A rare 3-year-old parrot that had become trapped high in a tree for nearly three days is back on solid ground.
At just after 1 p.m. Friday, NBC 5 learned that the bird, a Catalina Mccaw named Samba, had come down from the tree after its owner, Giulio Ferrari, was carried to the top of the tree in a donated cherry picker.
From its perch atop the 50-foot tree, the bird crawled over to its owner and the pair were lowered to the ground where Samba enjoyed some food, a lot of water and some rest.
The rescue effort was not without its hurdles, however. Once Ferrari was aloft, the cherry picker stopped working -- leaving the bird's owner as stranded as the bird. After about an hour, the machine was fixed and Ferrari continued his ascent until he reached the limb Samba was perched upon.
"When I did get up there, he came to me. I think due to exhaustion and probably all the noise of the machine, he did bite me a little, but our bond is so great it only took him a couple of minutes to be back to his old self," Ferrari said in a post on Facebook.
Ferrari said Samba was getting some sun in their Oak Cliff backyard Wednesday when he was spooked by fireworks and flew into a nearby tree.
An attempt by Dallas firefighters to rescue Samba only spooked the bird further, prompting him to fly into a higher tree.
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"They did what they could," Ferrari said. "But as soon as they hit the tree, it flew from a 30-foot tree to a 60-foot tree."
Once there, Samba, unsure how to fly down, became stuck. While Catalina Mccaws can fly, they rarely do so. Getting out of high spots is particularly difficult as the birds typically use their beak to crawl back down.
"It's obvious from his pacing that he just can't come down," Ferrari said Thursday. "He doesn't know how to and he doesn't know how to fly down. He didn't know how to fly up until yesterday."
Ferrari said Samba speaks several dozen words in English and Portuguese and that Samba says "hello" every morning and "I love you" every night.
"My wife doesn't do that," Ferrari joked.
