Taking flight

MSU student hopes to start bird rescue facility

By Robb Murray

MANKATO — She ponders the question, sits back in her kitchen table chair a bit and glances around the room, a room full of the chirps and squawks of three companion birds.

“I guess it’s hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t love parrots,” she says.

Emily LaMont, 22, an open studies major at Minnesota State University, doesn’t just love parrots. She’s obsessed. But in a good way. So good, in fact, that if all goes as planned, in a few years, southern Minnesota will have its own organization for rescuing injured or unwanted birds.

But more on that later. First, the woman behind it all.

LaMont got interested in birds by accident. A few years ago, while working at Pet Expo, the store needed someone to put in the bird section, and LaMont got the nod. Prior to that, her knowledge of birds was limited to this: A friend had a bird once.

She dug in. She researched birds, learned the breeds, learned about feeding, learned what made them tick. She also listened intently to her supervisor at Pet Expo, a bird expert herself. And before long, she’d fallen in love with the feathered creatures.

“They’re such a challenge,” LaMont says. “They’re basically like a 2-year-old child that stays that way for 30 to 60 years.”

Her pet store job also taught her a not-so-nice fact about bird ownership: Many times buyers who haven’t done their research buy birds they’re not prepared for. Many of those birds find their way back to the store, abandoned or worse.

Eventually, she left that pet store job. But she was just getting started on her love affair with birds, and on her way to doing something about the issue of unwanted birds, a task she’d find support for along the way.

She’d gotten to know a lot of bird lovers, many of whom she’d run into regularly around town. One of them was Lucy Lowry, director of the North Mankato Taylor Library. LaMont and Lowry, who met when Lowry bought her first bird, had talked often about how good it would be to get bird lovers together to talk about bird care and other issues.

The result was the Mankato Area Companion Bird Club, of which LaMont is the leader. They began meeting in August and today gather monthly at the North Mankato library.

“It’s nice to get together to be able to compare stories,” Lowry says.

The group sort of has a dual focus. Of course there’s the fellowship of bird lovers, where people get together and build bird perches or discuss educational material. But there’s also LaMont’s goal of establishing an avian rescue facility in southern Minnesota.

For the past few months, LaMont’s been interning at the Midwest Avian Adoption and Rescue Service in the Twin Cities. It is one of a few dozen avian rescue facilities in the nation. And just recently, the club began acting as a sort of satellite office for the MAARS facility and has already taken in its first unwanted bird.

Down the road, it is LaMont’s dream to have her own facility that can cater to the region.

“She just seems like she’s got a good head on her shoulders,” Lowry says of LaMont. “She’s taking the steps she needs to take in order to make this dream come true.”

That dream, however, will require cash. LaMont’s not kidding herself when it comes to income potential. To pay the bills, she plans to launch a bird toy business. And before any of that can happen, she’s got her college education to finish. Her major requires her to focus on three academic areas, and she’s chosen Spanish, nonprofit leadership and marketing.

For now, the Mankato Area Companion Bird Club is trying to raise money to fund its avian rescue efforts. Each bird taken in needs to be checked out by a veterinarian who specializes in birds. The nearest one is in Bloomington, and it can take several hundred dollars — after checkups and tests — to get a bird ready to adopt out.

A lot of busywork, sure. But LaMont couldn’t be happier.

“They have such personalities,” she says. “And it’s so much fun ... Once I left the pet store, I knew I wanted to help birds.”