Enslaved by Ducks (37 page)

“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.”

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.”

S
ATISFYING 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 gets 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.