Enslaved by Ducks

by Tarte, Bob

  I was devastated when I learned the news. Next to Stanley Sue, Weaver was my favorite bird, and I couldn’t accept the fact that he had simply flown away. The situation was eerily reminiscent of a scene in Arnie, the Darling Starling, where Arnie slipped out into the yard just as a monstrous storm was brewing. As ominous clouds swirled above our heads, Linda and I combed our property calling for Weaver, the wind gulping up our pleas until a drenching rain drove us inside. A sorry and soggy Arnie had eventually returned to his owner Margarete. I hoped Weaver would do the same, and to help him find his way back home, I revived my owl-calling trick. The following day, I made a tape of starling vocalizations from a birdsong CD and walked around the nether borders of our property broadcasting them from a portable boom box. I even drove through the trailer park a half-mile away from us, cruising past green areas where starlings gathered, calling, “Weaver, Weaver, Weaver,” from the car window until I feared the residents would call, “Police!”

  Day after day, whenever I went outdoors to change the pool water for the ducks or visit our turkeys, Hazel and Lizzie, in the barn, I trailed pleas for Weaver behind me. I was stubborn about the loss, furious that Weaver would have chosen a perilous existence for which he was ill prepared over the pampered life that we had given him. “You’d think he would at least let us know that he’s okay,” I insisted illogically to Linda. “You’d think he would show a little gratitude.”

  Eventually, it dawned on me that perhaps the question that had loomed so large in Weaver’s eyes was, “When can I go free with the others?”

  Raising and releasing him had been our original intention, after all, and I felt better once I began to view his escape as the realization of our interrupted plan. I also loved the thought of unleashing a talking starling upon the world. I pictured a groggy resident of the trailer park stepping out of her front door early one morning in a terrycloth bathrobe. Bending down to pick up the newspaper, her hand would twitch, and she would spill her coffee as her body stiffened at the sound of a small, shiny black bird that looked identical to every other small, shiny black bird. But this one would interrupt his gleeful pecking at the ground to observe in a clear voice, “Pretty boy, Weaver. Pretty boy, nice nice.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Parrot Who Hated Me

  As an unexpected side effect of pet ownership, I would find myself getting seriously puffed up from time to time. Physically I remained as skinny as a Weimaraner. That wasn’t it. And allergies to bird dander, cat hair, and rabbit fur along with mold and spores from poultry pens swelled nothing more visible than my nasal passages. But my self-importance was known to inflate to the dimensions of the Hindenburg should any keeper of a mere half-dozen animals recklessly raise the topic in my presence.

  If no ready victim sought me out, I might sucker some blameless shopper I observed in the bird supplies section of PETsMART. I’d watch for a middle-aged woman selecting cockatiel food, and I’d saunter up to her while conspicuously holding a bag of parakeet seed.

  “You must have some kind of fancy bird at home,” I’d comment wistfully.

  “Well, we’ve got a little cockatiel named Joey,” she’d tell me.

  “A cockatiel! You’ve got a cockatiel?” I’d exclaim, as if she’d claimed guardianship of a cassowary. Then I’d lower my eyebrows in deep thought and venture, “That’s the one with the crest on its head, isn’t it?”

  “And the orange circles on the cheeks. And loads of personality.”

  “I’ve thought of getting a cockatiel,” I’d reveal with an undercurrent of profound sadness. “My wife says they’re probably too much trouble compared to—” I’d raise the seed bag I was clutching and, while forcing a quivering smile, point to the color illustration of a parakeet on the wrapper.

  “You tell your wife to let you have a cockatiel,” she’d insist and pat my bag of parakeet food sympathetically. “They’re no trouble at all once you get the hang of owning a bird. And if you already keep a parakeet, you’re probably ready for a cockatiel.”

  “But added on to caring for our African grey,” I’d suggest with a shrug.

  “Oh, well if you already have a grey—”

  “And then there’s the ring-neck dove. He’s really no big bother, but he chases the parakeets and canary and likes to tease our pocket parrot, Ollie. He used to go after my pet starling, Weaver, too.” Here I’d heave a mighty sigh. “At least the turkey’s no longer in the basement and the bunnies have gotten their play area back again, plus the goose fully recovered from aspergillosis and we put her out back with the other goose and a bunch of ducks. But we’re so busy raising a batch of baby robins right now—we did bluebirds earlier in the summer and released them—that I don’t think we could squeeze in time for one of your little cockatiels. But tell Joey I said hello.”

