AT HOME : GARDENING : Birds in Paradise : Fancy fliers bring exotic color, flashes of movement, mingled music, a touch of opera, to Woodland Hills back yard.
The last thing a weary bird dealer wants to hear when he comes home at night is a lot of screaming birds. So as much as Louis Barth, co-owner of Birds Plus in Burbank, loves his own feathered pets, he’s had to make a deal with them. They get to live around the pool in his Woodland Hills yard; he gets to sleep in the house.
Three large cages fringed by fruit trees hold his personal pick of chittering Lady Gould finches, rosellas and white crown pionus. A fourth cage, on the patio, is home to Captain, a vulgar, Spanish-speaking parrot who sings and curses in a quavering falsetto.
Giving his garden to the birds was an inspired, if practical, gesture for Barth, the son of a bird importer, who has been raising and selling birds since he was 10 years old. Although his landscape is pretty in its own right--with its laden trees, sweeps of lawn and long, free-flowing pool--the fancy fliers have made it dynamic: full of exotic color, flashes of movement and mingled music. Although they retreat into the shadows during the heat of the day, mornings and evenings find them active and chatty, ready to pour their hearts out in song.
Birds, Barth says, add immeasurably to a garden. He admits that most neighbors wouldn’t appreciate pre-dawn wake-up calls from big macaws, but he believes people are mesmerized by smaller birds.
“It’s very tranquil,” he explains, “to watch them hop around chirping.”
According to Julie Rach, editor of Bird Talk, a national, Irvine-based magazine for bird owners, the feathered creatures enjoy the garden life.
“There’s added interest for them in an outdoor setting,” she says. “It gives them new things to explore, more to look at and hopefully, a lot more room for exercise.”
Living in Barth’s garden, specifically, also means getting invited to pool parties--along with bigger birds from Barth’s shop--and being the evening’s entertainment. On these occasions, parrots and cockatiels stroll freely among the guests, sitting on chair backs, perching on manzanita boughs and making small talk with anyone who will listen.
“They’re good centerpieces,” says Barth’s wife, Leslie, a fellow bird lover. “They do tricks; they let you pick them up. And they’ve all got different characters.”
The biggest party ham is usually Captain, whom Barth discovered 10 years ago in a Guatemalan hut and who is hard to stop once she gets going about a certain Roberto and Rosita and their adventures on a fishing boat.
“She does realistic gunshots too,” says Leslie Barth. “And her Spanish opera is unusual for the back yard.”
As for the local bird population, the exotic residents are a major attraction, not just for the birdseed they spill but for their night and morning songfests. Blue jays, sparrows and doves tend to hang around on nearby wires for sing-alongs. Runaways from local homes also gravitate to the Barths’ yard, especially when the parrots scream. And hawks have been known to swoop down on the caged finches.
For the most part, though, the birds seem to be happily ensconced, Barth says, enjoying the fresh air and breeding better than they would inside. The Barths, in turn, are very happy with their garden. In Leslie’s view: “Plants are pretty, but birds move around and make music. They’re always doing something different. With them out here, it’s not a yard, it’s a living garden.”
