NPR meets My Telepathic Bird Lily b, part 1 by Sara Wright

I begin this story with a vignette and an invitation to meet my current family. This morning my four -pound Chihuahua made her usual rounds and ended up in the bathroom where my 3O plus year old African Collared Dove, a free flying house bird has a roost and his very own plant window. Lily b had flown onto the floor and was visiting with Coalie.

The first time I witnessed this exchange between bird and dog I instinctively swept Lily off the floor and deposited him on his perch, feeling relieved no damage had been done, though oddly Lily b was not the least bit agitated. A few days later I discovered him on the kitchen floor as Coalie was backing him into a corner. Or was she? Lily b was initiating these exchanges, so I was baffled.

Every morning Coalie stops by to see if Lily b is perched on his basket. They exchange salutations meeting eye to eye before Coalie moves on unless Lily flies down. It is impossible not to conclude that these two are engaging in some kind of play on days they meet on the floor. If Coalie can’t resist pulling at one of Lily’s feathers, he promptly spreads out a wing using it as a shield to block her. Back off he says and she does! Lily b never flies away.

Coalie is unlike any other dog that I have ever had. There is a serene gentleness about her – a childlike innocence. Every living being is her friend. The wild turkeys let her sniff their seeds as they eat. When chickadees see her, they greet her with a muted chirp while exchanging piercing stares and sometimes a chickadee will fly down to the lowest branches to be closer to her. The deer don’t run from her. These animals know like I do that Coalie is ‘different’.

 Lily used to torment all the dogs I have had by flying down to the floor and then taking off before they could catch him. My last dog Hope became so infuriated that she started to pretend that Lily wasn’t even there! My point is that I have no precedent for this kind of bird-dog friendship. Yet Lily b has assured me that he is safe, and I trust his judgment completely.

When I first got Lily b, he roosted in my room flying around as I journaled early in the morning. Oh, how I loved that bird!  Yet it took six months for me to get it that when I had an insight/illumination that was important Lily was not only reading my mind but responding, validating that I was on the right track. At these times Lily would utter three coos that were different from all the other sounds he made.

In retrospect, accepting the truth of what I experienced allowed me to cross an invisible threshold for the second time in my life. Telepathy returned me to my original belief system that developed out of the personal experiences I had had as a child and adolescent. If Lily b could read my mind, it followed that other animals and plants could too. Except for my beloved dogs this truth had been blurred by the difficulties I encountered in early adulthood.

I was born a naturalist and as a child had intimate relationships with animals, plants and birds. My little brother was three years younger than I was and as soon as he was old enough, we lived in the woods making friends with everyone that lived there. All nature was alive and every creature, tree, moss, or fungi had something interesting to teach us. We were the students, Nature was the teacher. We instinctively kept our experiences to ourselves knowing that they would be rejected as nonsense by others. But we always had each other.

Neither of us ever considered that we experienced prescience, telepathy, or precognition though we had access to all the above making interspecies communication easier (no doubt we weren’t even familiar with the words). The key that opened that door for us was our deep love for the natural world.

When Davey (my brother) died suddenly in my early twenties, I lost my soulmate, the one person with whom I could share my experiences. I stumbled on alone.

Now that I no longer had my beloved companion, I began to doubt that my non- human communications were real. Were my plants really talking to me? Gradually the thought that I might be crazy entered the picture though plants and animals continued to ‘speak’ and oh how I loved them (especially my houseplants and dogs) Sadly, I surrendered my truths to the collective during those darkest years.

 Then at midlife after being called to the mountains by a need to study bears and live in the forest my life changed radically. I was living in an 8/12 cabin a few feet from a roaring brook in a lush fragrant treed paradise.

 I fed hundreds of birds while waiting for the bears that I knew were coming. My favorites were still the same, chickadees and mourning doves, the latter whose coos soothed my soul body self just as the flowing waters did.

After my father died suddenly, I became obsessed by having a dove of my own because doves were part of his Italian heritage and I had recently returned from a trip to Assisi, Italy, my homeland too. I had always wanted a bird but couldn’t resolve the conflict between having an avian friend who would be confined indoors. Birds need to fly free. This attitude shifted when I discovered that African Collared doves were imported into this country to parent exotic birds and then set free to live or die. I bought Lily b for five dollars. Since I refused to cage him, I hung baskets all over the house, so he always had a roost and conveniently he defecated in them. No clean up for me.

Every dawning I continued to journal before beginning my day. It took six months for me to accept that Lily b, who slept in the same room I did, was reading my mind. Every important insight/illumination I had was accompanied by a particular set of coos that Lily used to inform me that I was on the right track.

When Dr. Rupert Sheldrake reached out for antidotal stories about animal telepathy, I contacted him about Lily b who became part of Rupert’s data bank. Rupert was the first scientist that took my observations seriously for which I will be eternally grateful.

 Otherwise, I continued to keep my extraordinary happenings that now included living around black bears to myself.

Accruing degrees that included a background in science didn’t help.

However, it was Lily b that had re- opened the door to interspecies communication as a concrete reality in my adult life, a door that would never shut again. I no longer doubted myself, although whenever these incidents occurred, I always experienced awe and wonder that we are all so connected and can communicate so effectively with other species if we develop relationships with them. Oh, how I missed my brother.

Although by this time I had become an academic researcher I understood that learning about a creature or tree was only half the story. We must also love and appreciate them, and we must be patient. Animals, trees, flowers, fungi communicate in their voices and in their time not ours. And those voices might be a scent or sound, a thought, a feeling, a word, a spark of light, a bird in flight, or perhaps a dream.

Because I am an ecologist and ethologist, I learn best by being outdoors in the field observing and letting nature lead. After each experience I do research and write about whoever has captured my imagination. Up until recently I deliberately left out the more astonishing and controversial aspects of my experiences like a dream that would direct me in some way, prescience that would give me a sense or feeling of where a creature would be found, or the telepathy that allowed me to communicate with that animal or tree because in this culture we pretend these experiences don’t exist. ‘Crazy’ was still stuck somewhere in my head.

Part 2 and NPR’s role next week.