  SATISFYING AS THIS WAS, I wanted more. I haunted the pet-bird newsgroups on the Internet and freely dispensed half-baked information to novice parrot owners, carefully avoiding encounters with breeders who possessed actual scientific knowledge. Whenever a poster to the group complained about a bad-mannered parrot that bit their spouse or shrieked incessantly, I rattled the keyboard with a rapid-fire answer that politely heaped blame upon the poster’s ignorance of avian psychology, as if our own Ollie wasn’t guilty of the same bad behavior.

  My comeuppance was devastating once Linda brought home Dusty, a Congo African grey parrot she had spotted in the classifieds.

  “Sweetheart,” I remember her informing me one evening as I sat on the sofa basking in the glow of a Wheel of Fortune “Las Vegas Vacation” episode as it faded into a junk-food commercial. “There’s an ad in the paper for a parrot that’s supposed to be a really good talker. He’s an African grey.”

  “We don’t need another parrot. We couldn’t possibly stand another parrot.”

  “I know,” she told me. “But I’m still going to call the people and find out what kind of cute things he says.”

  Though I hid in the bedroom with the door sealed shut and the BBC world news cranked up on the headboard radio, Linda’s explosions of glee still reached me as the bird’s owner regaled her with endless anecdotes. I shivered under the sheet in the early July heat as a damp chill foreboding my inevitable fate wracked my body. “He sounds like a wonderful bird,” Linda exclaimed as she burst into the room. “His name is Dusty. Can we go see him?”

  “We’re not getting another parrot,” I insisted through the pillow.

  “There’s no harm in looking at him. You like looking at birds.”

  “I don’t want another parrot. I really don’t want another parrot. We’ve got our hands full caring for the birds we’ve got.”

  “The owner’s a real nice lady, and she said we could come over on Saturday. We don’t have to buy him if you don’t want to.”

  “Buy him?” I groaned to Ed, the sock monkey, who snuggled against my chest trying in vain to comfort me.

  We’d been down this road many times before. Linda was driving a steamroller and nothing more substantial than a plywood cutout of a husband stood in her way. I might have succeeded in kidding myself that I had gained vast knowledge of animals over the years, but clearly I didn’t have a clue how to say no to my wife, particularly when the question involved a new pet that part of me secretly wanted, too—and that part was the knot inside my pine head.

  We weren’t allowed to see Dusty right away when we visited Becky in Kalamazoo. The three of us sat in the living room. The parrot sat in the den. “He won’t talk sometimes if you’re in the room,” Becky explained in hushed tones while her nineteen-month-old son whacked the walls and furniture with a plastic baseball bat. “Especially with strangers.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said to Linda, raising my eyebrows. On the hour-long drive from Lowell, I had raised every objection that came to mind against taking on another parrot. “He’d better be absolutely perfect, or he’s staying right where he is,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t worry, he talks all day once he ge
ts used to you,” Becky said. Then she was silent for a moment as her son’s bat ticked off the seconds. “I sure hate having to sell him.” Her words caught in her throat. “I’m afraid Brandon’s going to stick his hand into the cage and lose a finger one of these days. And Dusty’s used to walking around on the floor after breakfast, and I can’t watch them both every single minute. Not that he would mean to hurt Brandon.” She moved her knee to avoid a blow from the vinyl slugger, whose wielder had shifted from bopping the coffee table to raising wisps of dust from a couch cushion. The little boy’s enthusiasm made me wonder if the bird wasn’t the family member who was actually in peril. “I brought up Dusty from a little chick years before I ever thought of getting married. I’ve listed him three times in the paper and shown him to several people, but I haven’t been able to let him go.”

  “You haven’t?” I asked, brightening with hope. “Maybe you should keep him.”

  “I just haven’t found the right home for him, I guess. But you seem like a really nice person,” she concluded, turning to Linda. “And you definitely have the right experience with parrots.”

