Echoe, where are you?

Luling woman keeps her eye on the sky for her beloved Congo African Grey Parrot lost in storm

Vicki Matherne often looks up to the sky in hopes of catching a glimpse of her beloved, lost pet Echoe.

Though she knows the odds are growing longer that her Congo African Grey Parrot will return or be returned to her, she hasn’t yet given up hope.

Echoe was lost April 29, escaping into a windy night, not to be seen since. The high winds knocked down netting that had enclosed the patio area where the bird was.

“When I ran to grab (the net), she swooped,” said Matherne of Luling. “She looked like she’d come to me, but with the wind blowing like it was, she could have gotten pretty far. That weather was coming … the wind just took her.”

Matherne took to her Mimosa Park neighborhood streets in the days after Echoe was lost, enlisting the help of neighbors and leaving no stone unturned. She’s put up fliers around the parish and has even offered a reward for the bird’s safe return. She’s called “every vet from Lafourche to St. Tammany Parish,” and many of the pet stores in that range as well.

She and her family have even put Echoe’s small travel cage atop their home, on the off -chance she makes a return. What makes this particularly difficult for Matherne is just how close she had grown to Echoe since the latter joined her family in June of 2011. She got Echoe just two months after the bird hatched and Matherne took extra special care with her — she notes a Congo African Grey needs constant attention to thrive.

“They love to be with you wherever you are,” Matherne said. “You talk to them, whistle to them and they pick up your words … it’s like a 5-year-old that never grows up. They’re very, very intelligent and you have to make sure they’re stimulated.”

Matherne took that responsibility seriously.

“She became my life,” Matherne said. “I didn’t go out and eat lunch if I had been out working all day and if she’d been locked up the day before. She would fly to me in the morning. If she was out, she would fly into my bed.

“She was family. She’s my child.”

She said Echoe learned a lot over her five years at the Matherne household, building a strong vocabulary. It wasn’t uncommon to hear Echoe let out a “Go Tigers!” during an LSU game, or to make a little small talk with guests as she asked, “How’s it hanging?” and “what ya doing?” She would also mimic other sounds.

“She makes every sound an iPhone makes,” Matherne said. “We’d ask her, ‘who you texting, Echoe?’”

The neighborhood patrolling for the bird, she said, lasted about three weeks before “life intervened.” Matherne’s mother came in town for a visit, then her son graduated from college. That, coupled with Matherne’s day-to-day job, made that kind of detailed search impractical.

Because of Echoe’s disposition, she believes her pet would have approached someone in the neighborhood long before now, if she remained in the neighborhood. Birds like Echoe, she said, don’t want to be out on their own.

“So either she got far out by now, or something happened to her,” Matherne said.

The other possibility is Echoe may have been picked up by someone.

“African Greys … she’s a Congo, a more expensive, sought after bird,” Matherne said. “There are not many breeders with baby Congos in Louisiana and they’re hard to get. So maybe someone found her and knew what they had, or they don’t know she’s lost. For all I know they’re trying to find me.”

The lack of closure, she said, hurts more than anything. “We’re heartbroken,” she said. “It hurts so much that I don’t know what happened to this bird.

“If this goes on for a while more, it will become apparent she’s not coming back. But I’m not giving up yet. I’m putting it out there on Facebook, making my calls and making sure people are still aware.”