An unlikely parrot love story may have led to new species
WASHINGTON — When they met, Kirby and Suzie differed in ways that went beyond what people usually notice first about them, their color.
He was large. She was small. He had spent most of his life in a loving home. She had been abandoned when she was young.
He was bold and a gifted talker. She was sweet and more selective with her words.
Tammy Morgan, who owns TC Feathers Aviary in suburban Virginia along with her wife, Carey, says she would never have thought of pairing the two — yet she saw how they quickly gravitated toward each other, how they soon started sneaking off to be alone and how he now watches over her.
“They fell in love,” Morgan says.
There are love stories, and then there is the love story of Suzie and Kirby. Theirs is a rare pairing, one that both defies nature and resulted from it. The two are species of parrots that don’t normally mate: Kirby is a harlequin macaw and Suzie is a military macaw.
In the wild, they likely wouldn’t have come together. In a Virginia aviary, they are inseparable.
They are also parents. About a year ago, their firstborn hatched from an egg, leaving the aviary with a unique quandary: What do you call a species that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else?
Morgan first started taking care of Suzie more than a decade ago after she and two other macaws were left in front of her house by a man who lived with his parents and realized he couldn’t take care of the birds.
When Suzie first came to live at the aviary full time a few years ago, she had suffered a loss. She had paired up with another macaw that died, and “she was really missing” him, Morgan says.
Kirby had been raised since he was young by Morgan’s wife and was one of several male macaws living at the aviary at the time. He was also the biggest bird in the place and had developed a reputation of being rude to other macaws. With Suzie, though, he was gentle.
They would clean each other’s feathers with their beaks, which is called preening and requires a level of comfort and trust.
When the two began sharing a cage, no one knew what to expect. What they didn’t expect, though, were fertile eggs.
Morgan says Suzie didn’t know how to take care of them. Instead of sitting on them, she sat next to them, so they didn’t develop properly.
The next time she laid a set of eggs, Morgan pulled them from the cage and placed them in an incubator. Two didn’t make it.
But from the third egg came a tiny lump of a bird.
The aviary took suggestions from customers for a name and settled on “Kuzie,” a portmanteau of Suzie and Kirby.
The aviary’s staff, along with their friends, relatives and customers, also started researching whether a military macaw and harlequin macaw, a hybrid mix between a green-wing macaw and a blue-and-gold macaw, had ever produced an offspring.
They couldn’t find another. Kuzie, they realized, wasn’t just the product of an unusual love story. He might be a one-ofa-kind species.
Unsure what to call this new type of bird and unable to find a name that already existed, the aviary again took suggestions. And they again picked one that gave a nod to both parents: “miliquin macaw.”
For five months, Morgan woke up every 90 minutes in the night to make him formula and feed him.
She did the same last May when another egg hatched. This time it was a girl, Millie.
Both Kuzie and Millie seem to share their father’s ease with words. Kuzie is fond of saying, “peekaboo.” And as Millie nuzzles against Morgan one recent afternoon, she says, “I love you.”
Occasionally someone will ask whether the siblings are for sale, and each time the answer is the same.
“At this point, everyone is so attached, not only us, but also our customers,” Morgan says. “They’re not going anywhere.”