Damn Parakeet

[porphyry]

I love animals. Ever since I was a child old enough to want anything, I have always wanted and had pets. Unlike most children who got pets and then after a short time became disenchanted with or indifferent to them, I was always conscientious in my care of whatever animal was currently in my ongoing menagerie.

When I was much older, I worked for about a year in a pet store that specialized in exotic birds. The owner of the store, Garrett, was an ornithologist by training and so bred and hand-raised all the parrots, but the store had many other different kinds of birds as well: finches, lovebirds, lories, parakeets, cockatiels, cockatoos, and once we had an enormous blue macaw. Working for him, I learned much about birds and bird care.





I don’t know whether or not animals can truly sense a human’s attitude towards them, but given my affinity and general love for animals, I grew to care about many of those birds I’d helped to raise and hand tame—even one particularly beautiful Amazon parrot we named Sweetheart, who must have bitten me a hundred times as I worked to make her saleable, and I didn’t smack her even once (though I wanted to)—and I was sad when they were sold. Even the bird with the nastiest temperament, a sulphur-crested cockatoo with a mean disposition, adored me. This cockatoo was so mean, we named him Jack the Ripatoo. Whenever anyone except me approached him, he’d scream—an auditory assault rivaling rap music in its ability to annoy—and fly to the front of his cage, attempting to bite the interloper. I was the only one Jack would permit to touch him and the bird became docile as an infant when I cooed back at him, closing his eyes and nuzzling his head into my hand while I scratched about his head. “Christ,” Frank, another worker whom Jack particularly reviled, would say as he watched me with the bird. “If I tried that, I wouldn’t have any fingers left.” Much to my boss’s amusement, the bird even began to exhibit displays of behavior known as the mating dance when he saw or heard me—prancing on his perch, fluttering his wings, clicking his tongue, and raising his yellow crest. “Sorry, Jack,” I told the bird, “I think you’re a beautiful cockatoo but I’m not mating with you.”

Years passed and I no longer worked in the pet store. One day, when I was in graduate school, I was walking to class in a pouring cold rain when I saw a tiny bird lying on the sidewalk, peeping at me pitifully and completely drenched. He obviously couldn’t fly though he tried when I came near him. I crouched down and examined the bird as carefully as I could. He didn’t appear to have a broken wing or leg but he couldn’t move away much as he tried.

A dilemma. A beautiful little bird—I made an impulsive decision. Scooping the bird into my hands, I took him to my office (I was a teaching assistant that term), made him a little nest out of some tissues and an empty box, and went to class. After class, I took the bird to Garrett’s pet store, figuring the he would know what to do. It turned out the bird was a brown-breasted nuthatch (though his color was a very bright yellow), uncommon to cities according to Garrett who, after examining the bird, said the animal was male, very young, had no broken bones, but rather an infection (based on the bird’s droppings). He gave me a syringe and antibiotic for the nuthatch, and as I was taking the bird home, it occurred to me that keeping him cooped up in a box with a lid for two days wouldn’t be good for him. I stopped and bought a small birdcage as a hospital cage and hung it on my sun porch.

After two days of caring for the bird, giving him antibiotics and Gatorade and making sure he got plenty of light to stay warm, he seemed much improved, alert and also nervous, which was good. He was, after all, a wild bird, and it was time to let him go. I watched him fly off, alight momentarily on a small red bud tree, and then fly away. I wished him well.

Now I didn’t know what to do with the cage—I wouldn’t mind having a little bird or two, I decided. I called Garrett, who was very happy to hear about the nuthatch’s release. However, he was out of lovebirds and finches, my first choices, and gave me the name of a store owner in my town who might have some. I went to that pet store, but that owner didn’t have any very small birds either, except a cage full of parakeets, or budgies, as they’re sometimes called.

Damn parakeets—my last choice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like parakeets, for they are highly trainable and quite intelligent, but they can also be obnoxious little things unlike the loveable little finches and lovebirds I preferred. Nevertheless, I picked out two, a bright yellow female and a blue and white male.

“Would you like to get them a nesting box?” the store owner asked.

“No way,” I said. “Two parakeets is plenty. No parakeet sex in my house and no baby parakeets. They can live a nice, friendly Platonic existence.” Instead, I bought bird food and toys and headed home with my birds.

