live to 80 or older, loves people even though he was for years battered and neglected by the guy who owned him. Boo Boo bobs musically as Lloyd steps through a living room dominated by large, steel cages inhabited mostly by rescued parrots, a couple of which were so distressed when Lloyd took them in they’d plucked their entire breasts as bare as that of a meat-counter chicken.

Lloyd enters the backyard, where a couple of volunteers share some fresh air and play time with birds clutching or walking about on open, free-standing perches.

Salmon-hued Ollie, a Moluccan cockatoo, peers up into the yard’s prolific plum tree for fruit possibly within reach. Popeye, a green-winged macaw believed to be 47, stretches his great wings. Emma, the military macaw that greets Lloyd with, “Papa! Papa!” when he removes the fabric cover from her cage each morning, snuggles with one of Lloyd’s helpers.

Welcome to Birds of a Feather Rescue, Lloyd’s home for abandoned, neglected and abused birds. At this moment, he and his wife, Mary, and a handful of volunteers are keeping more than 30 birds, most of them sizable and vocal parrots.

Lloyd said the primary reason the birds are there is that the people who took them in as expensive, exotic pets had no sense of the magnitude of the commitment they’d taken on.

“You’ve got to learn the animal,” Lloyd said. “People should study them before they get ’em, but they don’t.”

He said too many new bird owners don’t anticipate that their winged pets might well be noisy and produce a mess as they shell seeds and discard food not to their liking, and they damage property, and they poop.

Beyond that, Lloyd said it doesn’t occur to many people who acquire birds as pets that the creatures need contact and attention. He added with a shrug, “If people don’t have the time to give them, why have them?”

As a consequence of poor preparation by humans, many home-kept birds large and small become ill, crippled or self-destructive because they’re so terribly neglected.

Many others are outright abused. Lloyd nodded toward the magnificent, red-headed Popeye and said he’d come from a cabinet shop at which some of the workers amused themselves by throwing things at him.

One of Lloyd’s most dedicated helpers is Dawn Clayton, who two months ago rescued from the lake at Santa Rosa’s Howarth Park a duck that stumbled about on a leg nearly amputated by a snare of discarded fishing line.

Clayton said so many stories of what pet parrots suffer are heartbreaking, certainly that of a blue-fronted Amazon that was kept in a dark closet for 10 years by a woman who’d discovered it would stay quiet in there.

Amazons, macaws and cockatoos “are so smart,” Clayton said. “They sing and dance. They are so funny, it’s like having little comedians with you.”

“But they will destroy anything they can get their beak into. I personally don’t think people should be able to have macaws and these large parrots locked in cages.”

Clayton and Lloyd share the curse of being unable to look away when they see an animal that’s suffering. Clayton, who does her bird-rescue work before and after her shifts at the Pet Club store in Santa Rosa, regards Lloyd as a genuine hero because he’s largely disabled by ruptured discs in his spine and brings in very little money, yet he does so much for the birds.

“He’s struggling, but still he puts the birds first, always,” Clayton said.

“He’s just a normal guy who has put his entire heart into this. He’s a fighter. He’s a nut. He’s hilarious.”

Lloyd said it costs $400 to $700 a month to feed the rescued birds. He and the other Birds of a Feather volunteers collect donations here and there; Lloyd often goes to Santa Rosa’s Wednesday night street market with Boo Boo or Ollie and a donation jar.

But he said most of what it costs to pick up, care for, feed, medically treat and seek good adoptive homes for birds comes out of his and his helpers’ pockets.

“I owe my landlady money,” he said with a what-can-I-do? grin. He hopes to attract more donations and grants to Birds of a Feather Rescue and to enlist more volunteers, obtain federal nonprofit status, build more cages.

For the moment, he does what he can, spending most of his time and money loving and caring for rescued birds that he insists are smarter and funnier and more affectionate than most people will ever know.

“This is just an amazing group of animals,” he said. As he took in the happy sight of Boo Boo, Ollie and Popeye seeming to savor their time on the outdoor roosts, Lloyd knew very well that they and most of the other birds he’s rescued are quite likely to outlive him.

As with the past-due rent, he doesn’t like thinking about that.

To learn more about Birds of a Feather Rescue and the birds available for adoption, visit:

http://www.birdsofafeatherrescue.org/