  I had counted on the bird refusing to talk as the ultimate deal killer, and time seemed to be favoring me until a barrage of noise and speech erupted from an unseen source. “Wanna peanut?” said an excellent imitation of Becky’s voice, followed by a squeal, apparently from the very same child who now sat tight-lipped on his mother’s lap, wondering why she had confiscated his cudgel.

  “That’s Dusty,” Becky told us. That was our cue to see him.

  “Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack,” said Dusty. That was Linda’s cue to buy him no matter how he looked—and he looked impressive. In fact, I had trouble reconciling the female persona he had voiced with the bruiser of a bird we confronted in the den. Almost half again as large as Stanley Sue, Dusty carried the lighter plumage, solid black beak, and bright red tail feathers of a Congo African grey, along with a wild expression in his eye. His gorilla-proof stainless steel cage backed up Dusty’s implicit show of strength as he snapped his beak with an audible click that set my teeth on edge.

  “He seems a bit aggressive,” I murmured, as I moved in back of Linda.

  “He’s a sweetie,” Becky insisted. “But he’s not too good with my husband. That’s because Kenneth is allergic to birds and doesn’t pay enough attention to him,” she added.

  “Can people touch him?” Linda asked.

  “He lets me cuddle him. When he’s walking on the floor, anyone can pick him up.”

  We didn’t even try to pick up Dusty’s cage, which was clearly too large to fit inside the backseat or trunk of my Ford Contour. “Too bad,” I sighed to Linda, in a last ditch effort to avoid buying the bird. “I guess this just wasn’t meant to be.” But two days later, she and her friend LuAnne unloaded the mammoth cage from LuAnne’s SUV and installed Dusty at the far end of the dining room between the hanging fern and the door to the backyard—the spot where Weaver’s flight cage would have stood.

  Almost immediately, Dusty began assailing us with voyeuristic sonic montages of his old life with Becky and Kenneth. It was as if a tape recorder that switched on and off at random had been secretly planted in their house. He mimicked the chirpy ringing of their cordless telephone, the declamatory buzz of a dot-matrix printer, clinking glassware, a small dog yipping, followed by what sounded like a volley of swats with a newspaper, and the beep-boop of an electronic toy. He captured the full harmonic complexity of toddler Brandon’s laughter. He even staged miniature dramas, such as Becky brightly and cheerfully calling, “Kenneth!” and her husband replying, “What?” in a sour, put-upon tone that reminded me of myself. He turned us into reluctant window peepers, and I began guarding my own speech for fear of what Dusty might absorb and spit back later.

  The first week or so that Dusty spent with us, he displayed warmth toward Linda and bland indifference toward me. After dinner, Linda would open Dusty’s cage, and he’d step onto the hinge of the drop-down door and let her scratch his head with an index finger. Some nights I’d beat her to the draw, hoping he’d let me do the honors, but he would hang around his seed dish until I gave up and left. Once when he descended to the floor to explore the kitchen at ground level, I managed to scoop him up with my hand and nervously return him to his cage as I cried, “Oh, what a good boy he is.” Another time when he strutted into the living room, I flopped down on the rug beside him and wiggled a shoelace for him to bite. I even carried off the trick I liked to practice with Stanley Sue, touching my nose to his beak as a familial way of saying hello.

  Our relationship hit the skids the day that Dusty decided Linda was the family member with whom he would bond. As he sat on his cage top waiting for Linda to return from feeding apples to the turkeys in the barn, I approached to try the old nose-and-beak touch routine. He replied by pecking me soundly on the cheek. Determined to give no quarter to the massively intimidating bird, I hesitantly raised my wrist and commanded him, “Step up.” He sank his beak into my forearm. He held on so firmly that when I snatched away my arm, he stayed stapled to my flesh and rode along, crashing harmlessly into a pinecone-and-evergreen floral arrangement on the dining room table that had somehow survived the many months since Christmas.

  Rushing into the side yard, I confronted Linda and cursed her new parrot as a criminal, a monstrous animal who had no business living in our house with decent people. “No animal has ever treated me like this,” I howled in indignation. “I’ve never been anything but decent to that bird.”

