Jungle Diary: Rest in peace, Dino.

It was early March, just as the dry season was becoming especially, unbearably stifling, when Felix discovered the tiny, pink hatchling parrot in the jungle behind our house. It was a chocoyo, or a Nicaraguan green conure, although, pink and featherless, the bedraggled specimen looked like a pitiful prehistoric embryo. Its survival seemed tenuous.

Felix is our quietest child, which really isn’t saying much at all. An intrepid adventurer, a champion skater, a surfer, an understated mover and shaker, Felix is elegant and strategic, cool and kind, and deeply intelligent. He’s also like a dog with a bone when he wants something, whether that be an experience, an acquisition, or an understanding of a particular topic. After reading My Side of the Mountain, he became enthralled with falconry, and spent hours researching falcons and other raptors. But before we could organize a visit to Nandaime where we had been told (through the grapevine) that one of Nicaragua’s only young falconers lives, Felix found the baby bird.

He brought the creature home, and was immediately devoted to him, and “him” he remained, despite the fact that, based on our fifteen-year old Horus’ encyclopaedic knowledge and expertise in zoology, the bird was female. Inspired by two-year old Helio’s observation that the bizarre-looking creature resembled “un dinosaurio,” he was christened “Dino.”

Felix, delighted with his new friend, and enthused by the responsibility of raising him, researched the care and feeding of chocoyos meticulously. He promptly bought a syringe and a bag of corn-meal, and conscientiously hand-fed Dino his porridge every couple of hours, every day, for weeks on end.

Dino thrived under Felix’s gentle, reverent ministrations, and rapidly transformed from an alien life-form, to a scrawny punk with tufts poking from the shafts of his newly developing feathers in a rogueish crew-cut, to a sleek, glistening, startlingly beautiful gem of a bird, adorned with an array of feathers in a stunning gradient of emerald to peridot.

From early on, Dino’s forceful, sometimes-belligerent personality dazzled—and occasionally offended—us all. He was hilarious and playful, and would pompously strut back and forth on the kitchen counter, the star of the show, snacking on fruit from the fruit bowl, and pecking at pieces of bread the younger kids had left out, pooping indiscriminately. He loved to scale the paper towel roll in triumph, and if ever it happened that he wasn’t receiving his due attention, he would yell, admonishing us with high-pitched squawks. One evening, Treva, Felix, and Cosmo put on a full-blown performance of Dino impersonations that was truly uproariously funny. Treva’s Dino impressions were especially apt.

Although we had a bird-cage, Dino was almost never in it, but rather hung out on the spot Felix made for him on top of my antique bookshelf in the dining area, where he had a roost and a basket of shells to play with on the infrequent occasion that he wasn’t being petted and snuggled by someone. Every morning he would excitedly yell at the first person who came into the kitchen, demanding to be picked up. Whoever was around would obediently go over, stick out a finger, and Dino would jump on, then climb up that person’s arm to perch.

We all loved him, and I did too, though I was also his harshest critic. I found his feces frequently on my bed, he ate the strap on one of my favourite bags, and while I enjoyed holding him occasionally, he was obsessed with my flamboyant rings, and greedily pecked at my jewels with his astonishingly strong beak. Felix had a habit of placing him on little Margaret’s baby-basket, which he sliced open in several places. Once, he broke an amber bead from Helio’s necklace that we had received as a birthday gift—which seriously annoyed me, and I threatened on a couple of occasions to “set that bloody bird free if you don’t ensure that it stops defecating all over the place.” But instead, I bought some “flypers” (bird diapers) so that we could enjoy the pleasure of his company without being evacuated upon.

Dino himself had ranked every member of the family in order of preference. For a while, given that Helio (our toddler) had squeezed him a few too many times, he was somewhat antagonistic towards him, and would peck at him aggressively if he came near. In contrast, he was quite friendly towards Iggy, and he enjoyed Xanthe’s company as well. Cosmo was one of his favourite people, and Dino had a special propensity for shimmying up Cozzy’s ear to the top of his head. Horus, fifteen, who is usually an animal-whisperer par excellence (though decidedly a cat fanatic, unlike the rest of us), annoyed Dino, and the parrot would go after him, ducking and parrying, in fearsome resistance to our eldest son’s attempts to pick him up. Lee, though, was a huge fan of Dino’s and the feeling was mutual.

His favourite person by far, however, was Felix, and his favourite place of all was riding on Felix’s shoulder, where he presided over his domain (our entire household) imperiously. Felix—our amiable pirate—made great strides in his goal of teaching Dino to say “hello,” repeating the word in a high-pitched voice, to which Dino would respond by chattering lovingly, then kissing Felix on the mouth. Felix would blow, and Dino would kiss some more, and the eccentricity of it all was weird, a little bit disgusting (to me), and undeniably endearing.

While in Catarina, on the way home from a magical trip to the Isletas de Granada with some dear friends, Treva called me to say that Felix had impaled himself (again) by stepping on a nearly two-inch long bent rusty nail that he had somehow speared directly into the soft part of the ball of his foot. “What do we do?” asked Treva, frantic, nearly panicking, but keeping it together. “Pull it out,” I said. “Now. And call me back if something important happens,” and then I hung up.

In the end, it took three separate attempts to yank the nail out before the coup-de-grace was delivered by the father of Felix’s best friend who finally got the nail out of his flesh. Felix came home in a state of veritable shock, pale and trembling, with a throbbing pain that only blossomed as the night wore on. I tended to the wound, reminded him to breathe, emphasized that his body is always oriented towards healing, and promised that the pain would subside, but it was Dino whose comfort was the most medicinal. As our gentle, brilliant, stoic, enormously brave boy wept into the bird’s olivine softness, Dino nuzzled into the crook of his arm, and I had the distinct thought that if it’s possible that a parakeet can come close to feeling affection for a human, here was an example of such a phenomenon.

Even more poignant was the sharp realization, in that moment, that our son, at almost twelve, was (is?) still a little boy, and that this will only be true for another few short weeks, just a few more breaths, a few more frames, and in a beat or two, this child of ours will suddenly be tall and broad and ready to fly.

This morning, like most mornings, all the kids descended upon us while I was getting dressed, lounging around the room, discussing their plans for the day, and there was Dino, swaggering about, being passed around, revelling the spotlight. He pecked at Horus, and Horus reflexively tapped his beak, and I reflexively reared up, dragon-lady incarnate, and said, “Don’t you DARE mistreat that bird.” Horus, who truly hadn’t meant to offend me, or Dino (or harm him, not that he had), was taken aback, and immediately said, “Okay, sorry Dino,” and the morning rolled along.

A few hours later, while I was at my office, I received a text from Lee: Dino is dead.

The kids found him in the pool. Apparently, Dino had flapped and swashbuckled his way onto the balcony, and then, it seems, he had fluttered down, carried by the breeze into the pool, where, unbeknownst to the kids playing upstairs, he drowned.

I called right away, and I cried with Lee, Cosmo, and Felix over the phone, then Treva came to the door of my office and she cried too. I was totally incapable of doing any of the work I was slated to do, so I wrote this instead, while feeding Augustus, the pigeon I rescued from almost certain death just a few days before. But that’s another story.

Rest in peace, Dino.