Serenity Park sits on a scrap of land behind a baseball field in West Los Angeles. Everyone who works there has been badly hurt, and so has every bird.
The Sound Behind The Ballfield
You hear the place before you see it. CBS correspondent Tracy Smith opened her 2016 report on exactly that detail: a lonely corner of Los Angeles that is home to dozens of parrots, many of them neglected, abandoned or abused.
The sanctuary occupies an eighth of an acre behind a baseball field on the VA campus in Westwood. It sits close enough to the 405 that you would expect engine noise, and Los Angeles magazine, visiting in 2015, reported that the birds drown it out entirely.
Dr. Lorin Lindner, a clinical psychologist and preventative health specialist, founded it in 2005. The mission LAmag described was deliberately circular: heal veterans by rescuing parrots.
The birds come in injured, or abused, or simply outlived by owners who could no longer care for them. The veterans come in carrying substance abuse, PTSD, and the parts of a war that followed them home.
What Group Therapy Never Did
Lindner did not set out to build anything on VA land. She ran another parrot sanctuary north of Los Angeles, and she started bringing the veterans she worked with up to visit it.
What she saw there did not match anything from her consulting room. “All of a sudden I’d see this transformation come over them,” she told CBS.
Then she named the comparison that the whole sanctuary rests on. “They’d be holding the birds in their arms and calling them sweet terms, and I hadn’t seen that in the group therapy I’d been doing with them.”
So she asked the VA Medical Center for enough ground to put up a few bird cages, and got it. Serenity Park was born, in the phrasing CBS used, on a budget based solely on donations.
Four Weeks Of Being Bitten
Matthew Simmons arrived in 2006, a Navy veteran of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. “When I came to Serenity Park, there were two birds, Maggie and Ruby,” he told LAmag.
They were wild parrots from Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, and a raccoon had got to them. “Maggie’s wing was mutilated, so was her chest. And so was Ruby.”
What followed was not tender. “For four weeks I held them down and put medication on them and force-fed them, and they would bite at me and be angry,” Simmons said. Anyone who has ever tried to medicate a terrified bird knows the shape of that month, and it is worth understanding how a frightened bird decides a hand is safe before assuming the biting means failure.
The two timelines he gives are the heart of it. After four weeks the birds began to heal physically; after four months they began to heal in the other way, landing on his shoulder and saying, in his account, “Matt, I love you. Matt, hold me.”
Why Not Just A Dog
Smith asked Lindner to answer the people who would call a veterans-and-parrots program hippy-dippy. Lindner answered with a question of her own: “Do you have a dog?”
Her point was about what a parrot is not. “Dogs are domesticated to lie at our feet, but the parrots are not, yet they still want the relationship because they are a flock creature, and they imprint.”
She finished with the mechanism, and then a joke. “They have those social neurons that immediately make them say ‘You are who I want to follow for life.’ And they’re monogamous — pretty rare these days!” That flock instinct is also the reason the argument over whether one parrot is enough refuses to settle.
Simmons put the same idea in shelter terms. A dog you pick out will probably accept you, he said, “but with a parrot who can fly, lives in a huge aviary, has no other reason to be with you other than self-selection — when they select you — it’s unique. It’s special. And that’s something that a lot of our veterans and myself coming home didn’t feel.”
The Cost Of That Loyalty
CBS did not leave that loyalty unqualified, and neither should anyone reading this and wondering about a parrot of their own. The same wiring that makes a bird choose a person makes it very hard to leave alone.
Parrots need near-constant attention, the report noted. Left without it, some will scream for hours on end, and why a bird left alone starts screaming is a more mechanical problem than most owners expect.
Others turn it inward and tear out their own feathers in desperation. That behavior has a long list of possible causes and no single fix, which is why what feather plucking is actually telling you matters more than any product sold to stop it.
Harvard researcher Irene Pepperberg gave CBS the analogy. “Imagine taking a five-year-old child, putting it in a playpen with a few toys and a few snacks for ten hours a day,” she said. “Doesn’t work that way.”
Birds Who Outlive Their Owners
There is a second problem underneath the first, and it is arithmetic. “Because they live forever,” Pepperberg told CBS, correcting herself immediately: “I won’t say forever, but 40, 50 years is very common.”
A commitment measured in decades is a commitment most households cannot make and few think to check. Parrots outlive the people who bought them, and CBS reported that the ones who do are often abused or discarded.
That is not a rare edge case, and it is not new. On this site, why so many parrots end up needing a second home was being written about years before Serenity Park existed, and the reasons listed there have not changed.
Which is the point of the sanctuary. Most of its birds went through something bad at some stage, exactly like the people who now look after them.
A Breakfast Date With Zoe
Mike Flennikan served a combat tour in Vietnam and then twenty-two years in prison for armed robbery. At Serenity Park he eats breakfast with an African grey called Zoe.
He is clear-eyed about how unlikely that is. “If you’d-a told me five years ago that I’d be sitting in a cage like this petting a bird, I’d-a told you, ‘You’re outta your mind!'”
Then the detail that gives the frame its shape: “She adopted me three days after I got here.” Not the other way round, and he does not correct himself.
Asked what the relationship actually is, he did not reach for therapeutic language. “I think she immediately saw something in me that I needed, you know?” he said. “I mean, she makes me feel like I’m important to her, you know? And I can’t explain it because I don’t know enough about parrots or birds or anything, but it’s just a great feeling.”
Better Than People
Lilly Love is a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer who lost nearly all of her buddies in a helicopter crash. In the years afterwards she battled depression and drug abuse, came out as transgender, and spent a great deal of time in therapy that did not work.
She described arriving at Serenity Park as “coming back to home for me,” and she is blunt about the comparison. “I like these birds better than people, to tell you the truth.”
What she says they gave her is not comfort. “They’ve taught me patience, they taught me trust. They taught me all about how you can be happy and playful even in the midst of pain.” Asked whether the pain was still there, she said: “It’ll probably never leave, but it’s okay.”
The numbers behind those sentences are modest and specific. By late 2015, Simmons had watched 48 other veterans pass through the program he helps run, and 43 of them had stayed, in his words, “sober, employed, and connected” — a psychologist’s idea about damaged birds, turned into something a hospital could count.
Sources: Tracy Smith’s report for CBS News Sunday Morning, published 17 July 2016, and Shayna Rose Arnold’s article for Los Angeles magazine, published 11 November 2015. Both were read in full for this piece and every quote above is reproduced as those outlets published it. The species note under the third image comes from Joe Morlan’s feral-parrot page at City College of San Francisco. Two notes on the sources: CBS refers to the sanctuary once as “Serenity Place” and everywhere else as Serenity Park, which is the name the sanctuary uses; and LAmag dates the founding to 2005 while CBS, writing in 2016, says “ten years ago”. All figures here are the ones those reports carried at the time of writing, in 2015 and 2016, and were not re-checked with the sanctuary. Featured photograph by Alessandro Zangrilli via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; it shows a Congo African grey and is not Zoe.