There is a very large “bird’s nest” inside The Spheres on Amazon’s downtown Seattle campus, but, despite the wishes of Heidi Fleiss, don’t expect to see any parrots nesting there.
Fleiss, who became famous as the “Hollywood Madam” who was busted for running a high-end brothel in the 1990s, has made a unique inquiry according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. The publication reported Monday that Fleiss reached out looking for help connecting with Amazon because she’d recently heard about The Spheres in Seattle.
Fleiss is semi-famous again because she now rescues macaws and runs a sanctuary of sorts at her home in the Nevada desert. She was the subject of an Animal Planet documentary called “Heidi Fleiss: Prostitutes to Parrots” in 2011 and she apparently believes her birds would be more at home with the tech workers in the trees than they would be in cages.
The Spheres opened in January to serve as a place where Amazonians (and the public during limited visitation hours) could commune with nature in an urban setting. There are 40,000 plants from more than 30 countries in the glass-enclosed jungle. There are waterfall features and some small fish, as well as a four-story living wall and a 55-foot-tall ficus tree that was dropped through a hole in one of the orbs.
While the climate is meant to mimic that of an altitudinal zone found in Costa Rica or Indonesia — which sounds pretty nice for a tropical bird — there are no animals living inside The Spheres. Some good bugs are used to combat bad bugs as part of the horticulture team’s pest management program, but the only birds that get in are likely doing so because a door stays open too long.
And from the description in a New York Times report on Fleiss and her living situation, it doesn’t sound like tech workers on laptops would invite the distraction:
“[Fleiss] lives in Pahrump, Nev., fussing over 20 macaws who roam uncaged around her house, sharing her food and sometimes her bed. They squawk and leave a lot of droppings, but oddly it is Ms. Fleiss who does all the talking. The parrots can speak but barely get a word in edgewise.”
