COCO THE PARROT BACK HOME AFTER BANK HOLIDAY ADVENTURE
THERE was a happy ending for beloved bird Coco who found his way back home after three days and two nights flying high in the skies of north Wexford.
The one-year-old African Grey parrot embarked on a bank holiday adventure after he escaped from his home in Gorey’s Allenwood Drive on Saturday May 2. Thankfully, he stayed local and could be seen flying around the Creagh area, the show grounds, Garden City and Willow Park over the next few days.
Meanwhile his owners, Caroline Travers and her family, were worried sick about Coco, and friends and neighbours were out in teams day and night calling and searching for the escape artist.
The bird grey in colour but has a long streak of red on his tail, which Caroline described as the most distinctive part of him.
‘He would remind you of a pigeon but the head and the beak are a lot bigger. He went on Saturday morning at about 10.30 a.m. and I put it up on Facebook that he was missing. We were all out watching and looking. He doesn’t fly that much in the house so I wasn’t expecting him to be gone far, but he flew further than I’d ever thought he would.
‘When he flew into next door’s back garden, I went right out behind him as he was sitting on my shoulder drinking tea. There was a bit of a bang in the estate and that’s what startled him and he just bolted. I expected him to be in the next garden or in the back lane but there was just no sign of him whatsoever.
‘The whole time he was out, he was doing this screeching, but he was really high in the sky. The more he flapped the higher he would have went’.
It wasn’t until 6 p.m. on Saturday evening that Caroline heard of the first sighting of Coco.
‘We’ve a green area and a river out the back of the house so we were all checking there. We got a phone call to say he was spotted on a tree at the Raheen na Guran but when we got up there, he was gone. The woman who spotted him called him by his name and he looked up, she went in to get a cracker for him and by the time she got back he was gone.
‘We were up there calling and calling but there was no sign. On Saturday night at about 10.30 p.m. we were still wandering around. A friend of mine called me to say she could hear a distressed sound of a bird screeching close by and they knew it wasn’t a normal bird. It was a five minute walk from my house so we went over and he had moved up the tree. Just as we came back to the house, we got a message from some young lads that they could see him, over by the trees at the old mushroom farm’.
Later on that night, local gardaí lent a hand and joined the search.
‘A group of us searching were at Hunters Green, it was just after one in the morning and the squad car came along to ask if everything was alright. After that, they drove the area where he was last seen flying and were looking for him. Every phone call we got to say he was somewhere, by the time we’d get there he was gone. I was getting so disheartened with the sightings and him not being there’.
At one stage, Coco was spotted back flying around his own garden while Caroline was out searching.
‘We were told he’d probably last four or five days out there. He wouldn’t starve but we were only ever going to get him back if he came down to somebody’s garden. We were worried about him being weak and hungry, panicked and distressed that he might bite someone. We’re lucky he stayed in our own area; he was even seen up on the roof of the Creagh school on Sunday. We had a few men, Owen Dunbar, Miley Finn, Colin Travers and Stephen Dunbar, out helping us who knew about birds and were interested in birds, who keep owls and hawks and had binoculars. They said he had covered some ground for a bird that’s not used to flying’.
In the end, it was another winged creature who helped in Coco’s rescue operation.
‘He was seen coming out of the wooded area of an estate up from us and a crow was at him. They came over a housing estate and Coco landed on a chimney, the crow knocked him off of it and he fell down. He landed into a garden and the people there, Ryan
Cullen and James Lynch, threw a towel over him to capture him.
‘We don’t think the crow actually harmed him, he was probably just trying to get him out of the area. We had been told that if crows saw him, because he’d be a strange bird to that area, they would have wanted to get rid of him.’
Coco has now happily settled back in at home and is up to his old tricks again.
‘He’s doing absolutely fine, he’s talking away again and flying onto my shoulder but he amazed everyone. We will have him a year on June 25 but he was hand-reared for 13 weeks before we got him. He nips the way a dog would lick you, but when he was returned he was distressed as he was biting harder. We put him back into the cage and let him relax when he got home but straight away he was feeding and drinking.
‘He loves mandarin oranges so he murdered two segments of a mandarin orange straight away and I made him a cup of tea so he was drinking that – he loves tea. But you’d never think by looking at him he’d been out for three days and two nights. The feathers are all are still perfect’.
Caroline said that she cannot thank the community enough for their support to bring Coco home.
‘I couldn’t believe the response and we didn’t expect it, we had phone calls from people as far away as Meath, but only for it going as far as it did, we’d have never gotten him back otherwise. Everybody was absolutely brilliant, the amount of phone calls and messages we were getting and we want to thank everyone from the bottom of our hearts.
‘The coronavirus was a blessing in disguise for us because people were around. Usually on a bank holiday, people would be doing different things and they wouldn’t be around. But this time people were purposely out walking looking for him, they weren’t in the pubs as they were closed so people were out walking two or three times a day out looking for him and calling him.
‘We want to thank the Pet Depot, the gardaí, the NWSPCA, Sister Clemin’s pre school, my brilliant neighbour Sabrina who was out for hours searching and just to everyone from the town for helping in any way,’ she said.
‘He’s a devil. The minute I come in for work, I have to go in and get him to spend time with him. He’d follow me up the stairs, he’d come out to the kitchen from the sitting room and sit up on my shoulder. He’s a bit of a torment at times but it’s like having a toddler. They just take everything in, like a sponge they soak everything up and that’s why he’s talking as much as he is. He’s definitely my pet as I’ve two boys and he wants to know them only if they’ve food for him’.