Cockatiels: Knuckleheads of the bird world
Anybody here have them? They can be noisy, messy, and destructive at times, but they're so weird and goofy that they can be quite entertaining.
I have a solitary male, and I have no idea how old he is. He was a refugee. A lady I worked with about 15 years ago caught him flying around in her condo parking garage and gave him to me. I think he was abused in the past. Part of two of his toes are missing; I don't know the story behind that. He is not tame at all and at times he can be quite grouchy and he'll hiss and snap at me if I get too close to his cage, but other times we will whistle and squawk at each other and I can get right up to where our foreheads touch. Then he'll suddenly realize that I'm much to close and he'll go cower in the corner. So, I try to give him his space.
I think when he was out flying around wild, he may have been attacked by crows, because everytime he hears one outside, he goes into a panic and he shreiks and squawks like crazy. Then he immitates their cawing for a half-hour after they're gone, kind of a soft growling "hrrr, hrrr, hrrr." He'll even squawk at them on the TV if I'm watching some nature show or a western movie. I got him a female for company, but they fought all the time. She got away one day and I never saw her again. I think he was glad to see her go!
One thing for sure about my bird (his name's Charlie), he absolutely hates car rides. When I moved from California to Seattle, I had him and the female in a small cage in the back seat of my truck. He squawked continuously so loud that I wore earplugs the whole way! No kidding, he squawked the whole way!
My folks used to belong to a camping club, and one couple in the club had a pair of cockatiels that would fly around loose in their motorhome. They would sit on the bill of the man's cap and look down at him as drove.
I have had various birds over the years. When I was a kid, I used to raise zebra finches and sell them to pet shops. One year we brought a pair in our camper with us on a trip to visit my grandparents in Colorado. We were going to give the birds and a cage to them, but they didn't want them, so we brought them home. We worried about how the finches would handle the high altitude of the Rockies, but they did just fine, and the female even laid an egg in her nest along the way. I remember stopping for dinner in the heat of Las Vegas and leaving their little traveling cage next to an open window of the camper. As we returned from dinner, we could hear their soft little beeping sounds and people were looking at them.
Anyway, I've always been a bird fan. Anybody else have birds?
Andy
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