Boo was 40 years old, newly adopted, and had been seeing almost nothing for a quarter of his life. A veterinary team in Raleigh offered him a surgery that birds his age are rarely given.
A Bird Who Saw Shadows
Boo is an umbrella cockatoo. When Amy Hurst adopted him in early 2025, he was 40 years old and had been living in a blur for about a decade.
Cataracts had clouded both eyes. NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine puts it plainly: he had been effectively blind for a quarter of his life.
He had come to Hurst from a previous owner, who had taken him in as a rescue. By the time she adopted him, he had never actually seen the person who was going to advocate for him.
None of that had stopped him working. Boo was already a therapy bird for children with autism and for the elderly, doing the job largely by ear, in a household that had learned to read what an older adopted cockatoo needs, the same slow work described in one keeper’s account of four umbrella cockatoos adopted as adults.
The Surgery Few Birds Get
In mid-March 2025, Boo went under anesthesia at the NC State Veterinary Hospital. The operation was a phacoemulsification, performed on his right eye.
The procedure uses ultrasound to break up the clumps of protein that cloud the lens. An ophthalmologist then suctions those fragments out through a handheld tool built for the job.
It is routine in dogs and in people. In birds it is not; NC State describes avian eye surgery as relatively uncommon.
Hurst had gone looking specifically for surgeons who worked on birds, and the hospital’s reputation was what decided it. She lives in Smithfield, Virginia, roughly 200 miles from the Raleigh campus.
Why His Age Made It Harder
Being a cockatoo made the case harder. Being a 40-year-old cockatoo made it harder again, and the hospital says his procedure needed more involvement than an average cataract removal.
Two services worked the case together. The exotic animal medicine team brought the avian physiology and the anesthesia, and monitored him for complications while the ophthalmology service operated.
Anesthesia was the part Hurst had been most worried about. That worry is the ordinary one, and it is why the trip itself deserves planning, and why the ten-minute carrier check before an avian vet trip is worth doing the night before rather than in the car.
“It was a very positive experience,” Hurst says. “I felt very comfortable with the team. Everyone seemed to care for Boo as more than just an animal.”
A Cone And A Camera
In late March, still coned to stop him rubbing the healing eye, Boo was filmed for his social media accounts. Hurst asked him a question that had not had a real answer in ten years.
“Can you see, Boo?”
He faced the camera and warbled back: “Yeah! I love you!”
Hurst says that clip captured the first time in about a decade that he could clearly see anything. It was also the first time he had ever seen her.
What The Rechecks Showed
Recovery was checked rather than assumed. Dr. Nicole Himebaugh, an ophthalmology resident, went over the operated eye with a handheld slit lamp at a March recheck.
Dr. Amanda Day, a clinical intern in zoological and exotic animal medicine, examined him on the towel held by registered veterinary technician Meagan Smith. He passed the rechecks, in the hospital’s words, with flying colors.
The left eye is still there to deal with. It carries a partially resorbing cataract, and the result on the right was good enough that Hurst is considering putting him through the same operation again.
Most owners will never need an avian ophthalmologist. They are far more likely to need the same phone number for something ordinary and bloody, which is why the two or three minutes after a blood feather snaps are worth rehearsing before they happen.
The Team’s Own Verdict
Day framed the case as being about age as much as about eyes. “We can do a lot of amazing things here that, in general, a lot of other practices can’t,” she says.
“Boo’s case also shows that the best care is possible for animals of any age. He has an owner that was willing to advocate for him, a care team that was comfortable anesthetizing him and an ophthalmology team that was comfortable doing his surgery.”
Then she added the line that gives the whole thing away: “It also helps that Boo is such a sweet bird!”
A bird who spends his working life in rooms full of other people’s children is a bird whose social life is not the usual argument about company and cages, though that argument is worth having properly, because what actually predicts welfare in a single-bird home is not the thing most owners assume.
Back To The Children
After the last recheck, Boo’s care team celebrated with him. Day held up a poster that children he had worked with had made for him, and he put his crest up at the colors.
He had been visiting those children for a while already. The difference was that now he could see what they had drawn.
“He’s a once-in-a-lifetime bird, and he so deserved this life change,” Hurst says.
Not every parrot in a difficult situation gets a hospital, an advocate and a second decade of work — as the seventy-one parrots pulled out of a New Hampshire barn earlier this year make clear enough.
A First For A Bird
A year later the story got a second ending. On 14 April 2026, Pet Partners named Boo its 2026 Pet of the Year — the first bird ever to take the title.
He did it by raising $33,674, the highest total any single participant has raised in the competition’s history, through Super Pet Expo appearances, local gatherings billed as “Brews with Boo,” and social media. He beat 147 other entrants from 35 states and Canada, 123 of them dogs.
“Boo’s journey—from abuse to restoration, including regaining his sight after 10 years of blindness—is proof that connection isn’t limited by species,” Hurst said after the win. She called the title a way “to educate on a lesser-known species, showing that birds like Boo can make an extraordinary impact.”
C. Annie Peters, president and CEO of Pet Partners, said the result “highlights the powerful role that a wide range of species can play in bringing comfort, connection, and support to people in need.” Boo spent ten years unable to see the people he was helping, and then two more years being the reason a lot of them heard about therapy birds at all.
Source: NC State College of Veterinary Medicine, reported by Katie Rice, 18 April 2025, and Pet Partners’ announcement of its 2026 Pet of the Year, 21 April 2026.