Joe Sagar’s sulphur-crested cockatoo loves her perch in the garage where Joe works on his 1952 Chevy BelAir hardtop. Tiki has been with Joe and Hazel Sagar for 40 years and is very much part of the family.
Cockatoos are a highly intelligent parrot species. They are native to Australia and New Guinea and can live to be 100 years old. Male birds can talk. Females like Tiki have other ways of communicating. Like when the refrigerator door is opened on mornings and evenings when Tiki’s chocolate treat time is forgotten. She becomes very animated.
Joe had been on a quest to replace the 1952 Chevy BelAir he owned when he was a teenager. Handy with mechanics since he helped his father rebuild his go-cart engine at the age of seven, Joe had installed a series of increasingly higher horsepower V8 engines in his original car owned in the mid-Sixties. It made it very fast.
The memory of that car never left him which led to him buying another 1952 Chevy BelAir that was a stalled restoration project and little more than a shell accompanied by boxes of parts. He transported the project car to the garage at his Ladner home where he spent two years tracking down missing and necessary parts to reassemble the car. He bought a fully rollerized General Motors crate engine that puts out about 400 horsepower and installed it with a four-speed automatic overdrive transmission. The car is painted seafoam green and white with a matching custom interior.
During his time putting the car together, he developed a fly bite sized lump on his ear. He had no idea it was cancerous. But Tiki seemed to know something was wrong. “She would repeatedly peck at that spot on my ear and wouldn’t leave it alone,” Joe says. “It seems she had an instinct that something was wrong.”
He decided to have it looked at. The lump was removed by a plastic surgeon. A biopsy showed it was cancerous. When the stitches were removed from Joe’s surgical wound, one was missed. Joe’s caring cockatoo began pecking again, found the stitch and pulled it out. She never bothered with that area of Joe’s anatomy again. Sometime later, Tiki began paying attention to a spot on Joe’s hand. That too proved to be cancerous. The problem was dealt with and Joe went on cruising in his custom Chevy.
The role pigeons play in detecting cancerous cells by utilizing their highly advanced eyesight while being shown mammograms has been well documented. Joe and Hazel don’t know why or how Tiki the cockatoo could diagnose a malignancy, but they believe it is more than a coincidence. “She has done it twice,” Joe says.
Joe continues to fight health issues. But, with wife Hazel at his side and Tiki on his wing, he is looking forward to another season of car shows and cruises with his customized 1952 Chevy BelAir.
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and a partner in a Vancouver-based public relations company. [email protected]
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