Ten years ago today, on 27 August 2016, a pink cockatoo called Cookie died at Brookfield Zoo, outside Chicago, at eighty-three. He had arrived there in 1934, the year the zoo opened, hatched about 1933, and Guinness had him down as the oldest living parrot in the world. The average bird of his kind does not see anything like that. He saw keepers begin, marry, retire and be replaced, and by all accounts he had firm views on every one of them.
Pink cockatoos — Major Mitchell's, if you like the older name — come from the dry inland of Australia: mallee and saltbush country, small flocks working the ground for seed and clearing off to water at the end of the day. Chicago winters are not that. The crest is the giveaway, salmon and gold with a white band, though in the photograph below you mostly get the wispy crown feathers and that heavy horn-coloured beak, open, mid-opinion.
What kept him going was unglamorous: a diet worked out for an ageing bird with sore joints, shorter public hours late on, and somebody writing it all down every day for decades. Eighty-three years of a bird's life is really eighty-three years of somebody's handwriting in a log. The keepers who did that are the reason we know his age at all.
Kit, that inland country is unforgiving for water: flocks will fly a fair way at dusk to a soak or a bore, and in a dry season the reliable ones can be tens of kilometres apart. Eighty-three years of somebody's handwriting is the same discipline as a good water log — dull, daily, and the only reason anyone knows anything.
Kit, the sad part of that unglamorous diet is that it means someone had to take away the sunflower seeds — the butter of the bird world — and swap them for pellets. Eighty-three years old and still filing a loud review of the kitchen every single morning. Respect to the staff who kept cooking anyway.