The obsession became a business.” In September of 1975 they opened the first Pyramid Birds in Hollywood, with $1,500 in inventory and $500 in the bank. We used to let them out in shifts.”īefore long, he said, “The hobby became an obsession. Ingraham recalled, “It was wall-to-wall parrots in a two-bedroom apartment. By the time the two decided to become roommates, Ingraham had about a dozen parrots and then Mortimer started bringing in new birds. It all started in 1972, Ingraham was explaining, when he acquired a pet cockateel, Dixie, to help combat loneliness after the breakup of a longtime relationship.Īt that time Ingraham was working as a waiter at Studio One in West Hollywood, where Mortimer was a bartender. In response to the question that hadn’t been posed, Ingraham smiled and said, “As God is my witness, I have never pulled a feather from a bird. A man who designs costumes for Las Vegas showgirls comes in regularly to buy feathers. A contact in New Mexico takes feathers in barter for pine nuts, sold at Pyramid as bird treats. It would be placed in a jar and saved for trading or selling. Ingraham stooped to scoop up a dropped feather. Severe rowdiness is another problem, though a few blue words are usually acceptable. “If they’re feather pluckers,” for example, Mortimer said, it’s hard to find a buyer. If birds have severe psychological problems, Mortimer and Ingraham will not accept them for sale. On this day, there were about 100 feathered friends at Parrotdise, half of them “hotel guests,” the others brought in on consignment by owners who didn’t understand them or, perhaps, needed to “liquidate” them to settle a divorce.
After nine years, Mortimer said, “They could land right on her and she’d look the other way.” Posted prominently in the front shop area was a warning: “These premises patrolled by an attack cockatoo.” Lady Love, the small black and white house dog, moved freely through Parrotdise, neither disturbing nor disturbed by the birds. If its wing mended, Ingraham said, the bird would be released to the wild if not, it would be offered for adoption. Parrotdise does not ordinarily cater to sparrows-or, for that matter, to canaries or finches or mynas, just parrots, please-but the sparrow was left on the doorstep in a shoe box. And, in the adjacent cage, a garden-variety English sparrow nursing an injured wing.
There was Mercedes, a rose-breasted cockatoo carrying a $2,500 price tag on her pretty head. There were Zorro, Max, Angel, Jake and Salty. The other bird boarders, some on open perches (“We’ve never had a bird walk out,” Ingraham observed, “but we have had someone walk out with a bird”), the more temperamental and nervous in cages, were being heard from. “You can’t tell by looking,” Ingraham said, adding that if there is a need to know (for breeding purposes), a surgical sexing procedure can be performed. Caesar was staying at Parrotdise until a new home was found for him the woman who brought him in had found she was allergic to the fine white powder in cockatoo feathers. “They breed like flies,” Ingraham said.įrom his perch nearby, Caesar, a salmon-crested cockatoo of formidable size, emitted a megadecibel screech and then reached out with his hooked bill to nibble on a visitor’s notebook. The idea had been to gather information to share with breeders worldwide.
We kept these elaborate records of eggs, dates, numbers.” “It was outrageous,” Ingraham recalled with obvious pleasure, “an assembly line of parakeets making babies. Ingraham laughed and said, “I guess I’ve suppressed that desire.” Today, neither he nor Ingraham owns a single parrot, having completed a divestment that began a few years ago when their CPA put her foot down: Their World Parrot Foundation, with its 200 breeding pairs, was a luxury they could no longer afford. “I wanted to do that at one time, to have the largest private collection in the world. “You could have a whole zoo of nothing but parrots,” Ingraham said. Even so, their menagerie did not begin to include all of the 350 major species and 750 subspecies of parrots, which include cockatoos, macaws, amazons, love birds, cockateels and budgies, among others. In fact, Mortimer and Ingraham at one time owned 1,200 parrots.
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