Playa del Rey woman is a strong voice for planned parroting
COLUMN ONE
Mira Tweti's lorikeet is living the good life - ocean view, personal chef. Still, the owner advocates leaving such birds in the wild.
ZaZu hangs upside down on the curtains of the apartment window, surveying all that is his: the jumble of colorful plastic balls, the climbing ladders, the panoramic view of the ocean. And the woman standing before him, cooing.
"Whaddya say, cutie? Are you my sweetie?" she asks.
The 3-year-old rainbow lorikeet -- a small parrot -- is a melange of colors.
His head is a deep cobalt blue, his torso a flame red with black stripes. His back and his sweeping tail -- "keet" denotes "long-tailed" -- are Astroturf green.
ZaZu revs up for takeoff with a feathery whir that sounds like a toy helicopter and soars past his owner and out of the room.
Usually he follows her. "I'm the flock leader," says Mira Tweti, whose last name is pronounced "tweety," an impossibly perfect coincidence for a bird owner. (It's Moroccan. She didn't make it up.)
ZaZu flies into the kitchen and perches atop the refrigerator, the better to dominate the two strangers visiting his nest.
"This is the closest he'll get to a tree," Tweti explains.
A photographer moves in for a shot.
"Bye-bye," ZaZu says in a voice that sounds like a scratchy tape recording.
"No, no, they're not leaving," Tweti tells ZaZu.
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.
- Rare Parrots Stolen in N.Y. Sep 01, 1995
- Stolen Parrot Requires Medication, Special Food Sep 24, 1991
- Att. S.F.: a $3,000 Singing Parrot Missing Dec 12, 1988
