I was at the animal shelter pretty early this morning when a woman brought in a large box of donuts. Since today was Friday the Thirteenth I took that to be a miraculous sign. Except the box didn’t have any donuts in it, at all. It had a towel with bird shit on it, and a small green parrot.
We have, here where we are, lots of flocks of feral green Amazon
parrots that fly around in groups, make a loud, awful racket, and look awesome
as they hang out on phone wires, in trees, and fly around more. These are not
song birds; these are cacophonous, invasive creatures that are slightly more
pleasant than crows and proud, prolific excreters of their meals. You live
here, you move your patio furniture out from under the ficus tree. Once in a while one of them will fly into a
window and get its bell rung, and somebody else will pick it up to save it and
the bird will bite the living crap out of their hand, just to be mean.
“My girlfriend and I were walking along the sidewalk and this
beautiful little bird fell out of the tree just like that, right in front of
us. He just sat there, and we didn’t
want him to get eaten by a coyote or something like that. He is so pretty, and he is really friendly,
too! Can you save him?”
I looked into the box of no donuts and saw a small green
parrot sitting on the towel; he saw me and made a move like he was going to
flap a wing, so I slammed the box lid shut and put on my crack-head-frisking
gloves. We had some staff there in the
front office, and also some kind of TV reporter who was going to do some kind
of story there at the shelter.
Fortunately she didn’t have her camera plugged in yet.
“How do you know he is friendly?”
“I picked him up and he walked around on my arm, and my
friend petted him, and he seems like he is someone’s pet and he is just so
sweet!”
I am not a bird guy.
A few years ago, when I probably should have still been in training, I
had been kicked loose to do my job and had to break into a sweltering, 100-plus
degree pick-up and rescue a macaw the size of a medium emu, and the feathers
and (my) blood and shredded towel bits that resulted from that bout gave me a
healthy respect for these sociopathic creatures. Some crush nuts with their
beaks at over 200 thumb-severing pounds per square inch.
But this parrot was small, and cute, and the finder reported
it to be friendly.
I reached into the donut box and gently grasped the parrot,
so I could do a quick, basic health evaluation; eyes, wings, legs, parasites,
the usual. And discovered a small aluminum band around its left leg, with
letters and numbers on it. Okay, this
parrot IS someone’s pet. Then it crunched down on the soft ball of my finger
like wire cutters, like it meant it, squalking that malicious squalk they make
when there are fifteen or thirty of them lurking in your back yard trees
knowing you wanted to sleep in for another hour and a half.
I managed to keep the bird in my hand and with the help of a
smirking kennel attendant and too many laughing witnesses stuff it into an
empty bird cage, set it on a perch and latch the cage gate. The parrot stalked to the far end of its
perch and turned its back on me, refusing to make any eye contact with me, giving
me its shoulder only, from every angle.
You little prick, I thought, shaking out my mauled finger. We get maybe a half dozen lost pet birds in a
year and virtually all of them go unclaimed, and get adopted to new
families. I gloated at this one- you are
mine to torment for months now, I thought to myself, looking at his back. I am going to teach you bad words when nobody
is looking, I thought again to myself, still looking at his back.
I named it Thug.
You know what? Two
hours later a nice older couple came in asking if anyone had found their sweet
little mustache parakeet.
