Enslaved by Ducks Read online

  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.

  Fortunately, Linda had been keeping tabs on Ollie from the living room. Finding the kitchen uncharacteristically quiet, she headed down to the basement and in disbelief traced the sound of his angry chirps outdoors, down the hill, and beyond the backyard fence. She ran back into the house and hollered up the stairs, “Ollie’s out in the yard way in the top of a tree.”

  I thundered down the steps and followed her outside. Linda pointed and shouted, but I couldn’t pick him out from the foliage. His emerald-colored body blended in perfectly with the newly emerged leaves. For once Ollie’s incessant chirping served him well, and using his voice as a guide, I pinpointed him in a hack-berry tree just on the other side of the fence, clinging to a branch about twenty feet off the ground. I was shocked at how small and vulnerable our avian dictator looked. Though escaped Quaker parakeets have taken root in environments as inhospitable as Chicago and New York City, there wasn’t a chance Ollie would survive outdoors if we couldn’t lay our hands on him. His bad attitude was nothing like street smarts. It was the pampered personality of a spoiled rich kid in feathered knickers who was tough only when it came to dominating his owners. Bluff and bluster would mean nothing to a hawk, and none of the trees on our property sprouted spaghetti or mashed potatoes at mealtime.

  “Ollie, come down from there,” Linda said, but she was talking to the wind. Under the best of circumstances, Ollie had never listened to us, and in this case he had determined that safety constituted the branch his toes were wrapped around. Our only chance was to try to reach him, which struck me as extremely unlikely. I don’t climb trees, chop them down, or even plant them. A ladder was the obvious recourse, but the last time I had used one, it was to clear debris off the nearly flat roof above our dining room, and once there I had been too frightened to climb down again.

  This time I had no option but to fight my fear of heights. I wrestled an aluminum stepladder over our wire backyard fence and with no small effort followed the ladder with my body. I managed to penetrate a clinging barrier of wild black raspberry bushes and was already panting by the time I reached the base of the tree. Ollie scolded me as I searched in vain for a semisolid patch of ground that would simultaneously support all four legs of the ladder. The front legs immediately sank as I made my ascent, knocking the ladder against the tree trunk and almost pitching me off.

  As I began my shaky climb, I lost all sight of Ollie. “I don’t see him anymore!” I shouted to Linda, who was helping to steady the ladder.

  “He’s right th
ere,” she called back, grazing my chest with the pointing finger at the end of her arm. From the way we were shouting at each other, you would have thought we were on opposite sides of the swamp instead of within backslapping distance. “On this one?” I exclaimed, my voice rising louder with hope as I indicated a shoulder-height branch at a level a scant two steps up the ladder.

  “No, that one,” Linda said, thrusting her finger toward a patch of sky split at a dizzying height by a thick grey line of bark. Blood hissed in my ears as I continued my ascent. After each successive step, I’d stop and raise my head from my thumping chest, hoping that the branch was suddenly closer than it had last appeared and our bird was miraculously within arm’s reach. He seemed more distant than ever when I arrived at the last step. The edge of the top platform pressed sharply against my shin, stimulating various bad ideas whirling through my brain, including spraying him with a hose or wrapping the hose around the branch and pulling it down to where I could grab him. Any plan that involved a hose somehow seemed appealing.

  Linda directed my attention to a long, thin branch that branched off Ollie’s branch. “Can you get hold of that?” she asked me.

  “I think I’m okay,” I told her, then I realized it wasn’t my safety that concerned her at the moment.

  “To pull his branch down!” she shouted.

  My legs oscillated as I climbed to the top platform of the ladder, which was emblazoned with an orange sticker depicting the teetering silhouette of a foolish man with an X stricken over his body, along with the warning DO NOT STAND ON TOP STEP. Wondering why it was called a top step if it wasn’t a step at all, I hugged the tree trunk with one arm, stretching myself into an impossible geometric shape in order to snag the tip of the dangling tendril. “Got it,” I told Linda with more confidence than I was feeling. The branch was a match for my own physique, far too weak and spindly to be of much help. It barely budged the parent branch when I gave it a healthy yank. By pulling it in a waltz rhythm, however, I managed to get the tree limb swaying a little. I gradually increased the momentum until, at the far end where Ollie sat, the swaying was converted to a crack-the-whip bounce that snapped him squawking into the air.

  Awkwardly stretched between branch and ladder like a wishbone, I was unable to turn my head to follow Ollie’s flight path without losing my footing and joining his descent. He was a green blur at the edge of my vision as he shot off the tree limb and began an arc toward the ground. Linda scrambled past me. I felt rather than saw her brief pursuit of him across the litter of last year’s fallen leaves, then heard his indignant squawk as she scooped him up.

  “I got him!” Linda told me.

  “Is he okay?” I called out in a pinched voice, as I slowly reeled myself in.

  Clutching Ollie in her hand, she thrust him under the open front of her jacket and rushed toward the house. “Are you okay?” she asked him. I realized that he was in perfect shape, none the worse for his brush with disaster, when I heard her cry out in pain. Happy and healthy, Ollie gave her a healthy bite.

  He wasn’t grateful, of course. He simply took it for granted that when he squawked, we would cater to his whim. It didn’t matter if he was stranded on top of the highest oak or merely wanted another spaghetti noodle to nibble on, then fling at us. He gave the order, we obeyed—and were typically punished anyway. We must have been masochists to allow such an imperious creature into our house. Little did we know that his willfulness was all too typical of birds.

