Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  “I don’t think she’s bleeding anymore,” the chagrined wife informed us as we backed out of their living room, our senses on alert for the return of the Volvo-size Saint Bernard. “We sprinkled flour on her feathers,” she added, citing that well-known coagulating trick favored by ambulance drivers and emergency room physicians around the world.

  Though the experience unnerved us, we still came away favoring a cockatiel, and I bought a cage in anticipation. Unfortunately, when we brought the cage to the Jonah’s Ark, a local pet shop specializing in birds, it became clear that it was too small for a cock-atiel. A cockatiel would have been able to sit in the cage but wouldn’t have had the room to turn around without catching its tail between the bars. Plus, the cockatiels in the store struck us as disappointingly parakeet-like, as if someone had taken a common yellow budgie, added a crest and drawn-out tail, and applied a little orange rouge to the cheeks. But sensing that we were in purchasing mode, the clerk, Joyce, plucked a Quaker parakeet from a Plexiglas display area and placed it on Linda’s finger. In contrast to the other Quaker we had seen, this one was lively and handsome, causing my hand to migrate toward my checkbook. But the bird was about the same size as a cockatiel and wouldn’t fit our cage. Joyce’s admonition unnerved us, too.

  “Don’t let him get hold of your fingernail. He’ll think it’s a nut and try to crack it.”

  Duly warned, I buried my hands in my pockets as Linda and I walked up and down the aisles in search of an alternative to the cockatiel and the Quaker. In our flush to buy a bird, we didn’t stop to question why the inventory was depleted. The first time we had visited Jonah’s, the store was atwitter with all manner of birds. This time, however, most of the cages were empty except for a pair of menacing macaws that growled if we approached them, a sleepy-eyed cockatoo that barely noticed us, and a wild-caught, wild-eyed Senegal parrot that had mangled a clerk’s forearm our last time in the store. In an isolated cage near the cash register, the prettiest of the few birds scaled to fit our cage hung upside-down from the bars. He was a stubby-tailed, parakeet-size, animated fellow endowed with every possible hue of green and wearing a brilliant patch of orange just beneath his beak.

  “What kind of bird is he?” Linda asked the clerk.

  “You can take him out of the cage,” she replied brightly, bypassing the question. Then a cloud passed over her expression as if she had just remembered a troubling event from her childhood. “I’ll get him for you,” she offered, turning her back to block the cage-to-finger transaction from our view. Before passing the bird to Linda, she cautioned, “Now, he might use his beak to climb onto your hand, but don’t worry, he’s not trying to bite you. He’s just keeping his balance.”

  True to Joyce’s words, when the small green bird bent forward, he pinched the flesh of Linda’s finger in his beak as he pulled himself up with his foot. Linda laughed in surprise. Responding to Linda’s voice, the bird unleashed an amiable series of squeals and chirps. “You’re a friendly little guy,” said Linda, and the bird burbled back to her.

  “Let me hold him!” I begged, extending a finger in friendship to the cheerful bird who cheerfully leaned over and bit me with great gusto.

  “He’s just being possessive,” Joyce hastily explained, as I studied the neat pair of puncture marks below my knuckle. “He loves his people!” she assured us. “He loves his cage a lot, too,” she decided, snatching the bird from us and returning him to his perch before he could inflict another incision. Having worked up a hearty appetite biting a gullible pair of newcomers, the bird turned his attention to his seed dish.

  “So, what kind of bird did you say he is?” I asked, as I massaged my finger.

  “Violet, the store owner, isn’t here today,” Joyce apologized. When we begged her for a hint, she finally acceded, “I think he’s a peach face,” but no further explanation followed. The $150 price tag on its cage was more than we had intended on spending, but it seemed a shame to miss out on the chance to bring home a friendly bird who had only bitten me due to extraordinary circumstances that would never occur again. That must have been my thinking. Either that, or all the blood had rushed from my brain to my throbbing finger, because otherwise I never would have even considered such a Jekyll and Hyde of a bird. As it turned out, the dual nature of the misnamed “peach face” was precisely why it was one of the few birds in the store. Violet was out of town at an aviary show, and with her had gone all the well-behaved parrots, parakeets, and lovebirds.

  WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN better than to trust the stock at Jonah’s Ark. A month or so before cockatiel fever struck, we had flirted with the idea of the budgie parakeet as our dream bird, but only if we could locate one that had been hand-raised, socialized, and hypnotized to enjoy close interactions with people. Violet assured us she had exactly such a bird and apologized for the high price of eighty dollars versus around twenty dollars anywhere else.

  “It takes a lot of work to bond a parakeet to humans,” she had explained, as she plucked a small blue budgie off its perch, “and this one is really special.” Almost at once, the bird squirmed from her grasp to lead the three of us on a floor-level chase around the store. If his wings hadn’t been clipped, we never could have caught him. “He’s just nervous,” she told us, when we had finally surrounded him near a refrigerator bearing a sign that read, LIVE BAIT, suggesting that the bird business at Jonah’s Ark wasn’t all that it could be. Both Linda and I made an attempt to get the bird to sit on our index fingers, but he thrashed with fear whenever we approached him.

  Our “peach face”—actually an orange-chin pocket parrot—responded to the car ride home with aplomb. Instantly taking to his cage, he hung from the bars while trying to dismantle his virgin birdie swing with a surgical application of his beak, ignoring the honking car horns and frequent stops and starts as we battled a spurt of rush hour traffic. We set him up in our living room, placing his cage on a plastic floor-standing pedestal whose base we had filled with twenty pounds of aquarium gravel to discourage our cat, Penny, from tipping over the stand. Within a couple hours of owning our parrot, Linda suggested the name, Ollie, which promptly stuck. At about the same time, I made a reluctant observation.

  “Am I imagining things,” I asked Linda, “Or does it seem like whenever we leave the room, Ollie starts chirping?”

  “I noticed that, too.”

  We exchanged a look of dread, hoping this was merely a coincidence.

  “Didn’t Violet once tell us that birds eventually accept their owners as members of their flock?” Linda asked. “Or even as substitutes for mates?”

  “Mates?” I experienced another pang of dread. “Ollie certainly wouldn’t have bonded to us in such a short period of time.”

  But he had. As long as we stood at his cage talking to him or coddling him on our finger, he acted reasonably. But if we turned our attention away, he would immediately begin calling us with high-pitched, scolding chirps. His voice was inoffensive enough, as parrots go—certainly nothing like the scream of a cockatoo, which can cause your ears to bleed—but the chirps were unrelenting. He unleashed them in strings of tens, hundreds, and thousands, and nothing short of our surrender would abate the bad behavior. Warily, I would introduce my hand into his cage and hold my breath as he stepped onto my finger. His bright green body would wiggle from side to side, his black eyes gleaming as he alternated his beak, left foot, beak again, and right foot to scramble up my sleeve and settle triumphantly on my shoulder. He’d nuzzle my neck with affection as I walked around the house. Then, once he had decided that the scenery had grown stale, he would deliver a wire cutter– like bite to my face.

  After three days, Ollie’s tyranny had completely worn us down. With one ear constantly cocked in his direction, I had trouble concentrating on anything else. My shirt collars sported beak-holes. Linda’s cries at yet another biting reverberated throughout the house. Dinner was the final straw. Linda had prepared a small dish of Purina Monkey Chow, the recommended food for an adolesc
ent brotogeris, by soaking the pellets in warm water until soggy. Trustingly, she placed the dish on top of his cage, and we took our places at the table.

  “You’ve got to say one thing for him. He’s got a healthy appetite,” Linda pointed out.

  “Too healthy,” I complained, leaning forward in my chair as Ollie dipped his beak into the goo and slung it in all directions. “We might as well eat outside in the rain.”

  With the gleeful demeanor of an infant who has just discovered the law of gravity, he gave the dish a shove. It plummeted from his cage top, hitting the counter at exactly the proper angle to spatter monkey gruel all over our food. He squealed in happiness as our voices rose.

