October, 2003

     “I leave the apartment and I tell him, ‘OK, I’ll be back later.’ He [says], ‘Alright.’ Every time – ‘Alright.’”

      For Baltimore nurse attorney Dorothy Haynes, it’s the same old story, just a different day. “And [then] I tell him to get the dishes done,” she adds, “and there’s nothing after that. He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t do them.”
But neither does Haynes display an ounce of frustration; she has no unrealistic expectations. As an attorney with 30 years of experience as a registered nurse, she can’t. In fact, she’s impressed with their conversation in and of itself.

     And besides, as Haynes herself notes with a chuckle of amusement, “He’s in his cage.”

     Haynes can’t – or won’t – recall the name of the judge who once asked her for one of her business cards to give to his daughter.
    
     “The only card I had was a Baltimore Bird Fanciers card,” she admits. “Well, I’ve been the ‘Bird Woman’ ever since. ‘Oh, you’re the Bird Woman!’

     Indeed, spending an afternoon talking birds with Haynes, who works for the Maryland Board of Nursing in conjunction with the Assistant Attorney General, one gets the distinct impression that she could have taught Tippi Hedren a thing or three about our feathered friends.

     “They’re certainly not for everyone,” says Haynes, whose bird love began in 1990 when a friend, responding to her desire for a pet, gave Haynes a parakeet. “A lot of kids get along really well with the birds, but they have to know how to behave around them. If you stick your fingers in their cage and make them nervous, they’re going to react the way nervous people do.”

     Haynes’s own avian devotion is so great that it’s difficult to picture a bird nervous in her company. “I like cockatiels,” she says. “Lovebirds are okay, and the smaller birds are fun to watch.”

     But Haynes prefers the hookbills – a stroke of good luck for Haynes’s parakeet as well as her pride and joy, a non-dishwashing African grey parrot named Bo.

     “They named him,” Haynes says of the couple that raised Bo, “and since he’d been that name seven years I didn’t change it. They did a great job raising him. Unfortunately, they got a divorce and while they were fighting, she put all his exotic birds out on the patio and opened the cage doors.”

      But Bo was lucky. “He’s just been fascinating from the moment I got him,” Haynes says. “I put this big old cage together. I let him out of his travel cage and I went to my chair, sat down and said, ‘Now I’m going to leave him alone because he needs to settle in and everything.’ He climbed to the top of the cage, whipped around and looked at me and said, ‘Hey, woman!’ I was just smitten. And it’s been that way ever since. They’re [hookbills] very interactive – that’s why I get a big kick out of him.”

     And that kick has given Haynes plenty of stories to tell.

     “He was [staying] at another house,” she explains. “He must have not been getting enough attention because when I got back, [my friend] said, ‘I kept going down to check on him because he was going a-heh a-heh and I thought he was sick. So I turned the heat up and I paid a lot of attention to him.’ Well, he heard somebody cough like that, and [she] paid attention to him every time he did it! So we get in the car, I put him in the back seat, and I heard a-heh a-heh. I [said], ‘Don’t even think about it!’ I have never heard it since.

     “One time I was driving back from somewhere and he had a little bit of water in his travel dish. He was eating grapes and putting the grape skins in the dish. And I said, ‘Well, this is really good – now you’re not going to be able to drink any water,’ and I just kind of chuckled. But I gave him a soda top – one of those plastic things – to chew on, and he put it in upside-down and put his beak in it until water came into it and then he picked it up and started drinking from it. I kid you not. If somebody told me these things and I didn’t have one I wouldn’t believe it.”

      Like anyone with an avid interest, it wasn’t long before Haynes sought out others with similar inclinations; she found them in Baltimore Bird Fanciers (BBF).

    “It started out mostly with breeders of canaries finches and different birds, but now it’s mostly owners,” Haynes says of Maryland’s oldest bird club, which in its more than six decades has grown to include approximately 60 dues-paying members (though by Haynes’s estimate the BBF mailing list is closer to “80 or 90”).

    “When I first went, there were probably three people who were doing most of the work and maybe five at the meeting,” Haynes says. “I mean it was just very small. And the same people had been doing the work and doing the meetings for several years. Now there are at least 60 paid members, and our meetings are probably 20-25 people each time, which is really nice. We have a good working group now, and that really helps.”

     In addition to co-managing BBF’s two main annual events – a bird mart in May and a bird show in October, each on the third Saturday of its respective month – Haynes has herself served as the organization’s president and recording secretary.

     “I refuse to be treasurer,” she laughs. “I don’t even balance my checkbook.”

