Me, My Mayan Parrot,
and a Red-Tailed Hawk
Friendships Are Not Just for Humans
Words & Photos by Macduff Everton
June 5, 2025
Read more from Pets & Animals 2025 here.
In 1971, I stopped to photograph in a Mayan village in Campeche, a place so small that 40 years later it still doesn’t appear on most maps. Rows of traditional thatched roof houses lined both sides of the highway, reminding me of an English village in that it was so tidy, each house behind a whitewashed drystone wall, except in Mexico there were vivid tropical flowers and fruit trees in each yard.
A family offered to sell me a baby parrot. I put out my finger. The parrot climbed up, not stopping until it was nuzzling against my neck. I called him Suc Tuc, the name of the village. He squawked when he wanted food. He squawked all the time. I bought fresh ground corn masa every day. I’d pinch little bits into bite-sized balls to put in his mouth, like a mother bird feeding her baby. When he started eating on his own, I added fruit to his diet.
He matured into a beautiful bird. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Even that young, he was more like a crusty little sidekick, a bit scruffy. We traveled everywhere together. This wasn’t a bird that lived in a pretty cage in a nice house. We lived in the jungle. I had long hair, and at night, he crawled underneath it and fell asleep on my shoulder. When I spent a rainy season with a family of chicleros in the jungles of Quintana Roo below Tulum, I’d leave Suc Tuc on my hammock ropes when I went out with the men every morning to bleed the chicozapote trees for the resin used for chewing gum. I’d whistle for him when I returned, and he’d whistle back to let me know where he was.
Driving back to California in December, we hit freezing weather. Suc Tuc crawled in my mummy bag with me when I camped at night and slept next to my head. I’d put a piece of paper under him, so I didn’t have to clean the bag. I shoulder-trained him to jump off so he wouldn’t soil my shirt.
I got a job in construction so I could make enough money to return to Yucatán. In the spring, I was laying adobe brick on a large house. I brought Suc Tuc to work every day. One day, another worker brought his big St. Bernard. The dog pounced and then swallowed my parrot when he flew off for a bathroom break. I jumped off the scaffolding, picked up the St. Bernard by his tail, and kicked him in the belly until he vomited my bird. Suc Tuc was covered in saliva, he had a puncture wound in his chest, and he was missing feathers, but he took one look at me and squawked the equivalent of “Mama!”
He lost so many feathers, I put him in a box with a goose-necked lamp to keep him warm. He recovered but never flew again. I tried to un-train him not to jump off my shoulder, but he’d plop to the ground, poop, and climb right back up.
Back in Santa Barbara, when I see the red-tailed hawk lying dead on the road coming back from Rancho Las Cruces, I immediately pull over. It isn’t right that such a beautiful bird should become a bloody stain of flesh and feathers on the roadway. I put her on the floor of the cab of my truck. I pull back onto the freeway, shifting gears until I’m doing 70 miles an hour again. Only a few minutes later, in a flurry of feathers, the hawk stands next to me on the seat. I try not to make any sudden movements. I raise my foot off the accelerator. If she attacks, we’re both dead. We’re still going too fast to drive and fight her off. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her examine me. I can only wonder what she’s thinking. One moment, she’s flying; the next, she finds herself inside my pickup.
She stands next to me, watching the sky move past the windshield without a trace of wind or air currents. I speak to her in a low, soothing voice I hope sounds comforting and reassuring. She looks at me appraisingly and somehow understands I’m not a threat as we arrive home at the Summerland Road Yard.
I grab a pair of welding gloves in the barn. I put one on and hold out my hand. Her talons are perfect crescents that come to a needle-sharp point. She gently climbs on, gripping just enough to keep her balance. I hope she was simply stunned and will be able to fly. I move my hand up and down, enough so she has to open her broad, rounded wings to keep her balance. But she doesn’t fly off.
