Pickles The Parrot Returns: My Continued Adventures with a Bird Brain

by Abbott, Georgi

  I still couldn’t let go of the section I had in my hand, otherwise it would become a bungie again and head for the ground. But the game was over for Pickles so he scampered up the rope, found a perch and announced “Time to Party! Woo hoo!”

  Pickles is pretty animated and happy during parties, especially if we have company. He likes attention but he’s happy to sit on his own and just observe the action too. When he starts to wind down, he wants to sit on a knee and receive head scratches until his eyes get heavy and sleepy. That’s when he goes back to his cage to be covered.

  He likes many children’s songs, especially Raffi, and particularly the Banana Phone Album. He sings some of the Banana Phone song but he’s never learned, or sung, anything else he’s ever heard on CD’s. He likes lively piano songs and he’ll put up with classical now and then but only if he’s in the mood for a nap. The same thing with relaxation music, with the exception of the one I have with rain, thunder coming and going, birds and a bullfrog. He only had to hear that bloody bullfrog once to copy it perfectly. Ever go out in public with a bullfrog in your birdie backpack? Nobody notices the backpack when you’re walking toward them, but they do notice the flatulent sounds coming from your direction and you get a little tired of always having to turn around to show the backpack and explain it’s just your bird. When we’re walking, Neil says he’s in the back deliberately bouncing with each step I take, pretending he’s walking too – or something. But he’s decided that the bullfrog sound goes great with every step. Think about that.

  Pickles has always liked thunderstorms, because we always made a party out of it when he was very young, and he likes them loud. Even if the first one scares the crap out of him, he thinks this is marvelous music and will dance to it.

  There’s another CD he likes - Loons In The Mist. It plays soft music with running water, wild birds and a loon. Pickles does perfect imitations of the four loon calls (or is it 5?) and originally learned them on our lake trips. African Greys can copy these calls beautifully; you’d never know the difference and it’s amazing to listen to. I highly recommend buying them a CD or there’s lots of audio you can play or download to your computer by doing a quick Google search. They pick it up quickly; or at least, Pickles did.

  Of course, there are his musical toys and he goes through those little music discs very quickly. It’s very annoying when they’re running out of battery power because they either start emitting sour notes in slow motion, or they start to skip back to the beginning after a couple of bars. Pickles doesn’t care, it’s just more cool noise for him to copy – forever.

  The TV must be on at all times so he can keep up with the advertisement jingles. If a commercial has beeps and whistles or any kind of electronic sounds, Pickles will play the sounds right along with the ad. First thing in the morning, that TV has to be turned on or he’s miserable and cranky until it is. He thinks it’s just a noisy lamp and demands “Lights on!” if we turn on his UV light and walk away forgetting about the TV. It shines light; therefore it must be a light.

  He likes, and copies, Neeka’s squeaky toys but especially likes the rubber chicken. He scares the crap out of me with that sound; it’s like a sudden, loud, distress call that gets me every time.

  You would think that his fondness for music would encourage him to sing more songs, wouldn’t you? He used to, but now usually asks me “Wanna sing a song?” and I’ll say “What song?” and then he’ll sing the first line of the song he wants then stop and wait for me to sing the rest. When he’s tired of that song, he’ll give me the buzzer and ask “Wanna sing another song?” and we continue on like the first one. I don’t know if he’s lazy or if he just prefers dancing to other people’s songs.

  But whistle! Now that’s the best music EVER! I still haven’t found any whistling CD’s so he only learns from the TV, the neighbor when we’re outside, or me. He’s an amazing whistler and will copy my whistles but correct the bad notes as he learns it. He makes up his own whistle songs, which are incredibly beautiful and always in perfect pitch. That’s unbelievable to me.

  Yup, music. And anything that makes a racket. Even Neeka’s pop bottle full of large beads that makes so much racket, you can’t hear anything else. I could probably buy a trombone, play it right in his ear and he’d just dance. He’ll never make a career out of his dancing but he likes to bob and lately he’s been swaying his head back and forth to the side, which is pretty cute.

