Foster Parrots Sanctuary Reopens Five Years After Fire Killed 100 Birds

Buddy survived. Of the parrots housed in the section of Foster Parrots Sanctuary that burned before dawn on April 1, 2021, he and a companion named Rose were the only two who made it out alive. Ninety-five birds in that section did not. For five years, Buddy and nearly 370 other rescued parrots lived in what remained of the converted chicken farm in Hopkinton, Rhode Island: a structure compromised by smoke, with a roof that leaked onto the birds below and a kitchen that turned to standing water with every rainstorm. On April 4, the last resident moved into a completely rebuilt facility. "It has been a long journey over the last five years," Executive Director Karen Windsor said.

The 2021 blaze broke out around 5:30 a.m. when a fan in the building's heating system seized, igniting the far end of a structure housing roughly 400 birds across four large sections. More than a dozen fire departments held the damage to one-third of the building, but the toll was devastating. The cockatoo section suffered the most. "What we mainly lost predominantly was our space for cockatoos," then-Sanctuary Director Jennifer Yordy said in a 2024 interview as the rebuild was taking shape.

In the years between, the remaining building kept failing. "When it would rain, it would rain into the building," current Sanctuary Director Amanda Coleman said. "Our kitchen would flood, our workshops would flood." Windsor described it as "a really hard place for all of us to be."

The $9 million rebuild replaced the old four-zone layout with a 29,000-square-foot structure housing 33 large indoor aviaries, each connected to its own outdoor aviary. Where the 2021 fire traveled through a continuous section, the new building isolates birds in discrete compartments that limit how quickly any single incident can move through the flock. Windows run throughout, providing natural light the former factory farm never had. A dedicated on-site medical clinic and named wings, including a Latin American Parrot Wing and a Macaw House, are organized around species-specific care needs. The facility was built by Bentley Builders of Warwick, whose portfolio includes the rainforest exhibit at Roger Williams Park Zoo.

Coleman put the difference plainly when the last birds moved in: "To see them now in this bigger, brightly lit room with big windows and ropes and trees and murals, it's just beautiful."

The specialized cockatoo rooms, the exact spaces destroyed five years ago, are not yet finished. Coleman said the sanctuary already has a dozen birds on the waiting list for those rooms: "We're going to fill this building with cockatoos in like two weeks." The sanctuary currently houses nearly 370 rescued parrots, most acquired through surrender, seizure, or abandonment.

Windsor credited the public support that made the project possible. "Our supporters built this building," she said. "$9 million worth of people cared enough to rebuild this."

For Buddy and Rose, who spent five years in a leaking building that should have been their worst memory, it now gets to be something else entirely.