  I had recently weaned myself from Zoloft, and the entire world seemed as sharp and steely as Dusty’s beak. The medication had lost its effectiveness over the years, and since I didn’t want to suffer through the high-voltage emotional jolt of another dosage increase, I had decided to cut the chemical strings instead. Despite my dislike for Dr. Rick, his admonishment about the lack of information on the long-term effects of Prozac, Zoloft, and related drugs had begun to gnaw at me. To mitigate the Zoloft vacuum, I swallowed a couple of capsules of St. John’s wort each morning to slightly pad the edges of my nervous-depressive personality. But it wasn’t particular effective against parrot jaws.

  I decided to give Dusty a wide berth and leave the touchy-feely aspects of his care to Linda. Unfortunately, my newfound cautiousness only emboldened him. Wandering around downstairs while Dusty was at large invited aggressive lunges at my shoe that quickly turned into an ankle attack if I didn’t immediately shake him off my foot. Eager to regain the psychological ground that I had lost, I took to donning a pair of daunting winter boots and affecting an attitude of vexed forbearance.

  “What’s the story here?” I’d ask him in a sleepy tone of voice, as he exercised his beak on the impenetrable leather of my boots. “I don’t think that’s going to get you anywhere.” It took him exactly three futile assaults before he learned to climb the laces and strike at my vulnerable calf.

  “Get this bird off me!” I’d holler to Linda while hopping up and down on one leg. “Get him off!” To her credit, she never exactly laughed out loud, though an hour or so later, while reading an Emily Brontë novel, she might lapse into a snicker and refuse to discuss the reason.

  I wasn’t the only person who had problems with parrots and feet. In her book, The Parrot Who Owns Me, ornithologist Joanna Burger reported that her fiercely loyal Amazon parrot, Tiko, loved giving painful bites to her husband’s toes. And a woman on a parrot newsgroup told me, “Don’t take it personally. African greys have a thing about shoes.” I didn’t even need to be wearing them. One day I came home from work and noticed that a pair I had left under the coffee table sported a fresh coat of black polish.

  “Thanks for shining these,” I told Linda. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Dusty chewed on them this morning,” she confessed. “I don’t think you can notice the damage now.”

  Linda’s shoes he left alone.

  My sole defense against embarrassing foot attacks was to carry a heavy towel
whenever Dusty was free and interpolate it between his beak and my fleshy parts. His response was to climb the towel toward my hand. That left me with the choice of dropping the towel and beating a hasty retreat or trying to reach the open cage door with the dangling bird and pop him inside before I sacrificed a digit.

  WHILE I SAT UPSTAIRS at my computer, I considered myself safe when Dusty was on the prowl. However, my sense of security was punctured one afternoon when a piercing pain to my ankle interrupted an e-mail session. Using his beak to help him climb, Dusty had quietly scaled twelve carpeted stairs and crept up to greet my foot in his inimitable way. A few days later he tried reprising the stunt, but this time I spun my head around and caught him at the entrance to my office. “I’m sorry,” he announced in my voice, then proceeded to clamber up my quickly vacated chair with unthinkable mayhem in mind. From then on, whenever he was loose and I was working upstairs, I barred the steps with the plywood board that kept the rabbits out of the living room during more tranquil hours. He could, of course, flap his wings and sail over the board at will, but like Stanley Sue, his odd reluctance to fly trumped most other concerns.

  I decided I had better fix the situation before I needed a bodyguard. My only recourse was changing my behavior. Maybe at some level he was afraid of me and acted aggressively out of defensiveness, I reasoned. Or perhaps he had transferred his dislike for his former owner’s husband to me and didn’t understand that I wanted to be his friend. In an attempt to win his trust, I began demonstrating my value to him. Whenever I woke up in the morning before Linda, I humped to the kitchen to shower kind words on Dusty along with the more tangible treats of fresh parrot seed and water. At first I only dared unlatch and slide out his bowls if he was perched on the opposite end of his cage, safely beyond biting distance. But once he began associating my actions with a benefit, he permitted these incursions with a mild look in his eye. During meals, I could even get away with poking table scraps through the bars into his dish, mere inches away from his beak.