And that is how Daisy and George Keets came to live with me. Having each other, they never really became all that interested in me and instead preferred (or so I thought) each other’s company. Birds who live together also generally establish dominance, and it quickly became pretty clear to me who was in charge between those two—Daisy. Their relationship became a source of amusement for everyone.

Daisy, if I may gender stereotype, was a very mouthy female. She peeped, squawked, or screamed all day long, from the minute I uncovered them in the morning until I covered them back up at night. She was so loud and rude that if two people were talking on the sun porch in her vicinity, she interpreted normal human conversation as competition and would screech and scream until the two people talking became so distracted, it was easier just to go somewhere else in the house. She continually pecked at George, frequently backing him into corners, screeching in his face, knocking him off the swing, chasing him away from seed cups. He often hung bat-like in one upper corner just to get away from her. The only time during the day Daisy was ever quiet was if by chance the radio happened to be playing and Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” came on. During the end part, the whistling part, Daisy would get very still, listening intently, cocking her head. When the whistling stopped, she would imitate a few bars charmingly and then go back to being her usual self. Sometimes poor little George would get so distressed from her nonsense he would over preen himself, oftentimes plucking parts of his body bald. “Sorry Georgie,” I told him. “Daisy’s your problem, not mine. You should fight back a little bit. Show her who’s boss.” But he never did. Even when I transferred them after we ourselves moved to a different home, moving the birds from a small, hanging cage to a roomier freestanding one, equipped with more toys and flying space, she still terrorized him. Even casual observers of this relationship commented that Daisy was such an energetic bird and George was not that she would probably outlive him by a long time.

And so they lived together like this for eight years with one exception. George attempted one escape. I heard a terrible scrambling of cat claws and a flapping of birds’ wings on the sun porch, not thinking too much about it since the cats often chased each other around and birds flap their wings, but all at once the scrambling and flapping stopped and the cats hadn’t completed their chase back into the house. Most of all, Daisy was quiet too, the most alarming sign. I went out there to find Daisy alone in the cage, the bottom tray open slightly. Poor little Georgie was sitting in the corner, terrified, looking over his shoulder at three cats crouched around him. The cats, on the other hand, did nothing except to look at him and then at each other, rather stupidly for predators. I shooed the cats away and scooped Georgie up, putting him back in his cage, telling him, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they say. Nice try, old man.”

The day after Christmas in 2001, Daisy died. I found her clinging to the side of the cage, her final attempt to knock George off the swing one more time foreshortened by death. I made Malkhos (who was living with me by this time) uncurl her toes from the side of the cage and I buried her. I felt a little sorry for her, but Malkhos found her manner of death, clinging to the side of the cage with rigor mortis setting in, hilarious.

Given Daisy’s ongoing noisemaking, the house seemed very quiet without her. I watched George daily, fully expecting him to get depressed and not last much longer himself. That is often the case with pairs of birds: one dies and the other, having bonded to his lifelong mate, follows shortly thereafter.

Not so with George. He was very still for about a week, mostly sitting in the corner quietly, and I was sure he was going downhill. But after that first week without Daisy passed, Georgie experienced a kind of resurrection. Having spent all of his life so far in silent endurance or neurotic over-plucking, he began to test out his ability to sing more. A kind of euphoria set in—he played with the toys Daisy had bullied away from him, ate all the spray millet he wanted, sat on the swing for hours. He ate gravel and grit from the sanded perch covers and floor and Daisy wasn’t there to dive bomb herself after him until he gave up. He flitted from seed cup to seed cup without fear and settled nicely into his widowerhood, having dutifully observed a week of mourning.

“Really, Georgie,” I told him. “If I’d known you preferred being a bachelor, I never would have set you two up.” He eyed me balefully, half-suspecting he might lose his newfound freedom. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to get you a new girl.”

And six years later, he’s still enjoying his solitary, misanthropic existence. At first, I thought the two of them together might live four or five years, six to eight at most. Now, he’s approaching the age of fourteen but is still going strong. His breast feathers have never quite recovered from his incessant self-mutilation, so he’s not the most attractive bird one might ever see, but he’s happy. People are constantly surprised he’s still alive given most parakeets in captivity don’t live that long. My father calls him a “mean old bastard” and admires George’s cantankerous behavior and jokes George is immortal. I have given up any notions of doing anything with the sunny corner in which his home sits, half-convinced myself he’ll outlive me. Suffering must really make one stronger. Damn parakeet.