  CHAPTER 3

  Stanley Sue’s Identity Crisis

  By all logic, Ollie should have thoroughly discouraged us from ever owning another parrot. He had exactly the opposite effect. Whenever Linda and I went on vacation to dream destinations like Grindstone City, Michigan, or Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, rather than inflicting Ollie on the housesitter who looked after our pets and princely possessions, we’d board him at Jonah’s Ark. It was our way of getting back at the people who sold him to us. While dropping him off at Jonah’s, which had inexplicably moved to the cramped back room of an office-supplies wholesaler, we found ourselves mesmerized by parrots that had appealing personalities. When we ventured into bird shows at local motels, dealers thrilled us with live birds that didn’t bite.

  We wanted one of these. Sadder, wiser, and beaten down by Ollie, I did actual research this time. After much thumbing through bird magazines and gawking at well-behaved pet shop hookbills, we came up with a checklist. Our wish was for a bird that was quiet, friendly, undemanding, could talk, wouldn’t bite us, and wouldn’t bite us. In other words, except for the talking part—if you count under-the-breath muttering as talking—we were looking for the polar opposite of Ollie.

  Of all the breeds, the African grey seemed exactly what we were looking for, except for the problem of price. Betsy’s Beasts, our local pet shop in Lowell, displayed a handsome fourteen-inch-tall Congo African grey named Oscar selling for a wallet-flattening $1,350—“but that’s including the cage,” owner Jerry assured us. We came close to considering an installment plan, but dallied so long that Jerry was forced to return Oscar to the breeder who had placed him at Betsy’s on consignment. It didn’t pay to try to make a living selling expensive birds in our small town. Shortly after returning Oscar, Jerry went out of business. His store was taken over by an oddball who refused to sell us a mirror for our canary—“It makes them mean,” he insisted—and posted the confidence-building sign over his aquariums NO REFUND WITHOUT FISH CARCASS.

  Despairing of our chances of latching on to an affordable grey, we drove to the nearby town of Coopersville, where a breeder who advertised in the Grand Rapids Press classifieds waved his arm at a pungent floor-standing cage full of meat-eating African hornbills. The owner suggested I keep my hands well away from the bars, lest these birds that resembled a charmless variation on the toucan mistake my fingers for chicken strips. Motioning Linda and me into another room, he introduced us to an Amazon parrot he admitted needed some work. “I wouldn’t trust him,” he confided. Extending one of the longest wooden perches I’d ever seen, he removed the attractive red and blue bird from its cage, making sure to keep it well away from any of our bodies. “This bird isn’t for everyone,” he warned in an intimate tone that implied we’d be special people in his book if we bought his problem bird. “I don’t accept returns,” he hastened to add. At least not without a carcass, I assumed.

  Deciding against bringing home a larger, meaner, louder version of Ollie, we held out until the afternoon we were buying perches for Ollie at Pet Supplies “Plus.” Linda breathlessly dragged me over to a bulletin board near the entrance.

  “Sweetie, this lady’s selling an African grey named Stanley. Her ad’s even got a picture. Isn’t he cute?” An overexposed photo stapled to the file card showed a parrot tearing apart a box of Sun-Maid raisins. The condition of the couch Stanley perched upon made me wonder what else the parrot enjoyed chewing. “He’s only three hundred and fifty dollars including the cage,” she squeaked.

  “I’m sure he’s already sold.”

  “I’m going to call her right now.”

  “You might as well wait until we get home. It’s long distance.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of quarters in my purse.”

  “I wouldn’t even bother,” I sighed, laying a consoling hand on her shoulder. “Too bad we didn’t see this a couple of days earlier.”

  I turned and headed for the car as Linda made a beeline for the pay phone. A few minutes later she delivered the news that the woman hadn’t sold Stanley yet.

  “Gee, it’s kind of far to White Cloud,” I complained. Anything spur-of-the-moment distressed me. I wanted to go home and brood about it for a while, but Linda’s momentum nudged us northward instead.

  Lynn was packing boxes when we arrived at her box of a house set in the middle of a neighborhood of miniature cottage-style homes from the 1950s. The houses on her block huddled closely together despite the vast wooded tracts and open fields that flowed out in all directions f
rom the town. Across a compact front yard, Lynn’s car was waiting with open hatchback for the armload of jackets and dresses that met us at the door.

  “I won’t be needing these,” Lynn told us, as she stuffed the clothing into a carton, led us out to her car, then took us briskly through a side door into the kitchen where another box was waiting. As we scurried behind her, she explained that she was moving to California to become something known as a mobile nurse. I envisioned Lynn conducting medical treatment from a speeding vehicle while patients ran alongside trying to keep up with her. “I’ll work in one city for a few months, and then get assigned a new hospital in another part of the state,” she said. “So I have to get rid of all my birds. Stanley’s the only one left. He’s an African grey Timneh. I just sold the Congo African grey and used to have a cockatoo.”

  “What about your dog?” I asked. A Boston terrier scampered at her heels, toenails clicking on the hardwood floors. He backed off as we trailed Lynn into a cluttered living room, where a pigeon-size parrot clinging to the flap of an empty box flashed the terrier a look of warning. No fan of small, hyperactive dogs, I immediately admired Stanley. From his fluffed-up mantle of silver-tipped grey feathers to the sense I got of blazing intelligence behind each of his reptilian eyes, Stanley was clearly cut from a different cloth than our clownish orange chin parakeet. A patch of bare white skin encircled his eyes, but the skin of his feet was scaly grey, and the stubby tail feathers were tinged with the deepest maroon.

  “Casey’s coming along. He doesn’t mind riding in a car. Stanley’s another story. Aren’t you, big boy? That’s one of the phrases he knows. ‘Big boy, Stanley.’ Two people owned him before me, and he must have picked up the ‘big boy’ from the girl and the ‘Stanley’ from the guy. So he’ll say ‘big boy’ in the woman’s voice, then ‘Stanley’ in a deep voice,” she chuckled, lowering her own voice an octave to emphasize the “Stanley.”