Weaver, as we came to name the miniature ostrich, would flap his wings like mad without gaining an inch in altitude. Even Ollie, the worst flier we had ever seen, could make it across the room on sheer gliding power. Weaver fell like a crumpled wad of paper whenever we urged him to give his innate abilities a fresh try. Fearing he had an insidious wasting disease, I took him to Dr. Fuller, who spread one of his wings and made the diagnosis, “Poor feather development.” And it was true. His flight feathers resembled porcupine quills dipped in fluff, and they leaked more air than a window screen.
“It was probably caused by a vitamin deficiency,” he said.
“But he ate the same food as everyone else.”
“The deficiency may have come at a crucial stage of his early development.”
I left before he started quoting Freud and resigned myself to the fact that we couldn’t release Weaver until he had gone through a molt. But by then, I knew, he would probably be too tame to ever adapt to life on his own outdoors. That meant I had moved from reading about Arnie, the Darling Starling to suddenly having an Arnie of our own, though the darling aspect was definitely up for grabs.
Although he couldn’t fly, Weaver still insisted on coming out of his cage to scamper around the top of the kitchen table in search of imagined caches of his beloved mealworms. If we didn’t accede to his demands for freedom, he would throw himself flapping against the bars until we feared he would injure his body or his excited heart would explode. Unlike most birds, whose beaks wield considerable clamping strength—especially when my finger is involved—a starling asserts its jaw muscles by opening its beak and prying things apart. It’s a handy skill for enlarging a hole in the soil to access hidden insects or for widening the spaces between stitches in a woven placemat. And while Weaver lacked a parrot’s talent for picking up small items and throwing them on the floor, he compensating by whacking them croquet-style with the same end result.
Even when standing in one spot, Weaver was constantly in motion, exercising a repertoire of tics and twitches that aided his deliberation over a tabletop project. Cocking his head and scissoring his beak, he would unhurriedly study a situation from every possible angle before getting down to the business of toppling a saltshaker or shredding a paper napkin. Whenever I felt especially generous, I would place a few curls of adding-machine tape beside his cage, and he would arrange and rearrange them obsessively, lifting a loop and stepping through it, positioning it vertically into a wheel, or grabbing the tape by one end and tugging it behind him.
Even though I saw nothing of Stanley Sue’s white-hot intelligence in his actions, Weaver had the most soulful eyes I could ever imagine a bird possessing. Neither judgmental, like a parrot’s eyes, nor as innocent as a turkey’s, they spoke of emotions every bit as lively and deeply rooted as the fat, luscious grub of his dreams. Whenever I brought Weaver’s cage into the back room at night, just before covering him, I’d sit down for a moment in the chair at Linda’s desk and talk to him while I marveled at his eyes. “You’d better start flying soon,” I’d tell him. “You need to stop pooping on the kitchen table.” He’d hop to the perch closest to me to give my suggestions the deliberation they deserved.
A bird looks directly at you by looking at you sideways. It’s an odd thing to get used to, and I can never help but wonder how Stanley Sue, Howard, or Ollie’s brain simultaneously integrates an image of me with a completely different panorama on the other side of the bird’s head. But a starling’s eyes are positioned just above the base of its bill and shoved slightly forward toward the front of its head, the better to study the patch of ground that the bird is probing. Because of this, whether Weaver turned the side of his face toward me or squinted at me down the length of his beak with both eyes, I received the full weight of his attention. And I couldn’t shake the impression that his eyes held a nagging question. I seldom studied his face without encountering the query.
If only I could figure out what Weaver was asking me.
“Where’s my food?” was my best guess, based on his voracious appetite. Weaver’s lifeblood coursed with a current of sheer joy. When Linda or I would walk into the dining room, he was so pleased to see us, he would literally hop up and down with happiness. His exuberance was greatest when we came bearing food. He ate each and every meal as if it were his one and only meal of the day. Never mind that we might have filled his dish three times in a single afternoon with a dollop of canned cat food sprinkled with avian vitamins, or with minced red grapes, or with several wriggling mealworms. He would still attack the treat with all the ferocity of a child tearing the wrapping paper from a birthday present. His passion for his food dish became the most effective means of engaging his interest. This soon became important. Two months of Weaver’s unflagging devotion to eating yielded a healthy set of flight feathers and the ability to elude us at will whenever we set him free in the dining room.
Weaver was smart enough to discriminate between our trips into the room on rabbit business and our ostensibly nonchalant visits aimed at surprising a roaming starling and returning him to his cage. If we were lucky, he might light on my hand at first sight of the purple plastic feed dish I was carrying and ride the dish to the kitchen sink for a brisk cleaning, to the refrigerator for replenishing, then back inside his barred enclosure. But if we needed to pen him up before his hunger got the better of his penchant for flying free, we were forced to chase him from the dining room table to the window sill, from the top of the refrigerator to the curtain rod over the sink, and from the antenna of our portable TV to the summit of another birdcage before he might finally decide to surrender by hopping onto one of our heads.
“What’s that little sound you’re making?” Linda asked one evening during dinner.
“I don’t know, I guess I’m chewing too loud.”
“Not you. Weaver. It sounds like he’s trying to talk.”
“He’s saying ‘buzzy buzzy.’”
“‘Busy busy.’”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t talking,” I insisted. “He’s just making buzzing noises. We might as well be keeping a bumblebee.”