We look at each other. I tell her she’s a beautiful bird. Her chest is the color of a coffee stain moving to cream, her wings and back are dark chocolate, and she has cinnamon coloring on the top of her head. I run to the store to buy hamburger. I carefully feed her, wary of her piercing raptor’s bill. When I offer the first little ball, she delicately takes it from my fingers. She doesn’t lunge for it. It reminds me of feeding Suc Tuc when he was a baby. He’s watching from the other side of the kitchen. I worry the hawk will think Suc Tuc is an appetizer if he’s on my shoulder.
Suc Tuc enjoys it when I use my thumb and middle finger to scratch him from behind around the nape of his neck. This is an area birds can’t reach when they preen themselves, so I’m helping to groom him. He enjoys it so much he ducks his head and ruffles his feathers whenever he wants me to do it.
I wonder if I can scratch the hawk’s head too. A bird is vulnerable when they put their head down. Would she trust me enough? I know I shouldn’t try, but curiosity gets the better of me. After feeding her, I slowly move my hand behind her head. I lightly scratch the nape of her neck. She ruffles her feathers and lowers her head. I scratch harder and she lowers her head even more. I’ve only experienced trust like this with small children and animals. Each time reminds me to live up to that trust.
There weren’t any raptor rescue centers like there are today, so I try to rehabilitate the hawk myself. I also don’t find any manuals on how to heal a hawk. This is decades before the Internet. I come up with a plan of my own. I think she needs to strengthen her wings. I work with her every day. She hops on my hand whenever I put it in front of her. I expect her to dig in with her talons, but she never does.
I buy white mice from a pet store and take the hawk out to the corral. I put her on the top rail of the corral, then tie dental floss to a mouse with about 20 feet of lead and tie that to a fence post. I let the mouse loose and hope the hawk will try to pounce on it. It’s lucky I tied the mouse, because the hawk hops around and chases it before actually catching it. Day by day, she progresses from falling to gliding to actually flapping her wings. I don’t have to tie up the mice any longer.
After a few days, I put Suc Tuc on my shoulder. I walk over to the hawk and put out my hand. She hops on and looks at Suc Tuc with feral interest, but she doesn’t lunge for him, so I carry them both. Soon they both want attention. Suc Tuc bends his head forward, ruffing out his feathers for me to scratch him. I rub his head until the hawk indicates she wants attention too. Then I switch and scratch her head. Suc Tuc then busies himself grooming me, nibbling around my ear, but doesn’t bite me or act jealous. We go for walks together. The barn is at the bottom of a valley with hills rising on three sides covered in grass and brush. I want the hawk to spend as much time outside as possible, hoping to excite her to try to fly. We scare up jackrabbits that dart away while birds flit around us. I wonder how long she will be content to move as slowly as I walk.
After about a month, she takes wing and flies off. It’s time. A part of me wants her to come back to visit, but it isn’t realistic. She needs to be wild. The first few days, she circles the barn and sits high on a branch in a eucalyptus tree. Red-tailed hawks have a distinctive screech. Ralph Hoffmann, a former director of our local natural history museum, describes their call as “a high squealing cry, which in spite of its asthmatic quality, has a fierce insistence.” It’s so good that in movies and television, whenever a raptor appears, regardless of whether it’s a hawk or an eagle, they invariably use the screech of a red-tailed hawk.
I look up when I hear her, but then we both have our own separate lives to live, and I stop looking for her. Of course, I wish she’d come back to visit. I dream that I whistle for her and she answers from high above, and when I put out my arm, she swoops down to land on it. A red-tailed hawk is so thrilling to watch, soaring effortlessly, so regal, graceful, and beautiful.
It makes me think of our relationships with wild animals. When people ask each other, “If you came back as an animal, what would you want to be?” so many name a dominant animal in their environment, such as a lion, a tiger, an elephant, or a hawk.
I don’t, and I’ve thought about it a long time. I’ve decided I want to come back as a canyon wren. They’re not that pretty, although they have the same rust coloring as a red-tailed hawk. But they have the most mellifluous and evocative song, like a cool trickle of water descending over rocks, a sweet cascade of falling liquid notes. It always puts me in a good mood. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to add beauty to the world every time you open your mouth?
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