Up close and personal with Australian birds

PALMER — In the center of the Don Sheldon Events Center on the Alaska State Fairgrounds is a cage filled with dozens of green and yellow parakeets.

Nancy Rouas, second in command of the World Center for Exotic Birds, which is putting on the Outback in Alaska display, said they’re parakeets and, as she spoke Wednesday afternoon, they’d just eaten and were taking a nap.

“Just like we would after Thanksgiving dinner,” she said.

As she spoke, an assistant tapped the cage and 20 or more parakeets that had been exploring the floor of the cage flew up in unison to perch on a branch.

“You just like doing that, don’t you?” Rouas asked.

“The people like it,” the assistant explained, mimicking the amazed look visitors display watching so many birds alight all at once.

Visitors can get inside that cage with the birds and feed them for a small fee.

“They all fly right to you,” Rouas said. “I’ve had a lot of parents tell me this is the coolest thing for their kids to do at the fair.”

The center she works for does these kinds of shows all over the country. They were here last year, too, though the show was smaller and done outside. They might be back next year.

“If we do it will be an entirely different theme,” Rouas said.

The shows are the for-profit arm of the operation. There’s also a nonprofit arm.

“We’ve got some Andean condors, in pairs, set up at a breeding facility,” Rouas said.

The hope is that their young will be able to be released into the wild. Rouas said a lot of people are aware of the plight of the Californian condor, but the Andean bird is also threatened. Visitors can donate to the effort. The money the show earns — from the fair and from that feeding cage (the show is free with fair admission) — will also help.

In addition to the parakeets there’s an emu, a pair of kangaroos and a bunch of other birds, all arranged in cages around that central parakeet cage. Rouas said there are more birds not on the floor. She brings them out for stage shows at 1, 4 and 6 p.m. on weekdays and noon, 2, 4 and 6 p.m. on weekends.

The show features cockatoos and a kookaburra as well as another mammal — a wallaby.

She said reception at the fair has been good.

“Last week I was just amazed at how busy it was,” Rouas said.

And that’s despite the trouble the show had in transit.

“They wouldn’t let some of our big, cool birds come through Canada,” Rouas said.

Though most of the show flew north on a plane, the larger birds had to be crated and shipped on a van. The veterinarian at the border, though, wanted different information than the show had been told to bring along in discussions with Canadian authorities.

“Apparently the left hand doesn’t talk to the right hand,” Rouas said.

The birds are spending a couple of weeks at a facility in Montana, she said. It’s unfortunate the birds couldn’t come, but Rouas said it doesn’t seemed to have dimmed the enthusiasm of visitors.

“People don’t get a chance to see this kind of stuff very often,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.