Every year during the Clark County Fair, Zena, a double yellow-headed Amazon parrot, can be heard singing "Old Macdonald" during Chris Biro's Pirate Parrot Show. Before stepping onto the traveling show, her journey began here in Clark County.
Zena once belonged to Chris Barker, the father of The Reflector reporter Cade Barker, who didn't plan to adopt a parrot when he walked into a Portland bird shop in 2012. According to Barker, the connection between the two was instantaneous.
"I was walking by some parrots … One of them was out of the cage and it hopped onto my shoulder," Barker said. "She started nestling into my neck and kind of preening my hair, and the owner of the shop said, 'Oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like that with her.'"
He took Zena home the same day. What followed was nearly daily music.
"She loved to sing … if we had anything on TV where there was singing, she would start singing," Barker said. "Her vocabulary was immense … It was almost like having another person in the room sometimes."
Barker cared for Zena for over two years. Zena was affectionate and behaved well with friends and visitors. However, Zena's attachment to Barker came with a downside.
"A woman came into our lives, and when she started hanging around more, Zena did not like that. (She) absolutely flipped a switch whenever that woman was around," he said. "It broke our hearts, but it really had to happen, finding her a new home, because it was unbearable."
In 2014, Barker saw Biro's Pirate Parrot Show at the Clark County Fair and decided to approach him afterward.
"I said I would like to donate her … and the rest is history," Barker said. "She's in very good care and living the life."
Today, Zena acts as a main star in Biro's travelling Pirate Parrot Show, repeating phrases like “hello” and “peek-a-boo.” Zena is also trained to repeat the song "Old MacDonald" after a volunteer sings it on stage, wowing the crowd with her vocal skills.
Zena has taken a teaching role for a younger male double yellow-headed Amazon in Biro's troupe. Biro said a future ambition is to get the pair to sing in harmony for future shows.
"If I ask her to sing Old MacDonald, he joins in and sings it with her as a duet, and it's adorable," Biro said. "It's perfect, but I gotta get him doing it reliably enough … Hopefully we'll have him do it out on stage at some point."
Barker, who watches the show each year, knows Zena enjoys performing.
"It's something she (loved) doing at home," he said. "She's a beautiful bird with such a personality … She's become a star."
Beyond the stage: Biro's global conservation mission
Biro's passion for parrot conservation began after he learned about a failed reintroduction of thick-billed parrots in Arizona from 1989 to 1993.
"There was a parrot that was native of the United States that they tried to put back into Arizona … and the birds, the way they released them, turned out to be a dismal disaster," he said. "They confiscated about 40 birds from private owners, put them in 4-by-4-by-6-foot cages in Arizona and turned them loose in the Chiricahua Mountains, and within a few weeks, several of them had been eaten by hawks and ringtail cats."
Biologists at the time concluded that captive-raised birds had poor flocking and predator evasion skills and were not suitable for conservation release projects. Biro disagrees.
"That bothered me because my birds had fantastic predator evasion skills and flocking skills," he said. "So it wasn't that they were raised in captivity. It was how they're raised in captivity."
In 2010, Biro founded the nonprofit Bird Recovery International. It took 12 years to secure permits for their first project, a release of blue and gold macaws in Brazil in 2022, in an area where they had been absent for over 50 years.
"We're the first team to ever have 100% survival 90 days after release," Biro said. "We have a 100% survival three years after."
He also released a few dozen dozen Amazons in Colombia in 2023.
"We have an 80% return on that one year after release, and I only had 17 days to work with those birds," he said. "So … hopefully it's going to be hard for Fish and Wildlife to say you're just an animal trainer now, because now I'm just the animal trainer to do it with the highest success rate of anybody in history so far."
Future work could include a project in Honduras and his long-term goal of returning thick-billed parrots to Arizona, where they last lived in the 1950s. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, only about 800 remain in Mexico, down from 1,700 in 2012.
"It makes no sense to me that they're restricting the breeding of these highly endangered animals when we need more of them," Biro said. "Now part of the reason for that is that they believed for many years that the birds that were raised in captivity have zero conservation value. Well, we just proved that wrong."
He sees northern Arizona as an ideal habitat for the species, with mature trees for nesting and abundant food sources.
"It's easy to save the species from going extinct if I can just get the bureaucracy out of the way," Biro said. "My long-term goal is to release thick-billed parrots into Arizona and save the species from going extinct."
To learn more about Chris Biro's work and find peer-reviewed studies on his conservation efforts, visit libertywings.com.
