I think we could be talking about clones here, because having just posted about next September’s “Blue Planet Film Festival“, which is conceived, developed, written, produced, and directed by the inexhaustible Mira Tweti (my favourite environmental activist ‘du jour’), word comes from Tweti HQ that she - or someone who looks and sounds exactly like her? - will be squeezing in a guest benefit event at the Connecticut Film Festival on Saturday June 6th before she (or the real Mira?) heads off at high speed to Mexico to put a size three boot firmly into a bunch of parrot smugglers and trappers for the film version of ‘Of Parrots and People‘, a book one of the three Mira Tweti triplets (surely no-one does this much work?) wrote last year.

Much as I would walk through fire for Mira (well, a small sort of fire that wouldn’t hurt very much anyway, like a grass fire, or one of those little camp fires you make on a beach with a few twigs…hmm, I digress…) there is an added draw for promoting this particular benefit - Mira will be hosting brunch, showing her new film “Little Miss Dewie” (a ‘duckumentary’), and giving 50% of the gate receipts to Marc Johnson and Karen Windsor who have also devoted a huge chunk of their lives to parrot conservation and animal welfare, establishing Foster Parrots Ltd, and “The New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary” which currently looks after over 500 rescued or abandoned parrots, exotic animals and domestic water fowl.

We here at 10,000 Birds really like Marc and Karen, and regular readers may remember that Corey posted an excellent interview with Karen in January as part of our ‘Parrot Month’, and that I wrote a post about the remarkable Maipaima eco-lodge Marc has been developing in Guyana to support eco-tourism initiatives: both are inspirational people who deserve all the support they can muster, and personally if I lived anywhere near Danbury, Connecticut I’d definitely pop along and meet Marc, Karen and Mira, cheer loudly from the front row, and put a ‘fistful of dollars’ (see what I did there? It’s a film festival…no? Okay, forget it…) in the collecting tin - or whatever it is they pass around at film festivals. Sadly I don’t actually live anywhere near CT (or the US), but I’ll be there in spirit (which won’t fill the Hall of course, so if you’d like a great and inspiring day out and live in CT could you pop along and fill my empty seat please…).

‘Foster Parrots, Ltd. is a non-profit organization dedicated to the rescue and sanctuary of unwanted, languishing and abused captive parrots and other displaced exotics. Through educational initiatives we seek to bring wider public awareness to captive parrot issues and to help raise standards of care for domestically kept parrots. A staunch advocate for parrots as wild animals, Foster Parrots has established a conservation project in the South American country of Guyana that has helped protect parrots and other wildlife since 2004.

Foster Parrots, Ltd. is a TAOS accredited sanctuary facility. We are a proud member of The Avian Welfare Coalition and are honored to be a WSPA Society member.’