Fresh mindsets take wing and fly

Josh Cook, a TEDx speaker, explores a fine line between training and freedom with the damaged birds he adopts. John Huxley reports.

Strolling out onto the sun-splashed balcony of his Bronte home, Josh Cook squints, frowns and tries once again to count the number of birds in his care.

Well, he says looking round, there's Sherlock, a galah with a bad cough. And Harry, an eclectus parrot, ''a poor thing, almost broken'' after having his wings clipped and being treated like a plaything by owners unknown.

There are three wounded welcome swallows; a pair of spotted pardalotes, which from their bruised heads appear to have been attacked by noisy miners; and a starling that is paying a return visit after being repaired.

In a cage in the bathroom, suffering in improvised isolation, protected from other bird dust, is an anonymous Alexandrine parrot, found almost dead at Bondi Junction.

Then, there are the cockatiels. Canaries. Chooks. Homing pigeons. Cook and his father, the retired Melbourne Cup-winning jockey Peter Cook, have always kept pigeons. And, of course, Mango, a big blue-and-gold macaw.

Mango! Mid-sentence, Cook stops counting and announces: ''We've got to go. Mango's started ripping the pegs off the neighbour's washing line.''

Worse, she appears to have started on the washing, too.

Outside, Cook whistles, calls the bird down. Reunited, the pair make their way to Bronte park where, to the astonishment of suburban children, joggers and dog-walkers, the one-kilogram bird is regularly released. To fly free.

For not only does Cook - avian behaviourist, bird whisperer or, more accurately perhaps, whistler - keep, locate, rescue, care for, repair and rehabilitate birds, he can ''train'' them in free flight.

A relatively new concept in aviculture and companion-bird ownership, his is an art rather than a science, based on creating a strong rapport between bird and owner and nurturing its natural instinct to adopt a home range.

Cook has had Mango, now seven months, since she was a ''little, pink ball of flesh''. After flying around, Mango usually returns to sit on his shoulder and nip his fingers, though sometimes she makes her own way home.

Over the past five years Cook has worked with owners and specialist collectors throughout Australia to train individual birds and to establish a free-flying flock of macaws and a breeding colony of eclectus parrots.

Remarkably, the ''birdman of Bronte'' as he is inevitably described by his neighbours, is self-taught. He has no qualifications. No binoculars. No telescopes. No other fancy birder accessories. Just an extraordinary talent.

Bird trainer Josh Cook, with Mango a female giant Macaw, visits Bronte Beach . Photo: Peter RaeCook, 34, has been fascinated by birds for as long as he can remember, back to the happy days at Scots College's outdoor centre at Kangaroo Valley, or in the backyard helping his father lay down seed and whistle up pigeons.

''Dad was always mad keen,'' he says. ''On the way to the Melbourne Cup one year, he found a bird that had been smashed up by a hawk. He won that year and the first thing he said afterwards was, 'How's that pigeon doing?'''

In his teens, Cook started caring for injured birds brought home by his father or, increasingly, passed on by members of the public through local vets, whom he had approached with offers to help.

''I'd ring the vets and say, 'If you get starlings or stuff that might be euthanased, I'll look after them'.'' Word soon got around, he says, as Mango jumps on the table and steals a shortbread biscuit from a plate.

Since then, he has treated everything from cuckoos to figbirds, Indian mynas (which he believes have been unjustly vilified) to peregrine falcons - possibly those roosting on the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction.

By the final year of school, where he enjoyed only art, English and writing, he had decided what he wanted to do in life. ''At one point I thought I might have to run away from home.'' But his parents proved very supportive.

''Birds were always his passion,'' says his mother, Robin. ''He couldn't be denied. I tried. I gave him a year off. I got him to go to uni. Briefly. He said he felt like an alien there. It just didn't work for him.''

At his father's prompting, he subsequently worked at a vet's clinic in Coogee. He valued the experience but found it unsatisfactory. ''I spent far more time working with people than animals.''

From the start, he was fascinated by free flight. ''It was the whole thing about being able to 'keep' birds without the restrictions of the cage; about overcoming the guilt of holding on to something that is meant to be free.

''I like to think that free flight changes the way in which man and birds relate; that birds continue to live as naturally as possible, benefiting from the relationship rather than just being there simply to provide entertainment.''

Free flight is not new, he points out. In most cases, though, it is based primarily on the bird's hunger: something that is effective if birds must be readied to fly to order at specific times, such as in zoo displays of raptors.

The methods Cook uses, and successfully teaches to others, might be reinforced by feeding but are far more demanding and time-consuming. He spends months building a rapport with a bird, sitting with it, interacting with it, playing with it, whistling to it, feeding it from a syringe and, orchestrating its first indoor flights, before stepping outside to expand its home range.

Cook picks his words, trying to avoid anthropomorphism, the ascription of human attributes to his birds. It is not easy when Mango is bouncing about, cocking her head, seemingly hanging on his words.

Releasing a bird after indoor training and controlled familiarisation with the great outdoors requires precise timing. It can be heart-stopping. Cook recalls the first flight of a scarlet macaw, bought for $10,000 by a central coast collector.

''I let him go about 9am. I stood there and watched him going higher and higher, wider and wider.'' With growing anxiety, Cook tracked him on foot. It was not until about 5.30pm that he closed on the hungry bird.

''Even then, there was still a creek between us. In the end I had to enlist the help of an excavator driver. I told him, 'I have to watch this bird, mate. Go back and grab my nuts.' They never let me forget that.''

Somehow, Cook has managed to turn a lifelong hobby into a career, skill into a source of income. But only just. He admits to worrying over how he can continue to make a living.

He worked on the movie Babe: Pig in the City, looking after a flock of pigeons as well as mice and goldfish. He ''trained'' birds to appear - literally - in a car commercial, supposedly in order to promote a safe, spacious image.

He teamed up with a local pet search expert to create a television show, provisionally called Pet Detectives, that would be educational, entertaining, ''sleuthful'' and based on real-life cases.

''It would have been great. Finding the pet. Reuniting it with its owner. We even had an indigenous fellow lined up to talk about tracking and such.'' Sadly, it only reached the pilot stage, though Cook remains convinced it would have been a ratings winner.

Meanwhile, he continues to locate and save the stray, sick and wounded, and to work what he describes as a ''small, niche market'', helping owners to train birds native and exotic, cheap and expensive. It is an honourable task.

There is a black market in foreign species such as the macaw, a native of Central and South America, but the parks service is happy as long as he doesn't lose imported birds into the bush. Mango, who was bought from a Cessnock breeder and carries both leg-band and microchip identification, is his mate, his pride and joy and, Cook concedes, a ''bit of a business card'' as well.

''She always attracted lots of admirers. First, people wonder whether she has had her wings clipped. No, I say. Then they want to know, how come she doesn't fly away.'' He tries to explain that she has been trained not to.

''In a sense a bird doesn't fly to fly away. The thing is, they want to have food, shelter and mates. They want to feel safe, comfortable. That way they become more and more confident.

''You are not trying to create dependence. I want the birds to be able to interact with their own kind.'' And herein lies Cook's next big challenge with Mango, who may live to be 80. ''Recently, she's started to go to children, perhaps attracted by high voices, which sound like my whistle. But for her own good she needs a mate.''

Cook, otherwise an otherwordly young man, is saving hard to buy her one.