In Amityville, Dominican nun takes abused birds under her wing
http://www.newsday.com/features/printedition/ny-p2lspetcol2450005nov06.story
November 6, 2001
YOU WOULDN'T THINK a flirt named
CieCie would be living in a convent full of retired Dominican nuns, but
then again, stranger things have happened.
"I tell her if she wants to make
her final vows, she has to fit in," chuckles Sister Barbara Seaward about
the 7-year-old Moluccan cockatoo whose name is pronounced "see-see" and
who lives in the Queen of the Rosary Convent in Amityville.
And CieCie has apparently taken the
advice to heart: Though most cockatoos are notorious squalkers, this big
white bird with the peach-tinted feathers is uncharacteristically muted.
"Birds get to be addicting," says
Sister Barbara, 54, who gave up a three- decade-long nursing career when
she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As she struggled with the disease
and the limitations it started to place on her, she started to adopt handicapped
and abused birds.
Her narrow bedroom at the convent
is filled with cages and brightly colored toys and bells, bird stands and
a license-plate frame from the Long Island Parrot Society, to which she
belongs. "Let Go, Let God," reads a magnet clinging to the sides of one
of the metal cages, near the fish tank. As a bird clock on the wall hits
the hour, the warble of a house wren sounds.
On a nearby table is a small, plant-filled
shrine with statues of some of Catholicism's animal-loving intercessors:
St. Francis, of course, and St. Martin de Porres, who was a healer of animals,
and St. Dominic, the founder of her order, "who is often imaged as a dog,"
Sister Barbara explains, her robin earrings bobbing. "Before she had him,
his mother dreamed of a dog with a torch in its mouth."
The cage doors are open, and the
birds wander at whim. "I believe birds should have as much freedom as possible,"
says Sister Barbara, though she's careful to cover her small television
set's screen with a piece of Plexiglas in case CieCie gets too beaky.
Sister Barbara's flock also includes
Angel, an African grey with a feather-plucking problem. Her teenage owner
never paid any attention to her, leaving her unbathed and so calcium- depleted
she was having petit mal seizures. Though she doesn't speak much, she's
got a large repertoire of sounds - barks and meows and gurgles and whistles
and the "bloop" from the Maxwell House jingle.
There's Lucky the Quaker parrot,
who satisfies his nest-making instincts by weaving wooden coffee stirrers
into the bars of his cage.
Dinkum is another Quaker - the species,
not the denomination - who rooms with a lovebird named Darlin. They got
their names from the endearments Sister Barbara's father gave her mother
in the couple's World War II love letters. Dad, who was in the Coast Guard,
was "Briny Marlin"; Mom was "Dinkum Darlin."
And then there are two gray cockatiels,
Peter and Mary (Paul was adopted by someone else). "When we first got Peter,
if you even looked at him, he'd scream," says Sister Barbara of the abused
bird, who paced in his cage for two years before deciding to trust her
and venture out.
Though Sister Barbara's illness closed
the door to her nursing career, it opened another. "Through that illness,
I got to adopt parrots," she says. And her "secondhand birds" inspired
her to start a ministry she calls "On the Wings of Love." For the last
three years, she has taken the birds to local nursing homes, where residents
stroke, pet and murmur to these once-throwaway animals.
Dominican nuns are the "Order of
Preachers," and Sister Barbara says her bird excursions fulfill that calling.
"I'm preaching that people matter,
no matter where they find themselves," she says, adding that not everyone
sees her work that way. Though she recently got a grant from her congregation,
"most people don't think what I do has value. They just see me as someone
playing with pets, not something deeper than that."
But deep it is, like when an uncommunicative
resident raises his head and strokes a flirtatious CieCie - the first time
he's interacted with anyone in months.
And for Sister Barbara, sharing herself
through the birds she so loves fills the hole created when she left her
nursing behind.
"Even though I'm not giving care,
I'm still healing," she says. "I'm healing broken hearts, and loneliness
and ignorance - ignorance of the preciousness of life."
Write to Denise Flaim c/o Newsday,
235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville, NY 11747
Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc.
Denise Flaim