By Josh Shaffer
At 40 years old, Boo the cockatoo bumbled through life as a beloved pet in decline: almost totally blind, unable to fly or perch, reduced to waddling like a duck, bumping into walls and sleeping on a blanket at the bottom of his cage.
A big decision faced Amy Hurst, Boo’s owner in Virginia: endure her bird’s blindness and a likely shortened life, or seek a risky surgery.
So in March, she delivered her 18-inch, 2-pound tropical bird to NC State University, where the exotics team at its highly ranked veterinary hospital would try a rare procedure aimed at giving Boo back his sight.
Hurst bit her nails for an hour, then greeted her bird fresh out of surgery — cone still around his neck.
“Can you see? Can you see, Boo? What do you think?”
“I love you,” the bird croaked back, blue eyes wide open.
“This bird is special”
Hurst and her husband raise tropical birds, hand-feeding them four times a day. But until last year, they’d never taken on anything the size of Boo.
In Smithfield, near Norfolk, they belong to multiple bird clubs, and Boo came to them via a member who needed to pass him to a new forever home, knowing umbrella cockatoos can live to be 80.
“He’s always been such a loving bird,” she said. “He just had that personality. This bird is special. My husband was holding him like a puppy. This is a man who’s never held a big bird in his life.”
But Boo had already been mostly blind for a decade, stricken by cataracts and able to see only shadows. This required a lifestyle change.
Boo would hop along, following three family dogs by the sound of their claws clicking on the floor. He would grab onto Hurst’s arm when he felt unsafe. He would bite at thumbs, unable to see the snap peas being offered.
“He could not find his food and water,” she said. “He’s never flown. He couldn’t navigate corners, so he’d walk into a wall. He couldn’t do the things that birds love to do.”
She put Boo’s surgery up for a vote at her bird club, and the vote was unanimous.
Yes.
“We’re very lucky”
To get at Boo’s cataracts requires a board-certified veterinary ophthalmologist and specialized ultrasound equipment — not available on every corner.
It also requires anesthesia, which few vets are willing to perform because birds’ respiratory systems include not just lungs, but also air bags that act like bellows, said Dr. Amanda Day, post-doc intern at NC State. On top of that, birds tend to have faster metabolism than mammals, requiring sedation for procedures where dogs and cats do not.
“We’re very lucky at NC State in that we have a fantastic ophthalmology service that performs this procedure,” Day said in an email Thursday, “and the exotic animal medicine service has the expertise to perform and monitor anesthesia in a wide variety of avian species, including umbrella cockatoos like Boo!”
“Eye surgery,” she continued, “is just one of the many procedures we perform every day.”
Still, for Boo, an hourlong surgery meant one more ordeal in a hard-knock life.
Early in life, long before Hurst and the bird club, Boo was rescued through a police raid on his owner’s home, where animal control officers found him in a cage next to his dead mate.
“She had chewed his toe off trying to survive,” Hurst said. “So he’s missing a toe.”
Boo came to the Virginia bird club after his blindness and landed with a member who specialized in underdogs. For five years, she assumed Boo was unfriendly and let him mostly alone, until one day he climbed up her leg and lay with his head in her lap.
Not long ago, Boo got trained as a therapy animal for both autistic children and seniors in assisted living, and to get certified for that kind of care, he had to get tested in loud, chaotic environments with crutches, wheelchairs and outbursts.
He made it through them all.
So to see him get healthy enough for surgery, changing his diet, adding muscle tone and regrowing feathers, felt like victory enough. To see him open his eyes after surgery and follow his doctors around the room felt miraculous.
Boo’s recovery moment went viral on TikTok, as did footage of him flapping his wings just last week and taking his first 4-foot flight.
“He’s like a rock star now,” said Hurst. “I’m going to have to get a PO box.”
Uniquely NC is a News & Observer subscriber collection of moments, landmarks and personalities that define the uniqueness (and pride) of why we live in the Triangle and North Carolina.
This story was originally published April 24, 2025 at 11:07 AM.
