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This lorikeet is one charming bird brain

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

In a charming Column One, The Times’ Carla Hall introduces the world to a colorful character. Actually, make that two colorful characters. Hall writes on ZaZu (above) and his owner/caretaker/companion, MIra Tweti.

As Hall notes, it’s pronounced ‘tweety,’ a perfect name for a birder, but just a coincidence. Click here to see the whole story and photo gallery. But here’s an excerpt:

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Once, she was a cat person. Now Mira Tweti is a bird person. Tweti has sacrificed much of her two-bedroom Playa del Rey apartment to ZaZu, fashioning a mini-rain-forest-cum-bird-playground on her spacious balcony and draping the living room sofa in towels, since ZaZu poops frequently as he flies. ‘It’s like living with a 3-year old,’ Tweti says. ‘Hello, hello,’ ZaZu says. ‘Goodbye.’ Once a film publicist, Tweti has written extensively on bird and environmental issues for various publications (including this one). Her just-released book, ‘Of Parrots and People,’ offers a portrait of the avians that is alternately serious and quirky. (‘Research on wild birds has shown that 30% of the time, birds fly for fun,’ she writes.) It also examines the often brutal practices of the parrot trade, both legal and illegal.

Earlier this year, Tweti published ‘Here, There and Everywhere,’ an elaborately illustrated children’s book about a rainbow lorikeet. The book is fictional, but it’s filled with facts about parrots. Of the roughly 350 species of parrots indigenous to the world’s tropical zones, a few dozen are lorikeets, all distinguished by their long, tapered tails. Lorikeets such as ZaZu -- who is 11 inches from head to tail -- live about two decades, sometimes longer. Some African greys and Amazons can live into their 70s. Macaws and cockatoos have been known to live beyond 80. Tweti’s devotion to parrots has led her to a ‘Born Free’ paradox: The pet she loves is a wild animal and shouldn’t be a pet at all, she believes. ‘It’s like putting a human being in solitary confinement,’ says Tweti, who adopted ZaZu from a family that was giving him away.

-- Steve Padilla

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