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Keeping Loud Ones Quiet
- Red Hen Press
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46 Keeping Loud Ones Quiet “You love macaws, right? My great aunt has a scarlet macaw, her best friend.” Eloise hesitates, doesn’t say, “I’d like to strangle your great aunt.” “Here’s the deal,” she says. That cherished pet, wings clipped, neurotic, pampered with sleigh bells and plastic globes whirling has for twenty years heard no voice from her flock, seen no feather except in mirrors. She’s never flown, though she still stretches cut wings through her dreams. For this confined life a hundred birds died, hatchlings poached from borderline nests 47 wet forest, dry forest, park and preserve. Packed in wheel wells, in false-bottomed vans, in car doors and camper shells, in crates and cages, drugged to keep them quiet . . . In shock, in disguise as boots or masks, stuffed into jacket pockets, wings banded they flew, baggage undeclared. They bumped dusty over gravel byways. Some arrived breathing, panicky, revived in Tokyo, London, Paris, Newark, L.A., Oaxaca, Des Moines. Lucky, las lapas left to the sky. Not so the thousands [54.205.238.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:04 GMT) 48 caged and admired the hundreds of thousands plucked or dumped. What we love we hold close. We bring to our eyes expensive glass, draw what’s wild into heart and mind. Celebrate this moment on the wing, twenty macaws, scarlet flock squawking. ...