  “Do we really want a pet like this?” I whined to Linda. We had erred by not returning Binky to Warren before his sullen presence around the house had seemed inevitable. We didn’t want to make the same mistake with Ollie. We had to act at once. The next morning we were back at Jonah’s Ark explaining the situation to an un-sympathetic Violet. Our claim that we were unable to control the small orange-chin clearly struck her as ridiculous, given that a pterodactyl-size blue and gold macaw with a beak slightly larger than Ollie’s entire body had been perched on her forearm when we slunk into the store.

  “These pocket parrots are on sale now,” she told us gruffly. “I can’t give you what you paid for him, that’s more than what I could sell him for. You’re looking at around $120 maybe.” Discerning that we were at a breaking point where we might actually pay her to take Ollie back, she made an even better deal for herself. She talked us into exchanging him for a different member of the brotogeris family that had a reputation for comparative gentleness. “She’s a grey-cheek parakeet,” said Violet, as she presented a meek bird on her finger and pulled a wing away from its body to show us the yellow underlying feathers. All of this the grey- cheek suffered without complaint. She was pretty enough, resembling an orange-chin whose forehead, cheeks, and chin had been dusted with a grey-green powder. But her colors, like her temperament, lacked Ollie’s fire.

  “Just keep in mind that she was wild-caught,” Violet advised us, meaning that instead of having been hand raised and socialized to humans, the unfortunate bird had been stolen from her nest before the import ban on birds had taken effect. Having barely survived our encounter with a hand-raised bird, we eagerly took home the unexcitable wild-caught parakeet.

  She bit me not a whit when I took her from her cage. She suffered being placed on my shoulder without aggression or complaint. Likewise, she exhibited no joy. I walked with her to the couch and sat. Ollie would have squealed into my ear when I spoke to him. The grey-cheek clambered down my shirt, descended the front of the couch, and toddled across the carpet. She climbed the aquarium pump tubing, briefly explored the top of the fish tank, located the electrical cord to the heater, and followed it back down to the floor. She was searching, I imagined, for her lush, lost birthplace in the branches of a rainforest. I put the quiet bird back in her cage.

  “She’s got a nice disposition,” Linda pointed out.

  “Especially compared to Ollie,” I seconded.

  “She’ll get used to us.”

  “She’ll be a very nice bird.”

  The following morning I blubbered into my slice of toast, “I miss Ollie,” and soon had Linda weeping along with me at the loss of our ill-tempered pocket parrot. Like kidnap victims who had fallen under the spell of their captor, we were crushed at his absence. After only three days of Ollie’s abuse, the house seemed empty and lifeless without his maniacal chirping.

  Swallowing my pride, I made yet another visit to Jonah’s Ark while Linda was still at work and asked Violet for the return of our tormentor. I had expected her to angrily refuse my request, but the bother of the exchange was nothing compared to the bother of hanging on to Ollie, and she agreed with ill-disguised satisfaction. We learned much later that we had been the second people to buy and return Ollie within a two-week period, but the only ones foolish enough to retrieve him.

  “We need to give lessons to you people when you buy a bird,” she told me, shooting a knowing look at a seasoned parrot-owner friend of hers. Without the slightest fear of injury, she whisked Ollie from his cage, turning him upside down so that his back rested in the palm of her left hand while his feet still clung to the two fingers of her right hand. Making a walking motion with those two fingers, she moved his feet back and forth while singing a chorus of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Ollie clucked in appreciation. Force of personality was obviously the key to dealing with him. I had no force of personality, but I did have Ollie back.

  Hardly a day goes by that we haven’t regretted his return.

  We learned to handle him with greater ease, understanding that the more hesitant we acted, the more inclined he was to bite. That doesn’t mean his temperament improved. From the moment the cover is removed from his cage in the morning to early evening when he’s put to bed, Ollie clamors for attention. His behavior contradicts the expert opinion of Robbie Harris, author of Grey-cheeked Parakeets and Other Brotogeris, the only guide to the brotogeris family I’ve discovered so far. “Their chattering voices can be loud at times,” the author understates, “but a bird kept singly as a pet is seldom noisy.” I’m not sure how Harris might define “noisy,” but on a summer day when the dining room windows are open, we’ve heard Ollie’s chirps as far away as the riverbank some five hundred feet from the house—down the hill, across the swamp, and through thickets of trees and brush, as cars and trucks clattered past the house. Late mornings, just before leaving for a housecleaning job, Linda usually eats her lunch in the car rather than sitting in the kitchen and suffering through Ollie’s shrill demands for a morsel of food.

