My vision of what a macaw companion would be was undergoing radical revision. There was going to be competition with the dogs for their food. There was going to be an ongoing mess: bird food on the floor, dog food on the floor, gallons of water on the floor, and of course prodigious amounts of bird poop. This was not going to be a bird who gazed at me lovingly while she nibbled an almond in silence. I began to realize that for all I had read, for all those discussions at the Parrot Weekend, and for all that I thought I knew, Sarah was not a bigger version of the parakeet we had when I was growing up. I was back in the Pleistocene Era; I had adopted a raptor. There was also going to be noise, lots of noise.