But a few days later I walked into the dining room while Weaver was in his cage indulging in his favorite noneating pastime of splashing around in his water dish. He took more baths than any bird I had ever seen and would probably have loved living outdoors with the ducks and geese, though he wouldn’t have given them a chance to use the pool. I was toweling up the floodplain at the far end of the table when I distinctly heard him interrupt his happy twittering to greet himself with a hearty, “Hi, Weaver.” Unlike shy performers Stanley Sue and Ollie, who refused to vocalize if we were in their field of view (and that applied to Stanley Sue’s whistles), Weaver flaunted a bold stage presence. He excelled at ventriloquism by keeping his beak neatly closed as he repeated the phrase for me again, “Hi, Weaver. Buzzy buzzy, hi, Weaver.”
Linda shared my elation at having a readily talking bird in the family. “Maybe he’ll tell us what he wants, like Arnie.” Occasionally, Margarete’s starling would pipe up with a prescient comment in an appropriate context, but Weaver’s commentary was a far cry from including pithy observations. Within another few days, he had picked up, “Whatcha say, Weaver?” from me, raising doubts as to which I should improve first, my grammar or my diction.
“You hear that?” I asked my parrot Stanley Sue accusingly, as Weaver practiced his repertoire. “Are you going to let a starling show you up? You could talk better than that if you wanted to. I’ve heard you do it.”
I should have known better than to even jokingly pit Stanley Sue against another bird, especially when the other bird’s affectionate hitchhikes on my head, hands, and other body parts had begun kindling the parrot’s jealous side. If I walked around the dining room with Weaver clinging to my shirt, Stanley Sue would race behind me on the floor biting my shoes as an attention getter. Why she never exercised her own talent for flying was a riddle, since she could easily have flapped up to my shou
lder and shoved him off. The closest she came to taking to the air was launching a snapping leap in Weaver’s direction whenever he foolishly decided to share the top of her cage. Such aggressiveness raised our fears of another Stanley Sue–Howard-type rivalry and resulted in our decision not to let the parrot and starling out together.
One afternoon, while slowly emerging from an extended winter afternoon nap, I heard an unfamiliar trilling from the dining room. Weaver was flying free, and Stanley Sue was shut in her cage where she shouldn’t have been able to cause him any harm. But the shrill cry alarmed me, and I hurried into the kitchen and dining room area only to find blood spattered across the top of the refrigerator and puddled on the table next to where Weaver stood forlornly on one leg. One toe on his right foot had been neatly amputated just above the toenail, and the presence of said joint with toenail in front of Stanley Sue’s cage implicated the parrot, who must have been hanging upside down from the top bars just waiting for Weaver to land within reach of her beak. The incident also solved the mystery of how Elliot, our canary, and Howard, our dove, had managed to sustain foot injuries from time to time. Within an hour of losing his toe, Weaver was briskly chatting away in his cage, but three full days passed before he resumed using his right foot. From then on, we always draped a towel across the top of Stanley Sue’s cage when the other birds were loose.
Weaver’s escalating friendliness toward us was matched by his increasing restlessness. If I were working upstairs on a writing project and needed a cup of coffee in hope of jogging a few brain cells into action, I was forced to weigh my craving against undergoing a pestering blitz from the starling. When I walked into the kitchen, Weaver would land upon my head and gleefully begin drilling for dander and sebum. Brushing him off only glued him to my arm, and from there he would migrate to my hand and peck at whatever task my fingers attempted to accomplish, knocking coffee out of the measuring spoon or dipping his beak into the stream of water from the faucet. Meanwhile, the confined Stanley Sue protested every moment that Weaver flew free, with squawks that reached upstairs and defeated whatever concentration benefits my dosage of caffeine had conferred. As soon as I returned home from work, Stanley Sue insisted on prancing around the dining room climbing the drawer pulls or bothering the rabbits. She loathed the briefest imprisonment in the afternoon, especially if it was for the sake of the starling. For his part, Weaver thrashed around and squealed inside his cage whenever Stanley was at large. Two incompatible birds clamoring for simultaneous freedom presented us with a problem.
“He needs a flight cage,” Linda informed me, as we tried eating lunch one Saturday while a caged starling fussed at us from the other end of the table. “This one’s way too small. If he had a big cage he could fly around in, he’d be a whole lot happier.”
“I’ll build him one,” I said.
Actually, I said no such thing, though the potential cost of buying a large cage made me seriously consider expanding my carpentry skills to include making straight cuts with a saw and springing for a powered screwdriver. For the moment, I dodged the issue by asking her, “And where would we possibly put a flight cage?”
Linda had no ready answer. Stanley Sue’s cage and a beat-up chair consumed one wall of the dining room, while three rabbit cages and three birdcages lined the windows of the adjacent wall. The opposite wall was out of the question, because it didn’t exist—a countertop divided the kitchen and the dining room instead. The fourth and final wall, a short and stubby run of Sheetrock across from Stanley Sue’s wall, struggled to accommodate a Jurassic-scale hanging fern and required space for a door to the outside to open, but it was the most logical spot for a cage. That door eventually provided a solution to Weaver’s housing problem.
All eight of our birds regarded the dining room, the top of the refrigerator, and an area around the kitchen sink as the extent of their territory. Only Howard occasionally flew into the living room to perch on a coat rack and hoot derisively at Grapey, Linda’s purple stocking cap. On the extremely rare occasions when another bird blundered into the living room, the bird considered itself lost, abandoned, and easy prey for passing eagles, even though the brightly lit dining room beckoned loudly through the doorway. Similarly, our birds expressed zero interest in the great outdoors. Any activity that transpired just beyond the quarter-inch thickness of glass that dominated two walls may as well have taken place in Capistrano, for all they cared. But Linda and I still exercised great caution whenever we used the dining room door to step outside when any of our birds were loose. One day, though, Weaver was just too fast for Linda. As she darted outside, he accompanied her and, without the slightest hesitation, disappeared into the open sky.
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 d
eep 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.
Bob Tarte Page 28