At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eightysome parrots from more than a dozen species. Many of these parrots have personal histories that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. The article explores the forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond to the psychic lives of these parrots—psychic lives that are marked by troubles ranging from social withdrawal to self-destructive behavior. These interspecies communications include body language, gesture, nonverbal vocalizations, and human-language phrases. While biosemiotic theory offers a provocative starting point for understanding these communications, sanctuary interactions destabilize certain semiotic distinctions, drawing attention to ambiguities between semantic and nonsemantic vocalization, vocalization and body language, informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom. Building on ideas about metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity. By loosening and opening up the distinctions frequently drawn between human and other-than-human semiosis, it is possible to develop subtler accounts of the semiotic improvisations that emerge in uniquely configured multispecies communities such as the sanctuary.

中文翻译：

---

禽类Bedlam

在美国中西部的一个城市鹦鹉保护区，人们照顾着来自十几个物种的八十只鹦鹉。这些鹦鹉中的许多人都有个人经历，包括各种形式的忽视，虐待和遗弃。本文探讨了物种间交流的形式，人类看护者通过这种形式来解释和应对这些鹦鹉的心理生活，这些心理生活的特征是从社交退缩到自我毁灭行为等各种麻烦。这些种间交流包括肢体语言，手势，非语言发声和人类语言短语。虽然生物符号学理论为理解这些交流提供了一个启发性的起点，但圣所之间的相互作用却破坏了某些符号学的稳定，引起人们注意语义和非语义发声之间的歧义，发声和肢体语言，内容丰富的言语和言语表达，交流和症状。我基于关于动物游戏中元交流的想法，建议将心理问题和缓解问题的互动都视为生物符号创造力的形式。通过放宽和开放人类和非人类符号学之间经常出现的区别，有可能发展出对在独特配置的多物种社区（例如庇护所）中出现的符号即兴创作的更好的解释。