Verses in the Parrot Multiverse
Last year I spent a month engaged in parrot conservation in Guyana and Suriname. Most of the time we were too hot, too cold, too sweaty, too thirsty, too hungry, too bug bit, and often these two things at once – sad and joyful. The joy comes from sharing this life with other parrot conservationists and parrots, and the sadness comes because parrot populations are diminishing in many places and the risk of them disappearing is high. In some places the parrots are just gone, and we do not know how to put them back. Yet, no matter the challenges, parrots teach us that beauty never dies. For if the beauty of untold parrots is remembered, it exists in the universe of our imagination, and we can pass it onto others.
Counting parrots in the rain, Guyana, November 2026. We conducted our annual count with a total of 295 individual sun parakeets recorded. In 2019 we recorded 406 sun parakeets, and 252 in 2023 during our annual counts. As they birds are nomadic and move according to weather and food availability between Brazil and Guayana, we cannot deduce if the populatin trend is increasing or decreasing.
One of the most hopeful writings I have ever read come from one of the darkest novels of all time, “The Road.” The story is of ecological collapse and the hero of the story muses about extinct trout in a way that captures my sentiments about parrots; beauty continues beyond the life of the beholder and being:
Standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. ... On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Conservationists aim to put the parrots back (reparrotations) and make the world right again. We imagine that we hear and see the skies filled with multiple species of parrots, calling loudly with all the colors of rainbows in the sky with a promise of belonging.
Rainbow over Karasabai, Guyana
One conservationist told me in Suriname that she loves wild parrots because they tell her that she belongs and is not alone. An Indigenous leader in Guyana echoed a similar sentiment, “The birds keep me company." Their chattering sociability and intelligence in the trees and their calls high in the clean blue air tell us we belong, as per Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.”
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
The same Indigenous leader I mentioned earlier spoke before his community, Karasabai, Guyana, at a Sun Parakeet celebration and said to the crowd, “If you don’t love yourself and you don’t love your environment, who then will love you?”
Who will love us? How can humans be loved when parrots, the earth, and our lives are diminishing because of us? But the memory and the witnessing of an entire universe, such as the dappled trout in the stream or the hundreds of macaws heading home and telling us that we are home, exist in the descendants of those who came before, us. We humans create beauty by remembering and envisioning it, even if it occurs in a world not like ours today. We live in the multiverse, and we can create a universe of beauty and live in it.
A corollary question to “who will love us,” is “who will we love?
How can we love this world?
Let us count the ways.
Let us count parrots.
Let us create a new world.
Let us bring into being the parrot multiverse made up of birds and people singing verses of joy and beauty:
If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it... then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides... The river will run clear, as we will never know it... On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots. The veins of forgotten springs will have opened. Families will be singing in the fields... Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament. The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its reality.
- Wendell Berry, “The Vision.”
Another leader in Suriname told me that when she hears orange-winged amazons in the skies it is a call to relax after an end to the workday, and to cocktails! The sanctuary of the evening’s light is ever sweeter when we share it.
The village and the Parakeet Rangers we worked with in Suriname, Kalebaskreek, stopped trapping for 3 years and placed this sign in their villlage along the Coppename River which forbids trapping. Since the end of 2025 the village has opened up parrot trapping for their own residents and discontinued their conservation efforts. Their decision is a heartache for One Earth Conservation, atlhough we realize that parrot conservation in Suriname is frought with challenges and setbacks and no one organization or community can end the tragedy of parrot extraction in this country. Though we experience pain, Suriname and the people and parrots there remain beautiful and worth the solidarity we can muster.
For many nights in Suriname and Guyana, and then recently for over 2 months of camping in my hammock among many others in Honduras, I rested in my swinging hammock as the final parrots’ calls echoed across the deep trees. The refuge of the hammock after a long day in these parts of the world is a gift beyond imagination. One looks up and sees the milky way and the moons, planets, and stars journey across the sky as the night turns, seeing the immensity of beauty even amongst such loss. The universe is larger and more varied than the limits of our “normal time” imagination.
My hammock home for two months in La Moskitia, Honduras, March - April 2026
So, my peeps, swing in your hammocks wherever you are, look up and look within, be one with the parrot multiverse, and let us sing, for the beauty of this earth. As long as beauty ever existed in any parrot, it is with us today and always.
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