Sarasota Jungle Gardens Brings Parrots to Reid House for Local Schoolchildren

Moni, a yellow-naped Amazon, and Amber, a scarlet macaw, don't usually make house calls. But on March 12, both birds traveled from Sarasota Jungle Gardens to the Leonard Reid House in the city's Newtown neighborhood, where kids from two local schools had gathered for a children's presentation called Hello Pretty Bird, organized by the Sarasota African American Cultural Coalition.

Four parrots total made the trip, performing antics on command for the assembled children, including singing and saying "hello." Among the audience was preschooler E'styn Smith from Precious Jewels Academy, watching alongside schoolchildren who had little context for why this particular porch, at this particular house, carried so much weight.

For Rose Solomon, the birds delivered something entirely different. Solomon, who grew up across the street, remembered being a child not yet old enough to sit with the adults during meals, so she would take her cookies and soda out to the front porch, where exotic birds kept in a decorative cage were her company. She recalled a scarlet macaw, a blue-and-yellow macaw, and a smaller green parrot from those years. Decades later, watching Sarasota Jungle Gardens' birds work the same porch, the memory came flooding back.

"It brought back a lot of memories for me. I grew up and on that front porch where we were watching the bird presentation is where I spent a lot of time," Solomon said. Her connection to the house runs deeper than proximity: her mother, Mamye Faulk, taught school alongside Ethel Hayes Reid, the daughter of Leonard Reid himself. Solomon's own childhood home on Fifth Street was eventually torn down when it was sold to the fire department.

Brian Reid, a descendant of the Reid family, attended the event with his girlfriend Marquetta Frazier and brought their own parrot, Champ. Standing inside a house that bears his family name, he reflected on what the day meant. "I'm so happy to know I'm a part of it because I never was a part of anything so big," he said.

The Leonard Reid House has earned that weight over a century. Leonard Reid was an early Black pioneer in Sarasota who helped establish the city's first Black community, known as Overtown and now called the Rosemary District. The house itself has been moved twice, most recently to its current location in Newtown in 2022. It opened as an arts and cultural center in 2024 and is currently marking its 100th anniversary under the stewardship of the Sarasota African American Cultural Coalition.

Hello Pretty Bird threaded together the centennial celebration, a living-history lesson for the next generation, and one woman's memory of a porch, a cage, and the particular comfort of birds who didn't care how old you were to sit with them.