Previously on WPT: Monty get's captured, Monty has a terrible time and is starving because the humans don't know what to do, he is rescued and taken to the Parrot Team who stuff him full of food. After a fun period during which he is weaned Monty finds himself at the Ministry for Agriculture (LVV) with many other parrots.
At first Monty found the aviary to be an incredibly exciting place. His new friends had all sorts of terrible tales to tell. In every case the poor parrots had been torn from their families. Some of the birds we're really messed up and some were just plain nasty but Monty laughed at them because they had been fed such unsuitable food they were also too fat to fly. Monty had soon grown his feathers back and could fly the full 5 meters of the aviary so the nasty Fat Club, as he called them, didn't get to bother him.
After some time Monty settled in and he had some close friends, well actually all the other birds were close because even in the relatively large aviary you could never be more than a few meters from all the other birds. There was never any real privacy though and that put all the birds a little bit on edge. Imagine never being about to get out of sight of your wife or husband. And so it wasn't long before Monty realized life in the aviary was actually a bit dull. He often thought back to the crazy challenges Rhian and Gabi had set him when he was a young lad. There were things going on around him so that helped. Monty got to see the hard working LVV men tending to the goats and in the nursery.
Occasionally Monty saw wild parrots flying past in the distance and he would day-dream about being a wild parrot too. As well as being dashingly handsome, Monty was very clever. Now of course Dear Reader you will be aware that some parrots have the cognitive ability of a 5 year old human child. So Monty was an incredibly intelligent parrot and if he read books, he would be "very advanced for his age". Monty was creative and in his day dreams his imagined eating incredible fruits of all sorts of colours and flavours. He imagined what it would be like to have a Peregrine Falcon (the fastest animal in the world, capable of 320km/hour or 200mph and a winter visitor to Bonaire) stoop down on him and how he would heroically swerve out of it's path and be safe.
In reality Monty wasn't a hero, he lived a boring life relatively devoid of dietary interest or activity. The only thing that Monty could think of that was as boring was doing accountancy. There were good moments, and the highlight of his week was when a nice lady came to visit at the weekend for a chat and to give him some treats. But Monty realized he could be in this aviary along with the other nutbags for the rest of his life. This Monty realized basically meant he was an accountant and he was going to be an accountant for the rest of his life. As if he hadn't had enough bad news this realization depressed poor Monty.
Deep down Monty just knew he was better than this. He knew that somewhere people would be working feverishly in his honor and that one-day he would be free again. He was convinced that just like Madiba (Nelson Mandela) in his book "Long Walk to Freedom" Monty would one day see his family again. He even allowed himself to imagine that somebody would one day make a movie about his life (just like the one on the http://www.echobonaire.org homepage). He had to believe it because otherwise he was going to be an accountant for the rest of his life and that was too much for this young parrot to bear.
Monty could not believe it when one day, out of the blue, two men came to the aviary and put him along with several other parrots in boxes. They were driven out into the wilderness of Bonaire and this Monty knew was the start of something. This was somehow different to the other times he had been captured and sure enough when he and his companions were let out in another aviary they were surrounded by green trees. It was gobsmakingly gorgeous. Monty, being vastly intelligent, immediately spotted two strange doors, parrot doors! This was tremendously exciting, and if it wasn't for the fact that birds had evolved to be incredible efficient at retaining water he probably would have wet himself, for Monty knew this meant he was on his very own Long Walk to Freedom.
Here Dear Reader we must end Part Three of this increasingly mis-named two part tale that is Monty's Second Chance. But worry not, the inconceivable magic that is Monty's Second Chance will be played out in a forthcoming blog.
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