     Each event draws about 400 people from all over Maryland, as well as from neighboring states. “They’ve been doing it for years, but when we didn’t have a stable place people weren’t that sure when or where it was going to be,” Haynes says. “We have been at the Tall Cedars Hall in Parkville for the last few years, so we’ve been having both events at the same place, around the same dates.” The mart, she explains, features more information for attendees, as well as space for handling of the birds, while the show in October focuses more heavily on special contests and judging.

     But while these events allow Haynes to “enjoy getting together and hearing the other bird stories” with fellow bird enthusiasts, BBF also provides a platform for serious issues.
    
     “I think a lot of the breeders – and I’m not speaking about the smaller breeders that really are responsible and show their birds and that kind of stuff - but a lot of them are in it for the money, like the puppy mills,” says Haynes. “One of the things that Baltimore Bird Fanciers has done is [draft] regulations with some other people to try and stop the selling of unweaned birds, which are similar to the dogs and cats except that birds wean in their own time – it’s not like ‘after six weeks, they’re weaned.’ But these people will sell the birds to people who don’t know anything about them. I mean, baby birds are so ugly they’re cute. [The customer] is kind of buying on impulse, and they think that [by] getting one when it’s very young and [hand-feeding] it that it will be bonded to them. Well, it may be – if it lives through the weaning stage. The problem is that many of them die, and there are a lot of complications. It’s very hard to wean birds and hand-feed them and that kind of thing. So what we’d like to do is have something so that if someone is selling unweaned birds to people who don’t know, we have a little something to go after them, because we don’t need a whole lot more birds. I mean, these people invest time and money and emotion, and then the bird dies because they’re told, ‘Oh yeah, it’s on two feedings a day.’ And the bird wants to eat five times a day. And it’s screaming and they’re screaming. So, we don’t sell unweaned birds at our events. We don’t allow them to be sold.”

     The group also does what it can to promote education in the aviary field.

     “We have a [vet tech] scholarship to [CCBC] Essex that we started a couple of years ago,” Haynes explains. “We donate to several bird organizations in the zoo at the end of year, when we figure out where our finances are.”

     “Education is a big part of it,” Haynes says, “[teaching people] not to just get a bird and then get rid of it, because these are not like finches, which want to live with each other. If you give finches away, I don’t think they really notice because they’ve got each other. That’s why the hookbills are so special. They’re bonded. They’re sort of like a child. It just breaks your heart because they can mourn, they can die, they get arthritis, they get glaucoma…they go through puberty, which is not pleasant. But when a bird, especially a male, changes personalities at that right age, you’re going to get your nice bird back sooner or later. You don’t have to give them away. They’re like your teenager. Get some help with it.”

     Despite the “Bo marks” that scar Haynes’s fingers, her bond to her African grey is strong enough to overrule any interest she might have in owning other birds. “He’s an unhappy camper if I get any other birds,” she explains. “I often want another bird and enjoy playing with other birds, but I’m not actually going to subject him to another bird.”

     But questions of “fidelity” occupy little mind, especially when there’s work to be done. “We really are hoping to get this unweaned bird thing out in the open,” Haynes says. “I submitted the regs first to Department of Health and Mental Hygiene because it seemed to me if they did turtles they ought to do birds. The idea is to get a sign in a pet store that says, ‘This bird can exacerbate asthma,’ or ‘They have a lot of dander.’ Sometimes they have some diseases they can get that might be transferred to humans. If you’re immuno-compromised, you really probably shouldn’t have a bird. And [BBF would like] to let people know those things, because if, just like a dog or a cat, you go in and you impulsively buy, then most likely you’ve spent over $50. You’re not usually going to buy a five-dollar bird.”

     “We’d like to have more kids get involved, obviously,” Haynes adds. “I end up finding a lot of people that have birds, but they don’t join a club or anything like that, which is really kind of disappointing because you get a lot of information. I end up meeting a lot of people that either know someone that has [a bird] or they’ve had one, and I encourage them to invite their friends or whoever to come to the bird meeting because that way we get to know who has the birds, and they get to be involved and learn a lot.

     “You learn about training the birds and how you can avoid being attacked because the birds are going to rule if you don’t. A lot of dogs are going to be subservient and the cats are going to ignore you, but the bird is going to take over and let you know who is boss. It’s interesting to learn about whatever you’ve taken responsibility for, and if you’re going to take responsibility you should know about it.”

     And what better place to learn to learn than a bird show?

     “If you ever want a noisy, colorful afternoon,” Haynes notes, “show up at our show.”


 

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