Walking into the Avalon Parrots shop, you’ll first be greeted by owner Sabra Khan, then by a chorus of human-sounding parrots vocalizing their “Hello! Hi!” as they take note of your arrival. These birds, the winged welcoming committee, have all been rescued from abusive owners, or surrendered by families who could no longer care for them, and are now waiting for homes.
Khan’s store is the support system behind the Parrot Rescue Services nonprofit that she started in 2011, 20 years after her introduction to birds. “I was volunteering at the Humane Society [in 1991] and I saw these little budgies [parakeets] in the back room,” she says. After asking her husband if she could adopt the small birds, she took home one, then two more. Within a year she came across someone who needed to place a cockatoo, Gilligan, who had already been in two homes though he was only a year old. “That’s when I realized this was an issue,” she says, and she took him in.
A few years later, Khan began volunteering for a parrot rescue, and in 2001, the Avalon Parrots shop opened. “I didn’t own it at the time; I just worked there,” Khan says, but by 2003, she owned the store. Her parrot rescue began later, as people would come in telling her they had a bird they could no longer care for. “It just sort of started,” she says. And while the rescue began in 2003, it wasn’t until 2011, after mounds of paperwork, that it became a registered nonprofit.
While the rescue may have started out of necessity, Khan’s passion for helping the abused birds was sparked by Gilligan. “He’s the reason I got into rescue,” she says.
After Gilligan’s third home, he was stressed and likely abused. “He started mutilating,” Khan says. “He would just rip his chest open and rip his leg open—huge gaping wounds that I would have to sew closed.” This lasted for five or six years before he recovered and was fine for years; it started again in November 2013. “I took him in and he had a really high white [blood] cell count. He had a really bad infection,” she says. The following March, Gilligan died.
“It’s hard to lose any pet, but when you have a pet that’s supposed to live 60 to 70 years and he dies at 20?” she says. Now Khan helps birds like Gilligan, and the three birds she currently has, find caring homes.
The birds brought to the rescue are surrendered under many circumstances. “It’s every reason that you could apply to dogs and cats,” Khan says. “[People] get frustrated because they’re noisy or they bite. They didn’t meet their expectations, they didn’t do their research.” Or, Khan says, the person bringing in the bird simply found him in their backyard.
That’s what happened to employee Laura Smith, whose neighbor’s dog, a pointer, found a white-eyed conure in the yard. Smith ran ads in the paper trying to find his owner with no luck, but found someone who wanted him. A month later they brought the bird back, saying they changed their mind. “That’s how I got hooked up with Sabra,” Smith says. She brought the bird to the shop five years ago and eventually decided the bird, Lucky, chose her and her husband as his family.
While the shop and nonprofit are two separate businesses, the shop financially supports the rescue, along with Khan’s art, soaps, and jams that she sells at the farmers market and art fairs. All of this, plus families willing to adopt, care for and take responsibility for the parrots, have made Khan’s mission in honor of Gilligan a success.
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Avalon Parrots
960 Mahtomedi Ave.
Mahtomedi
651.762.1151