  He lives for date night – or party night, to him. He’ll stay up later at night for a party and even when he’s had enough and climbs into his cage, he prefers to go straight into his tent and listen to the music as he goes to sleep rather than play with toys. A couple of minutes later, we can take a peek and he’s got his head tucked under his wing, fast asleep. It doesn’t bother him one bit if we stay up all night listening to music and he’s bright eyed and cheerful the next day.

  Chapter 9

  Ni-Nite, Lights Off

  “Last night I felt like going to bed early so at 4:30 I climbed in my cage, said "Lights off" and waited for my bedtime almond. Mom said it was too early so I climbed out & right back in and said "Now?" Mom said no. I climbed back out, back in & said "Now?" Mom kept saying no, I kept going back & forth asking "Now? until she gave up, gave me my almond and covered me up. Don't know why she didn't listen the first time.”

  “Mommy gave me a tough almond to crack before I went to bed. I don't like to work too hard for my almonds & this one didn't have a nice crack to get started with. I threw it to the cage bottom, expecting her to bring me another one or crack this one for me. She didn't. I couldn't give in infront of her so I had to wait til I was covered and sneak down and get it. She's a tough nut to crack.”

  “I'm a 'sleep in' kinda bird. I don't like to get up early. What's with that saying "early to bed, early to rise"? Like, how early is early? If you go to bed early - how early? If you went to bed early - how early are you supposed to get up? Like, is a minute later good enough? I get cranky if I get up to early - whenever that is.”

  “Sometimes, when I’m feeling sleepy, I turn my head so mommy can only see one eye. Then, as I start nodding off, mommy thinks I’m winking at her and she feels flattered.”

  “Mommy's mean. Every time she sees me yawn, she yawns too and it makes me stop mid-yawn. I wait for her to finish her yawn and then I try to yawn again but she mocks me again and makes me stop. I can't yawn when somebody's mocking my yawn. Yawning is serious business and she shouldn't mess with it. Nothing worse than a ruined yawn. I need a yawn. Big bad yawn. If you say yawn enough times, it stops making any sense. Yawn.”

  “You know when you fall asleep and then you dream you're falling, falling, falling .... They say that if you ever hit bottom in your dream, you're dead. I think they're confusing that will real life.”

  “When I shut my eyes, the whole world dies until I open them again. I hold the power of life and death. It's a burden I must carry.”

  “The sun rises and says Good Morning and keeps us company the whole day long. At the end of its day, he lays down and his head disappears as he pulls the land, like a blanket, to cover him and says Good Night. He leaves the moon and the stars for night lights but dammit, who is he to tell us when to go to bed. He's not the boss of me.”

  “Mom took the cover off my cage this morning and I was still sleeping in my tent. "It's morning already?" I asked. "Time flies" she answered. "I don't care if time flies in to a window and breaks its neck", I snapped "I asked if it's morning already". Ask a simple question.”

  Pickles loves going to bed and bedtime is getting earlier and earlier as time goes by. This past winter, he’s decided 4:00pm is the time to dismiss us and get some ‘alone’ time. Last summer, I think it was 5:00pm or 6:00pm and at this rate, he’s not going to bother getting up in the morning at all. When we first got him, he stayed up until ten or eleven at night and even then, he was reluctant to go in the cage. It’s not that he always wants to go to sleep because usually, but not alway
s, he’ll play with his bucket of toys or sit and talk to himself. Sometimes he’ll play and talk, then crawl in his tent to sleep for a while but after an hour or so, he’s back up playing and talking again.

  The white sheet we use to cover him, is placed so that he can peer around at us or go to a lower branch to see us. He’s not usually interested in whatever we’re doing and not interested in talking to us but once in a while he’ll go down to a lower branch and chat a bit, or just gaze at us for awhile.

