4 little birds...
Got up and on my way to the bathroom noticed that Mary Beth was sitting on the recliner in the living room (this is a mingy little 2-bedroom apt., y'unnerstan'), kind of staring vacantly not exactly quite over her left shoulder at or out of the front window... somethin' not quite right, anyway... went over to give her a 'good morning' kiss...
"I'm still kind of in shock," she says... when she got up this morning, 4 of our 5 birds were dead- Mellow "Mel" Yellow (canary, male), Gracie and Panchito (cockatiels, female and male respectively), and Deborah (parakeet, female). Cricket (canary, male) still lives.
Panchito used to do a catcall whistle and the "Charge!" rally that baseball park organists are so fond of when we first got him, but that went away after a couple of months or so...
Gracie was nothing like Sammy, the female cockatiel that Mary Beth had when I first started hanging around here, and would sometimes in the night loose her grip on her perch enough that she would end up upside down, flapping her wings and squawking terribly...
Mel and Cricket disproved the notion that 2 male canaries in the same household won't both continue to sing- that might have had something to do with them being in different cages, Mel's on top of Cricket's, where they couldn't see each other- don't know if it would still have been the same if they had both been in the same cage together... Sometimes at night you would hear them do quiet trills of their daytime songs under their breath... When they both felt like singing at the same time, they would sometimes overlap, but mostly it was like a 'dueling canaries' jam session...
A couple few months ago, Deborah's beak started growing very long very fast... I tried looking it up on the 'net, and came up with possible vitamin deficiency or liver problems, neither of which we really had the capacity to do anything about... made a trip out to a beauty supply place over by Target and picked up a little mini-Dremel knockoff type of manicure set, and we just trimmed it for the nth time the other day...
Strangely enough... I'm going to miss Panchito's "bu bu bu" inquisitive "what's going on out there?" call, and even Gracie's "Feed me!" and "OH NOES YOU'RE LEAVING!!!!" squawks, but what I think I'm going to miss most of all will be the "rrch rrch rrch" ratchety kind of sound Deborah would make when the noises of the other birds or the outside birds or sometimes who knew what the hell would upset her and she would sit there and just scold the whole world all at the same time, rrch rrch rrch rrch rrch
Yeah- I an gonna cry about sometime, alright? Just not right now.
"I'm still kind of in shock," she says... when she got up this morning, 4 of our 5 birds were dead- Mellow "Mel" Yellow (canary, male), Gracie and Panchito (cockatiels, female and male respectively), and Deborah (parakeet, female). Cricket (canary, male) still lives.
Panchito used to do a catcall whistle and the "Charge!" rally that baseball park organists are so fond of when we first got him, but that went away after a couple of months or so...
Gracie was nothing like Sammy, the female cockatiel that Mary Beth had when I first started hanging around here, and would sometimes in the night loose her grip on her perch enough that she would end up upside down, flapping her wings and squawking terribly...
Mel and Cricket disproved the notion that 2 male canaries in the same household won't both continue to sing- that might have had something to do with them being in different cages, Mel's on top of Cricket's, where they couldn't see each other- don't know if it would still have been the same if they had both been in the same cage together... Sometimes at night you would hear them do quiet trills of their daytime songs under their breath... When they both felt like singing at the same time, they would sometimes overlap, but mostly it was like a 'dueling canaries' jam session...
A couple few months ago, Deborah's beak started growing very long very fast... I tried looking it up on the 'net, and came up with possible vitamin deficiency or liver problems, neither of which we really had the capacity to do anything about... made a trip out to a beauty supply place over by Target and picked up a little mini-Dremel knockoff type of manicure set, and we just trimmed it for the nth time the other day...
Strangely enough... I'm going to miss Panchito's "bu bu bu" inquisitive "what's going on out there?" call, and even Gracie's "Feed me!" and "OH NOES YOU'RE LEAVING!!!!" squawks, but what I think I'm going to miss most of all will be the "rrch rrch rrch" ratchety kind of sound Deborah would make when the noises of the other birds or the outside birds or sometimes who knew what the hell would upset her and she would sit there and just scold the whole world all at the same time, rrch rrch rrch rrch rrch
Yeah- I an gonna cry about sometime, alright? Just not right now.