Something to squawk about^ahParrot shop will be on TV show

Published 6:47 pm Monday, November 24, 2008

By Diane de la Paz

The “Animal Planet” people figure they found the most amazing phenomena inside Denise’s Parrot Place.

Too bad they didn’t visit Denise’s home to get the truly juicy parrot story.

Denise Mouroux, proprietor of what she calls the “parrot paradise,” will be featured in the Jane Goodall-hosted special, “When Animals Talk,” to air on “Animal Planet” this Sunday at 8 p.m.

Goodall didn’t come to Washington, but “Talk” assistant producer Jonathan Hughes did, after finding Mouroux on the Internet. Seems her parrots “predicted” the February 28, 2001, Nisqually earthquake.

“I read a tale,” Hughes wrote in an e-mail, “of a parrot shop on Mercer Island that went completely silent several minutes before the quake, and that this was something that never happens in a parrot shop.”

Mouroux corroborates: “Nobody was making any noise. It was really eerie. Then the quake hit. They definitely knew.”

Uncanny, yes, but Mouroux’s pet African grey parrot, Maui, also has a sense of romance, often displayed in his folks’ living room.

Mouroux’s husband, Jack Rankin, reports that when he comes home from work each evening, the parrot says — in Rankin’s voice — “Hello, dear.” And Maui, who also does Mouroux’s voice, carries on a conversation as though the husband and wife were speaking to each other. It’s kind of nice after a long day at the office.

And the talk gets sweeter. A few years ago Mouroux was raising a young female parrot in another part of the house. When the girl was old enough, she brought her to meet Maui.

“He was very interested,” Rankin remembered. “He was on the edge of his cage; he was looking at her with one eye,” getting as close as he could.

Then, at the right moment, Maui cooed, “I love you.”

“All we could do was laugh,” said Rankin, who’s come to enjoy life with a wife who came with her own flock of chatty birds.

He still marvels that Maui was “making advances” to the young female parrot “in the English language, rather than whatever they would use in the wild.”

Maybe Maui and Mouroux’s other parrots — about 30 in the shop plus her five pets — have come to prefer her language. It makes sense, since she’s not just an owner. She’s their 24/7 mom who knows how to have fun.

“I taped an old Dirty Harry movie for Maui,” Mouroux admits. “I taught him to say, `Go ahead, make my day,’ in Clint Eastwood’s voice. He does a perfect Clint Eastwood, and sometimes says other things in that voice, like `Go ahead, make my Maui bird.”’

Hughes, the “Talk” producer, sings Mouroux’s praises.

“I’ve filmed parrots many times before and often the conditions that I’ve found them in have been less than ideal. With parrots in particular it’s so important to have someone looking after them who knows what they’re doing and cares deeply about their welfare. You only have to take two steps into Denise’s Parrot Place to realize that this is the case,” he noted. “I’ve never met such a devoted pet shop owner.”

The two-hour “Talk” documentary features dogs, pigs, rats, orcas and elephants that warned people about imminent dangers, ranging from skin cancer to land mines. And in a five-minute segment, Hughes and his crew reenact the Nisqually quake inside Denise’s Parrot Place. This “required two things that were going to be difficult — we wanted all the parrots to stop squawking, and we wanted the whole shop to shudder violently. When you watch the film it looks pretty effective, but the shots we used are a combination of parrots between squawks and me shaking the racks of bells and parrot treats as hard as I could.”

Sounds a bit hokey, but Hughes is serious about animal communication.

“I guess the earthquake-predicting pets tell us that we shouldn’t take animals for granted,” he e-mailed. “They have powers of perception that, in many ways, outclass anything science has yet developed. However, as Denise will tell you, to pick up on them, you have to know the animals well. Because familiarity is at the heart of any good communication, we found that everyday people were the authorities on this, not the scientists.”

In any case, Mouroux has the intuition that comes from motherly devotion. She breeds and raises all of her birds, matches each one to its ideal household and provides a 24-hour emergency hotline for adoptive families.

“I am very, very unusual,” Mouroux acknowledges. She doesn’t care if outsiders call her “bird brain” or “crazy bird lady.”

African greys like Maui, she adds, “have the intelligence of a 2- to 6-year-old child, sometimes more.” So they keep her young, they may keep her abreast of imminent seismic events, and they definitely keep her company.