By Tim Norris
Oct. 3, Sunday, 10 a.m.: It was quiet in the Van Egmond home at the end of Coconut Lane in Ocean Ridge.
Too quiet.
Philip Van Egmond and his wife, Gina, just back from a trip to Pittsburgh, knew the minute they walked in and looked across the marble floor to a central, glassed-in atrium. They had converted it to an aviary, for rescued fowl. It was two birds short.
No Xingu, the male. No Fiji, the female. No noise where the two macaws used to be.
They knew right away who had done it: squirrels. Spotting, or smelling, good eats on the atrium floor, the intruders chewed through the overarching fabric net, opening a hole to the wild blue yonder.
The squirrels would go unpunished; the Van Egmonds wouldn’t. Their macaws, brother and sister, just 1 year old, had flown the coop … or the atrium, at least. They could be anywhere. Or worse.
Ospreys are out there. Hawks happen.
The Van Egmonds jumped on their bicycles and took off onto A1A, then down Hudson Avenue, up Ocean Avenue, around Anna Street, along Corrine and Engle and Ridge,
whistling and keening. No answer.
“We were devastated,” Gina Van Egmond says.
Somewhere in their ride-about, they spotted the Ocean Ridge patrol car of Sgt. Eve Eubanks and waved her over. Seen the birds? No. Call in? Sure.
Anita Calhoun was working the day shift out of Ocean Ridge Police dispatch when the radio call arrived. She shot an e-mail to other town employees, including Lisa Burns, the receptionist, who put out the APB.
All-Points-Bulletins, the Van Egmonds would learn, have changed since the squawk-box days. Ocean Ridge residents can sign up for the city’s online list, and Burns employed that
for an e-mail blast. Instantly, a few pairs of eyes became dozens, potentially hundreds.
At that moment, the Van Edmonds had no clue … about blasted e-mails or missing macaws. They kept to their direct, hands-on-handle-bars approach.
That brought the first break.
About 7 a.m. Monday, along Ocean Avenue, they heard a familiar cry and looked up. There was Fiji, perched at the top of a large palm. They called to her for nearly an hour. Finally, she flew west and north, toward a wild area. “Awful,” Philip says.
The next morning, they heard her again in the tall palm. Philip decided to camp out underneath, with a tray of the bird’s favorite foods. An hour went by.
Fiji is the more vocal of the two birds, and she repeated a phrase she had learned from Philip, when he shoos her from the open bedroom window: “Go away!”
She didn’t mean it, any more than he usually does. She likes to nestle near them under the covers, Gina says, with her feet up. That morning her face was red, and she was shaking. After approaching, retreating, flying up and back down, she stepped near enough for Philip to snag her in a towel.
Fiji was home, and alone. The family had raised the two macaws together, almost from the egg, and the birds had never been apart.
Montana Van Egmond, age 11, learned about the loss later in the week. (Montana shares time with her father and stepmother and with her mother). “You worry,” she says. “They’re part of the family.”
Monday went by, in agonized looking and waiting, and Fiji wasn’t quiet about it. The family couldn’t calm her.
Tuesday came, and Ocean Ridge dispatcher Marcia Martin called to say that someone had reported a brightly colored bird along Ocean Avenue. Then a nearby neighbor discovered that Xingu wasn’t being quiet, either.
From her home at the corner of A1A and Corrine Street, Barbara Cook heard a strange cry. Around 9 a.m., she says, “I was sitting having my newspaper and coffee, and I could hear the squawking. Years ago, we used to have wild parrots, so I knew the sound. He was perched 50 feet high on a dead pine, and he was up there raising hell.”
The squawks didn’t last. Cook opened her e-mail and found Burns’s blast. She called the town. They called Van Egmond. He cycled over and found that Xingu had flown.
“He looked like a distressed father who’s lost a child,” Cook says. The bird had winged west, across the Intracoastal. “We never thought the birds would do that,” Philip says. Then Cook saw Xingu fly back across, called to say he was alive and flapping.
The sun set; the Van Edmonds eyelids didn’t. Wednesday brought another round of cycling and calling, spirits sinking.
Then, near 4 p.m., a break.
From their yard just north of Woolbright Road, Bud and Gail Aaskov saw a colorful bird, westbound over the Intracoastal, they said, “flying high.” They called the police, and dispatcher Jeanne Zuidema answered. She passed the word along.
Around 4:30 p.m. at the Las Ventanas development in Boynton Beach, leasing consultant Staci Popplewell was showing an apartment when something colorful from across the courtyard caught her eye: a parrot, she thought, shimmery blue and green, perched on a fifth-floor balcony.
She called the tenant, who had just come in the door. “Do you own a parrot?” Popplewell said. No. “Look out at your balcony.” The tenant gasped. “It’s beautiful!” she said.
Popplewell called in property supervisor Suzanne Moore, who remembered another resident who owned a parrot. She called his mobile.
The man who answered was Officer Jon Perigny of the town of Palm Beach Police Department, and he was outbound, on the way to work. He said, OK, OK, when he
got home …
Then he hung a U-Turn. “He told me couldn’t stand it,” Moore says.
“My wife and I are bird people,” Perigny says. They knew that parrots and macaws are as smart as cats and often more in need of attention.
The officer stepped into the apartment, approached the bird on the balcony. He knew a macaw when he saw one, knew what to do, too, calmly and gently. Within five minutes, Moore says, the bird had stepped onto Perigny’s arm, for the walk outdoors to another building and the officer’s apartment.
“He could have flown off at any time,” Perigny says. “He stayed with me.”
Moore sent an e-mail blast of her own, to residents. Within 10 minutes, Moore says, a resident called to say he remembered another e-mail blast about a lost bird from the town clerk at Ocean Ridge. She found the e-mail and called the Ocean Ridge police, where dispatcher Zuidema answered. She called the Van Egmonds.
“Within 20 minutes of us sending the e-mail blast, the owners showed up here,” Moore says. “This wouldn’t have happened in the days before e-mail blasts.”
The Van Egmonds appeared at the door, and Perigny asked for proof. The couple showed him a video with Gina and Xingu together. Bingo! “When [Gina Van Egmond] went over, the bird squawked and hopped up,” Moore says, “and they were kissing.”
Back at home, the reunion in the atrium was noisy. “Xingu and Fiji were kissing for a least two days,” Gina Van Egmond says. There were plenty of other warm pecks to go around, too, if they’d felt like it.
Stainless steel mesh covers the canopy above the birds, now. They’re back to their old attention-loving and feisty selves, and the family is praising everyone involved.
Ocean Ridge police welcomed the happy ending. As Chief Chris Yannuzzi says, they see tragedy and injury and the best and worst of human behavior … and sometimes an
animal enters in. He remembers recovering two golden retrievers and an albino python. He’s also considering new uses for e-mail blasts.
Town leaders have recently declared Ocean Ridge a bird sanctuary, something the Van Egmond family declared years ago. They hope that birds of prey didn’t get the memo.
