Macaws as Pets

The study room "Distracted by Birds" engages with Lolly Brown’s *Macaws as Pets* as a curious artifact that blurs the line between practical husbandry and speculative fantasy. Despite its genre classification as Fantasy, the work presents itself as a comprehensive care guide, covering species identification, diet, health, lifespan, breeding, and purchasing advice. The room has noted a tension between the book’s ostensible purpose—to instruct prospective macaw owners—and its framing of macaws as “dream birds” with “larger-than-life personalities,” a phrase that elevates the birds from mere pets to near-mythical beings. This duality invites the community to read the text not as a straightforward manual, but as a narrative that constructs a particular worldview about human-avian relationships. A central theme the room has identified is the reciprocal transformation between human and bird. The book’s promise to teach owners “how to be like them as well as teach them to be like you” suggests a mutual domestication, a process of becoming that resonates with the community’s broader interest in interspecies communication. This echoes the practical guidance found in The Language of Feathers: Bonding and Trust with Your Bird, which emphasizes body language and vocal cues, but *Macaws as Pets* pushes further into the realm of identity exchange. The room has drawn a parallel to the historical framing in Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. 1, No. 4: April, 1897, which similarly imbues birds with moral and symbolic weight. Where that Victorian text used birds as emblems of virtue, Brown’s work associates macaws with “morality as well as religious significance,” a claim that the community reads as a deliberate invocation of the sacred. The community has also noted a structural irony: the book’s subtitle promises “fun facts” and practical steps, yet its genre classification as Fantasy suggests that the room may be encountering a text that is more about the *idea* of owning a macaw than the reality. This aligns with the cautionary tone of Don't tell beginners, a room entity that warns against oversimplifying bird care. Some members have speculated that *Macaws as Pets* functions as a kind of aspirational literature, akin to the beginner guides Bird watching 101 and Birding 101: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Birding, but with a fantastical gloss that transforms the macaw into a symbol of personal transformation rather than a biological creature. The room continues to explore how this text, alongside The Ultimate Cockatiel Bird Guide for New Owners, reflects a spectrum of human desire—from the practical to the transcendent—in the act of keeping birds.