  Throwing a towel over Ollie’s cage calms but does not quiet him, eliciting a toned-down chatter that has the semblance of an apology. Even when he seems genuinely happy, as when practicing his limited English vocabulary, he shoehorns the words into a stream of parrot invective. It’s not surprising that “Do you hear me?” and “Now, listen!” are two of his most accomplished phrases. He’s heard these often enough from us to work them to a fine polish.

  “A great many people in Peru keep Brotogeris parakeets as pets,” Harris writes, “because many are tame and sweet, learn to talk, and become quite attached to their owners.” Attached by their mandibles, I might add to the author’s generous description. Ollie literally bites the hand that feeds him. When Linda offers him a corner of a windmill cookie, he’ll lunge at her and let the treat fall to the floor. He bites out of imperious impatience that the cookie wasn’t his the instant he first glimpsed it in Linda’s fingers. He bites in anger that access to his favorite cookie should ever have been denied him at all. He bites for the simple pleasure of biting human flesh. Many are the times that one of us foolishly forgets to carry his cage by the top handle, picking it up between our hands instead. The succulent folds of our palms protruding through the bars comprise too much of a temptation for Ollie to resist. He’s smart enough to recognize a cookie while it’s still in the package. He should be smart enough to understand that biting us while his cage is in transit threatens his personal safety. But the instinct to bite, like his urge to squawk, transcends mundane concepts of reason.

  As loud as Ollie is, he’s surprisingly sensitive to sounds. Removing a handful of kibbles from a bag of cat food invites a fusillade of offended squawks. So does scraping a knife against a plate, shaking a pill out of a bottle, running water in the sink, emptying or loading the dishwasher, rustling a plastic trash bag, cutting paper with scissors, pouring coffee beans into the coffee grinder, or dumping cornflakes into a bowl. He’s a jackhammer complaining that a cricket is too loud.

  If any instincts bind Ollie to the natural world, they are well concealed. We placed his cage near a window so he could watch the chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, titmice, goldfinches, and other birds making the circuit to our feeder, but he expressed no recognition of them. He did seem to enjoy it when we’d
hang his cage outdoors on sunny days, so we started taking him on walks. As we wandered the wooded trails of a county park a few miles from our house, he showed little interest in anything except the attention of the person who carried him. When he began biting Linda, Linda would pass him to her friend Deanne. When he began biting Deanne, Deanne would pass him to me. Whenever I carried him, the lovely hulking tree stumps, darting insects, splashes of wild asters, and incursions of creek meanders faded away as I was forced to shift my focus to Ollie.

  “Isn’t this nice?” I’d cajole him with a steady stream of encouragement, hoping to keep his beak at bay. “Pretty boy, Ollie. Oh, there’s a good boy. We’ll be back home soon.”

  Because Ollie’s wings were clipped, we had not thought we were endangering him by letting him ride through the park on our shoulders. We were wrong. We read an article in Bird Talk magazine that described how a bird with trimmed flight feathers could still catch a gust of air just right and soar to the top of a tree. We kept him indoors exclusively from then on. But one afternoon he still managed to find his way outside and lose himself in the woods behind our house. While Linda was working in the living room and I napped obliviously upstairs, something scared Ollie off his cage top in the kitchen. It may have been Linda carrying newspapers past the kitchen door, or it could have been a breeze rustling the pages of a notepad on the table.

  With the distinctive, rolling squawk he produces whenever he takes flight, Ollie abandoned his cage top and launched himself down the basement stairs. And then, because his hatred of the gloomy, low-ceilinged cellar trumped his ambivalence toward the great outdoors, he made a second wobbly flight around the oil furnace, through the workshop, and out the basement door, which either Linda or I had accidentally left open. Our backyard runs flat for about nine feet beyond our house, then in two dips it descends to meet the flood plain of the Grand River. As Ollie flapped across the yard at the level of the basement floor, the ground dropped beneath his feet. Snagging a spring breeze, he rose above the gully, floundering into the shoe-sucking swamp that separates us from the river.