Who will provide the grand design...
What is yours and what is mine?
For there is no more 'new frontier'...
We have got to make it here.

Don Henley - The Last Resort.


Kellie Sharpe ~ St Augustine, FL and Monticello, GA ~ Email Me!
My obsession with red-vented cockatoos began on a cold, snowy Sunday in March of 1993. I sent my husband, Bob, and our good friend, Marv, to the local pet shop for supplies. They returned with a cardboard box that was saying, 'Hello? Hello?' Knowing I shouldn't have sent them to the pet shop alone, I opened the box and out popped one small bird; a white cockatoo with a V of brilliant, dark orange feathers under his tail, and the most intelligent eyes I had ever seen in a bird's face.

Andre studied his new surroundings for a few moments, then hopped onto my hand and made his human preferences known by reaching over and taking a plug out of my husband's arm. The guys had served their purpose. Andre was in his new home, and had no further need of anyone else's attentions. I asked them what had possessed them to buy this particular bird. Bob replied that Andre had hopped onto his shoulder in the pet shop, and the bird decided at that point he had no intention of staying in the shop when there were perfectly good humans with a perfectly good wallet between them, available to spring him and take him to a real home.
Knowing the small bird was not a Goffin, Bob asked the pet shop owner what he was. "Goffin cockatoo,' was the reply. Okay.

 Bob and Marv had no idea what the bird was, but they knew what the bird wasn't; and since the decision had already been made anyway (by the 'not-Goffin'), the guys pooled their cash and headed out with the bird. The three of us were intrigued by this small bird; there was obviously someone home behind those eyes and nothing escaped him.

We dragged out our "Parrots Of The World," looked him up and discovered what we had was a Philippine Red-Vented Cockatoo. Interesting. According to the book, these cockatoos were endemic to the Philippine Islands - found nowhere else in the world. We had never even heard of them, much less seen one, so we started making calls to our more experienced bird friends. While we chatted and gathered information, Andre amused himself by chasing the dogs, devouring our pizza, repeatedly removing Bob and Marv from the couch and in general, wreaking havoc upon the household. By the end of the evening, we discovered Andre was a member of a severely threatened species.

In the months that followed, Andre settled himself firmly in our home. He played incessantly, ate everything we gave him, and chased the guys and the dogs relentlessly. He loved fruit, especially cherries. I discovered this when Marv was at the house one summer afternoon, inhaling the first of the arriving cherry crop. I went into the living room to find Marv enjoying the first cherries of the season, and Andre holding a mass of bloodied, mangled flesh in his foot, picking at it with obvious relish. After the initial shock of seeing my rare, endangered-species bird with a mangled, bloody foot, I realized it was only a fresh cherry and not a total disaster. Pizza was also a great favorite; he wailed pitifully for pizza when he saw us eating it, but he didn't much care for crust. Nope. Andre was strictly a deep-dish pizza-with-everything kind of bird. He could pick a slice of pizza clean from the crust, toss the crust into the poop tray and wail for another.
A year slipped into two, into three, and we decided we should be searching for a mate for Andre - after all, he was a member of a threatened species, and we felt we should remove him from the pet spotlight and give him the chance to reproduce. We now realize we were far too inexperienced at that point to try and breed red-vented cockatoos, but back then, we had the best of intentions.

We were advised to have Andre surgically sexed to make certain of his gender and that his reproductive organs were in good working order. So we did, and Andre was never the same. Something happened during the relatively simple procedure that caused our small bird to take almost a half hour to awaken from his surgery, and when he did awaken, his attitude had changed and he became unhandleable and untrustworthy. When we got him home, we could no longer let him out for long hours of play and attention as we had before; he was too aggressive to deal with so it was easier to keep him in a larger cage and not try to let him out - he was too unpredictable to try and put back in his cage.
A few more years went by, and we decided that if Andre couldn't breed or be handled, he needed to be in a situation where he could teach. I approached Amanda Whitaker, Curator of Birds at The St Augustine Alligator Farm& Zoological Park, a small private zoo in St Augustine, Florida, and asked if they would like to have Andre as an exhibit bird. Amanda welcomed him there, and gave him a large outdoor flight at the north end of the park, where he lived outdoors among the thick tropical vegetation and enjoyed the company of guests, other threatened birds and whatever other creatures hung around his enclosure.


Andre was a hit. His cheery 'Hello!' could be heard all over the park, and little kids dragged their parents over to see him. He was photographed constantly, and enjoyed all the attention a bird could want. He was loved and well-cared for by all his keepers, especially Gen, in spite of his penchant for attacking Amanda's boots and Gen's ears. During the time he lived at the Alligator Farm, he spurred renewed interest in the red-vented cockatoo by aviculturists from all over the United States.

Andre was found dead in his enclosure on August 26, 2000. Necropsy results revealed no conclusive cause of death. But his energetic spirit lives on among those who knew him, in the form of renewed interest and efforts to preserve the remaining numbers of red-vented cockatoos, and hope to increase them both in the wild and in captivity. Because of the lives Andre touched, the United States now has an 'unofficial' red-vented cockatoo studbook, an electronic mailing list of red-vented cockatoo breeders and pet owners, a connection to the Philippines and the conservation efforts there, and also a connection to Europe, where a large network of red-vented cockatoo breeders and owners exist and have formed a cooperative breeding program.

Because of one small bird, an entire species has hope for the future.

This entire website was created using archaeologically documented colors
of Spanish St Augustine. Colors used are available at Benjamin Moore Paints,
and are as follows:
Canova House White #935; Light Ochre #144; Dark Mustard #132;
Medium Mauve #1257; Maroon Red #1260; Shutter Blue #748.