  There was one night though, when he seemed particularly restless. We could hear crashing going on as he threw every toy out of his bucket in quick succession then kept climbing down to the bottom of the cage and back up again. He started pacing on his perches and muttering to himself, punctuated with the odd loud squawk. Eventually we noticed him clinging to his cage bars, waving and squawking. “What’s up Pickles? I asked. “Want music! Bang, bang!” he exclaimed. We told him we weren’t going to play any music for him so he went pack to pacing, climbing and muttering. Before long, he was clinging to his cage bars again and demanding “Music. Bang, bang.”

  I figured he wanted out so I went to open the cage and that’s when I noticed his maraca sitting on the TV stand; I had picked up his old, dirty one but forgot to put the new one in his bucket. I opened the cage to hand it to him and he ripped it out of my hand then stood there shaking it at me with his talon as if to say Stop touching my STUFF! All was well after that; he had what he wanted.

  In my first book, I described his bedtime routine – telling us “Lights off”, giving him his almond and ending with him telling us “Want covered.” and only one thing has changed since then. Now, as he’s eating his almond, he politely tells us “Want covered” and whistles his bedtime song as we do it.

  There was a time, long ago, when Pickles would sometimes refuse to go to bed. Sometimes it would work for us to turn off the lights and sometimes we could bribe him into the cage by putting his favorite treat inside but those things didn’t always work. It was when we started allowing him to be out of his cage all the time that going to bed became enjoyable to him. Obviously, the more time a bird has out of his cage, the easier it is to get them back inside and since Pickles is never locked in his cage, he knows that we’ll let him out any time he wants.

  Plus, all his food and water is in the cage and he knows that he is free to go inside without us slamming the door behind him. For the longest time, when we first started giving him his freedom, he would practically starve because he was afraid we would lock him in if he went for a nosh.

  Pickles is very particular about his night time almonds, with any nuts actually. He doesn’t like to work too hard to get the nuts out of the shells and if he can’t find a crack or chip as he rolls it around between his talon and tongue, it’s thrown to the ground. He’ll insist on a new one so we’ll either give him one or slightly crack it for him. However, if we leave the old one where he dropped it, he’ll eventually sneak down to get it and suddenly he doesn’t have any problem breaking it open.

  I gave him a solid one once and he promptly dropped it and asked, “Wanna nudder snack.” I told him to eat what I gave him and walked away to do the dishes. Not long afterwards, I heard him climb down his cage and I thought he was going to get the one he dropped. All was quiet so I assumed that’s what happened until I heard a little voice coming from behind me on the floor. “He said he’d be right back,” said Pickles. (He gets ‘you’ and ‘he’ mixed up and doesn’t say ‘she’ at all.) “I did not say I’d be right back, and what are you doing out here?” I responded. “Wanna snack” he said, “Lights off” he added, so I picked him up and reached on top of the fridge for a better, easier almond for him.

  As I did this, he was able to snatch a fridge magnet and when I tried to take it from his beak, he attempted to fly away with it but he managed to grab the heaviest one on the fridge which weighed him down so he dropped like a rock to the floor. I bent to grab either him or the magnet but he took off running, back to his cage. He attempted to climb up with it, and almost succeeded, but it was way too big and bulky so he ended up dropping it and carried on up the cage as if he meant to do that.

  Once he was on top of the cage, I handed him his almond but he didn’t want it - he wanted the magnet in my other hand. I thought oh, what the heck and handed it to him. In about 3 seconds, he managed to snap it in half and I thought jeez! He couldn’t crack and almond shell but he sure as heck managed to crack something a whole lot harder! I really liked that fridge magnet.

  Pickles yawns when he’s getting tired, just like anybody, and I can’t resist mocking him when he does. Just as he gets his beak open nice and wide, I open my own mouth wide, which causes him to stop and look at me. He slowly closes his mouth and stares at me until the need to yawn overcomes him again. He starts to yawn; I start to yawn – making a big production of it. He stops. I stop. He stares. But he really has to yawn so he does it again but this time he does it slower while keeping an eye on me. I wait. He figures it’s safe so he goes for the big one but nope, he’s interrupted by me yawning again. He keeps testing me by pretending he’s going to yawn and barely opening his mouth so I start mocking him by opening and shutting my mouth too. Eventually, he turns his back on me in disgust, refusing to look at me until he manages a nice yawn. Aren’t I horrible?

