When I was little I used to watch TV with a scarlet macaw named Pepper. He was smart and chatty. He knew the Mexican hat dance. And could also sing Happy Birthday. He danced. He bobbed and weaved. He liked to crack sunflower seeds. Before I was born he was my parents’ main child. Then they had me. And then they had my brother. For Pepper, my brother Jake was the final insult. He didn’t like becoming third string. I don’t blame him. He started to chase visitors around the house. His screams were blood curdling. His cage was at the end of the hall, where he could observe everyone who came in and left through the front door and most goings on of the family. It also meant that his screams were the first thing people would hear when they walked into the house. I was a kid but I remember seeing adults cringe under the auditory tsunami that was Pepper’s angry voice.

My parents started to think about finding a new home for Pepper. And one day, I remember my mom announcing that he was going to go live at the zoo. We packed him up in a dog crate with a few of his wooden toys and drove to Santa Barbara. I loved the Santa Barbara Zoo, or…I should say I loved the capybara exhibit at the Santa Barbara Zoo. The giant rodents had a muddy, watery area, enclosed by the slimmest of low wooden fences. They felt semi-free and I loved the snorting sounds they made. Pepper was going to live nearby. I was thrilled. For the next few years, on the school trips to the zoo, I was fantastically popular. I could go up to their exhibit, a leafy island called Parrot Garden and sing out “La cucaracha…la cucaracha…” and Pepper would appear, bobbing and weaving, among the crowd of the other, nonplussed, parrots. It was like having a superpower. Sometimes I could get him to sing happy birthday. The other kids looked at me with awe and asked me to talk to the rabbits, the gorillas, the tortoises. I told them my gift only worked with parrots.

Over time, there were no more school trips to the zoo. I left home to go to highschool, then college, then work and graduate school.  Adult life yawned open and swallowed me up. Pepper became an animal lodged firmly in childhood. “I wonder whatever happened to Pepper..” my mom would sometimes say. Truthfully though, I think we didn’t talk about him much because we all felt a little guilty.  We didn’t want to find out that he’d become a serious feather plucker, or died, or stopped dancing. Until recently that is. Last year I announced to my family that I was going to go look for him.

Macaws can live well into their sixties. “Pepper must still be there” I told my mom. I called the zoo. It turned out that for fifteen years, he had been. In Parrot Garden, with a mate he’d chosen for himself named Henny. Pepper, they also told me was a she. Only she wasn’t there anymore. She’d been sold to a safari park in the wine country in Northern California. Henny had not gone with her.

Safari West is some sort of strange African wildlife experience in Santa Rosa. There are tents “imported” from Africa. They have an event called “Wine, Wheels and Warthogs.” How scarlet macaws fit into the African experience I do not know. Perhaps there is an Amazonian extension. But on the phone they wouldn’t tell me whether or not they have Pepper. I am going to have to visit and wander the grounds myself, singing Happy Birthday and the Mexican hat dance…hoping that somewhere, out amongst the warthogs, someone is listening.