Put away the seeds and the bird call — Gracie has been found!
The missing African grey parrot — whose mysterious disappearance from her Prospect Place apartment last Thursday became front-page news on BrooklynPaper.com last week — was returned to his owner on Sunday in a tale of heroism, good luck and one plucky bird.
According to owner Lora Myers, a Prospect Park West woman was watching television on Sunday at around noon when she heard a chirping noise on the windowsill.
“She was watching ‘Treasure Island’ — she made a point of telling me. But she heard the chirp and noticed Gracie sitting on her windowsill, 12 stories up!”
The woman enticed the 12-year-old Gracie into the apartment with a piece of apple. Once the bird was safe, the woman went online and discovered a “Missing Bird” posting from a Midwood couple.
The woman called the couple, who showed up and were disappointed to discover that Gracie was not their missing bird. But they put aside their grief and took the bird home, fed him and called the Center for Animal Care and Control.
Myers had registered her missing fair feathered friend with the group three days earlier and, sure enough, the group called Myers with the four happiest words in the English language: We have your bird.
“It was an amazing chain of events,” Myers told us. “He survived three nights on the mean streets and was lucky he was rescued! I could not be happier.”
In our initial coverage, Myers described herself as frantic after losing Gracie, whom she had known since he was a chick, from her apartment between Fifth and Sixth avenues. The bird disappeared through a door that her husband, Andrew Kolker, left open when he was taking out the garbage.
“We’ve had him 12 years,” she said. “This is my child!”
She was also disappointed by the response (or lack thereof) from officers of the 78th Precinct, who declined to take a “Missing persons” report. And hours later, a worker at Hootie Couture on Flatbush Avenue spotted the bird and called police, who did not collar the bird.
Not that it would have mattered.
“If they had managed to capture him that night, they still would not have had a record of me!” Myers pointed out. “I know they have a lot on their plate, but it doesn’t seem a lot to ask of my community precinct to write down some basic information from a frantic pet owner.”
