The Bird Lady

SUN CITY – Jess Chipkin (N.22) is known in her neighborhood as “the bird lady.” When her neighborhood had its own newspaper, she contributed a Q & A on birds. Her corner-lot home is replete with an array of sparrows, doves, finches, blue jays, robins, cardinals, and woodpeckers that come to snack at her birdfeeders.

“Each birdfeeder is designed for a different type of bird, and I have different types of food [for each type of bird],” Chipkin says.

Although Del Webb limits the amount of birdfeeders one can have on one’s property, Jess helped her neighbor set up his birdfeeders, which are in view of her home, so she could enjoy those as well.

“I get the standard finches, but over the years, as the trees have grown, I get several cardinals; there are two pairs that come every day. Blue jays are gone in the summer months but start coming back around October 1,” Chipkin says.

Fall is a very active time of year for birds, Chipkin says, because of migration. Heading into the colder months, the bird population changes with the color of the leaves.

“Right around this time of year, these cute, little birds called juncos start coming,” says Chipkin. “They are very friendly and will practically eat out of your hand. They’re more of Canadian birds, and this is actually going south for them.” Chipkin saw the first junco on October 13. “[Their appearance] always tells me winter’s coming.”

Chipkin says that the colder temperatures creates activity in birds because their natural food supply of berries and insects diminishes, forcing them to turn to birdfeeders to supplement their diet. Chipkin says, “It’s very, very hard for them to get water,” because it freezes in the winter. Jess solves this problem for the birds by having two heated birdbaths. “I even have hawks that come to drink the water.”

Last year, for the first time, Chipkin attracted chickadees. “[It] was really exciting because that’s my favorite bird.”

A self-described animal person, Chipkin has owned dogs and even a horse. But birds have not always been Chipkin’s passion. Growing up, her love was horses. “I’ve been into horses since I was born,” she says. At seven years old, Chipkin started writing horse stories on a big, old typewriter. “Born to Ride, Born to Race, Story of a Lost Racehorse, Story of a Girl Jockey,” she says and laughs. “Mom still has them in a box someplace.”

It was Chipkin’s horse, a Lipizzan named Shaman, that got her interested in birds.

“[My interest in birds] started about 15 years ago, when I was at the barn [with her horse], and one of the barn cats had injured a little sparrow. I felt really bad because the sparrow was all beat up, and I decided to take him home.”

Chipkin named the sparrow Peepers, bought him a cage, and nursed him back to health. Once Peepers was able to be released back into the wild, she took him to the barn and let him go.

“He flew away,” she said. “And I was very depressed.”

But the next day, when Chipkin went to the barn to get her horse out of the pasture, she got a welcome surprise. “The little sparrow [Peepers] flew right out of a tree and onto my arm. I said, ‘Oh my God, Peepers!’ He recognized my voice and came back to me.”

Chipkin took Peepers home again and treated him much like a Parakeet. “One day I got a little careless,” she said. “I had the cage on my balcony, and Peepers flew away. I was so upset.” It was that day that Chipkin bought her first birdfeeder. “I put a birdfeeder up right by a tree outside my balcony, and I got all sorts of sparrows.” She never knew if one of the sparrows who came to the feeder was Peepers, “But I was convinced that one of them was Peepers.”

In addition to her horse, Chipkin now owns a four-year-old Quaker parrot named EzraBea. Originally from Argentina, feral Quaker parrots have been “flying free” in the United States for about 20 years and are populating the country.

“They are outlawed in about 20 states,” says Chipkin, for the main reason that Quaker parrots, unlike other parrots who build nests inside tree cavities, build external nests that can weigh up to 1000 pounds.

“They build them on utility poles, and utility companies have a big problem moving the nests,” explains Chipkin.

The biggest population of Quaker parrots is in Brooklyn and New Jersey, but there are also parrots in Hyde Park and Itasca, Illinois. “There’s about 200 birds there in a colony [in Hyde Park],” says Chipkin.

Chipkin takes her bird, Ezra, for a walks in a screened-in knapsack because he is able to fly.

“The most fascinating thing about my parrot is that he’s very in touch with his instincts,” she says. “He’s building a nest in the house that has the same structure as the nests that they build on utility poles.”

Ezra uses 11 ¾-inch lollypop sticks for his nest-building that Jess special orders. “The local Michaels can’t keep up with the supply,” she says. There’s about 500 sticks in his cage right now.

In the wild, Chipkin says Ezra would have the role of “nest builder.” Other Quaker parrots are “sentries,” who keep watch, and others are “food hunters.”

Quaker parrots can talk and are one of the top five parrots known for speech. “He [Ezra] has a huge vocabulary of 50-60 words,” Chipkin says. “They learn most of their words in the first few years of life.” But Chipkin says Ezra is a quick and continual learner: “He’s always picking up new words.”

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