The Kangas Family: Lost parrot may be too scared to squawk, couple say

This is the bird I have been try to help them find. We have posted flyer's all over.
Here is the article in today's newspaper:

Paul and Diana Carter love their macaw so much that they had her DNA analyzed to see if she was male or female so she’d get an appropriate name.

The green yellow-collared mini-macaw, hatched in Georgia, ended up being called Savannah.

The Vancouver residents paid about $1,500 for her more than two years ago, and lavished her with affection as if she were a child.

“She was hatched on my wife’s birthday,” said Paul Carter, a truck driver. “So that makes her more special.”

“She’s a sweet bird,” said Diana Carter, a schoolteacher. “She’s our baby. She loves to wrestle and play. She plays peekaboo with me. When you say, ‘Who wants a peanut?’ she squawks because she wants the peanut.”

The Carters’ haven’t heard those squawks for a while.

On April 19, a Sunday, Diana Carter stepped out her front door in the Burnt Bridge Creek neighborhood with Savannah on a little leash.

Something startled the parrot and she slipped the leash and flew into a nearby tree.

“We tried to coax her down,” the husband said.

“She was calling to us from the tree,” Diana Carter said. “She said, ‘Ma’ and ‘Step up.’ She doesn’t know how to fly down from really tall heights. She’s never been flying outside before.”

Savannah is trained to say “Step up” when she wants to perch on her owners’ fingers.

As the Carters watched over the next few days, the bird stayed in trees nearby.

“She was staying around our home and trying to get to us,” the wife said. “She’d call and try to get down. We called to her and tried to get her home with peanuts and gourmet popcorn.”

But on Wednesday, the wind picked up and Savannah was gone with it.

Fearing that Savannah is exhausted, dehydrated and sick, or might be found and sold who knows where, the couple swung into action. They notified the local Humane Society, veterinarians and pet stores.

The Carters and Christopher Driggins with N.W. Bird Rescue posted fliers in the Hearthwood area and others nearby, but some were quickly taken down by unknown persons, they said.

Finders keepers?

Thursday, Paul Carter took a flier into a pet store in Cascade Park. He said clerks looked at Savannah’s photo on the flier and said a woman had stopped by about an hour earlier, saying her son had found such a bird.

Paul Carter said he was told the woman bought a magazine about caring for parrots and left, saying the bird had landed in her yard, that her son found it and that he was attached to it.

On Sunday, April 26, after the Carters contacted Vancouver police, an officer obtained the woman’s name and address from the store and went to her home in the Countryside Woods neighborhood, according to public records.

The officer later reported that the woman told him her daughter in Florida had found such a macaw, and was trying to care for it, so the mother bought a magazine to help her daughter.

The woman allowed the officer to look inside her home, but no bird was found.

The Carters said they suspect the woman knows where Savannah is. They said Savannah might be too scared to speak or squawk, especially if the woman has dogs.

Friday evening, Driggins went to the woman’s home with three volunteers: Tracy Nichols, owner of the Love Your Pet store in Orchards; Dorothy Krout, 90, a volunteer and supporter of N.W. Bird Rescue; and Christa Kangas, a local representative with www.911parrotalert.com, a Web site featuring lost birds.

“While they were gone I prayed and read verses and sang praises and kept praying and waiting,” Diana Carter said.

After Driggins knocked and rang the doorbell a few times, the woman came to the door and said she didn’t have the parrot.

Driggins said he left his business cards with the woman and told her he’s offering a large cash reward and a more valuable bird to anyone who finds Savannah alive and returns her to the Carters. The couple have several ways of identifying their bird.

Anyone who finds Savannah, or knows where she is, is asked to call Driggins at 360-BIRDMAN or 503-BIRDMAN.

John Branton: 360-735-4513 or john.branton@columbian.com