  Pickles used to say “Big Bad Yawn” like the old Jimmy Dean song “Big Bad John” but he seems to have dropped it from his vocabulary lately. Maybe his refusal to say it stems from his yawning experiences with me. Lol.

  He’s had a tent to sleep in since he was very young and for a few months, he stopped sleeping in it. My mom makes them for me and I have several of them so I can swap them out to wash them every few days. The bottom is made of stiff plastic (sewn inside the material) and one time, I threw them in the washing machine with some towels and three or four of them broke in half, lengthwise along the bottom from the extra weight in the machine. At one point, the rest were dirty so I tried hanging the broken ones in his cage and Pickles didn’t seem to mind. I guess it was like a little hammock for him.

  I ended up using all the broken ones and when I finally washed the lot of them, I gave him one of the good ones. It wasn’t until many weeks later that we noticed he hadn’t been sleeping in them and by then, I’d forgotten about the broken ones so I kept hanging the good ones. I kept swapping them out anyway since they tend to get filled with his dander and I kept washing them and hanging them until one day, I was behind in my laundry and I resorted to hanging a broken one again. He was in like flint and back to sleeping in his tents. He still prefers the cracked ones but will settle for anything these days.

  Tents are great peek-a-boo places and on one occasion, Pickles was getting a kick out of poking his head out at me like a jack-in-the-box and yelling peek-a-boo. I stood next to the cage answering I see you each time he popped out. After the last time he did it, I snuck around to the back of the tent and hollered peek-a-boo through the other end. Well! He was NOT expecting that and he flew out the front with a loud ACK and ended up hanging from the tent by one talon. As he swung from it, he shouted ‘I SEE YOU!” I was laughing so he ended up chuckling about the whole thing too. He climbed back into the tent but faced the opposite way this time, figuring I couldn’t surprise him that way, and we continued the game.

  At some point, I went around to the other side and surprised him again but this time it didn’t startle him and he tried to turn around in the tent. There isn’t enough room for turning and in his efforts; he went turtle in a squished little ball, wedged between the walls, legs flailing. When he finally righted himself, he decided this game wasn’t fun anymore, told me to go home and then lay in his tent sulking.

  We have 2 large cages for Pickles – one of them quite large. We started out with the smaller one, which is quite adequate, but after a couple of years we bought him a nice roomy one. He used that for a few years and then we decided, since he only really used it for sleeping and because it was taki
ng up so much room in our livingroom, to change it back to the small cage. He’s happy in either one but I think, if he has the choice, he prefers the smaller one.

  Once morning comes, Pickles is content to stay covered and quietly talk to himself or play with his bucket toys for as long as it takes for us to get up and let him out. Once out, the day begins with happiness and lots of joyful sounds and cheerful conversation.

  Chapter 10

  I Love My Daddy

  “My navigation's a little off since the wing clip. Daddy's shoulder was my intended destination as he walked into the room but his crotch was where I crash landed. His PJ's aren't well cushioned for talons and I didn't mean to grab his nads but I don't know why he carries his baggage on the outside like that. He should tuck it in, like us birds.”

  “I've been up to no good lately so daddy grounded me - he clipped my wings. I don't really mind cuz when I can fly, I get real ornery and I don't like feeling that way. It's FUN getting clipped! Daddy puts me on the back of the couch and when he snips I laugh & dance and go Woo Hoo! Cuz feathers are flying all around and I think it's funny that my feathers can fly without me!”

  “Daddy went away ALL day yesterday and left me all alone with mommy. I refused to talk to mommy all day except to do that sound that shatters her ear drum. I'm used to having daddy home lately so I pouted all day. I gave up and demanded my lights off, my almond snack and to go to bed and be covered. Right after that, daddy came home but by then I was like - yeah, whatever, jerk. This morning I was really mad because I forgot I was mad and I talked to both of them.”