Homeless Bird Lands in the Hearts of a BPC School Community

Children in Sonia Bicocchi's second grade class are paid a visit by the school's new arrival, Gerald Rainbow Fluttershine Charger. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

It moved.

P.S./I.S. 276 Assistant Principal Claudine Jellison couldn’t believe what she was seeing that Monday morning, May 4, when she found the creature, its eyes tightly shut, its shivering body puffed up in a yellow ball of feathers and fear—and no leg tag to identify an owner.

“I wanted somebody else to see it because I thought I’d lost it,” Jellison recalled. “I couldn’t believe there was a parrot sitting on the ledge here.” So began the temporary but popular addition of Gerald Rainbow Flut¬ter¬shine Charger (as the students named him/her) to the school community.

During the two weeks before his adoption by a Tri¬beca couple, the highly vocal and brightly colored green-and-yellow parrot, a sun conure, found its feisty, squawking self in demand throughout the school.

“Little by little everybody’s been wanting him in the classrooms,” parent coordinator Erica Foley Weldon said soon after the homeless bird arrived at school. “The kids are all excited.”

It appeared that the bird had been abandoned by its owner.

“I saw a cage in the garbage over there,” said Anthony Seenath, a school custodian, standing at the window where the bird landed and gesturing to the residential building across the way. “So I’m figuring he might have been in that cage.”

Called to the scene, Seenath had coaxed the bird off the ledge and into the building with a bit of a breakfast doughnut donated by Linda Moftah, a teacher.

“Of all these high buildings, for him to fly and just sit there,” Seenath said, “it’s amazing.”

Principal Terri Ruyter quickly began to search for a store with a cage, and by the end of the day, the forsaken parrot was being comfortably housed and fed in her office.

Each morning, Gerald, as the bird was commonly called, was wheeled into a different classroom, where he had become an ad hoc addition to a teacher’s lesson plans.

“The kids are going to observe the bird’s behavior, see if it likes grapes more than apples, to see if we can teach it to say some words,” said Ruyter, who sometimes allowed the bird to fly freely in her office. “We’re thinking about things kids can do as they build a relationship with this bird.”

Even when the parrot was not the center of instructional attention, it was glad to chime in, as second grade teacher Sonia Bicocchi learned from the unsolicited squawks during a math lesson.

“I will not be yelling today,” the teacher said, matter of factly. “He will.”

In Julie Smith’s kindergarten art class, where the kids were assigned to draw the bird from life, Gabriel Kim insightfully announced that Gerald may squawk because he is not so happy.

“I think it means that he’s scared because maybe he’s scared because they left him by himself and sometimes I get scared at night when I’m by myself.”

Indeed, realizing that it was un¬healthy for the bird to be kept alone in the 

school on weekends, Geralin Fanelli, sister of the school’s secretary, Lorraine Fittipaldi, adopted the bird with her husband, Danny. In the couple’s Inde¬pendence Plaza apartment in Tribeca, the bird—now called Dolly—happily flies about at will. (“In the morning when I make the bed he has to come stay with me,” said Danny. “He has free rein,” added Geralin.).

The couple is busily trying to help the parrot expand its diet beyond seeds and corn chips as well as kickstart its vocabulary.

“Say hello,” Danny urged the parrot as it rested on his finger.

“Squawk, squawk,” the bird replied.

“That’s good,” Danny said, smiling. “You’re trying, at least.”