Bird Talk

It’ll be a month tomorrow since Kazoo, the Double Yellow-Headed Amazon Parrot, came to live with me.

I love how he makes me work for our relationship. A dog will just love you instantly and unconditionally. A cat will give you plenty of opportunities to make yourself useful. But a parrot is still a wild animal. It doesn’t have generations and generations of domestic evolution shaping its behaviour. You have to give a parrot patience and time. You have to respect its body language and its personal space. You can nudge the boundaries, but you must do it very, very slowly and respectfully. You have to earn your friendship.

Every few days, Kazoo and I have another little breakthrough. Each one makes me so happy. Here are a couple of examples:

Kazoo permitted me to pick him up right from the beginning, but he only recently started letting me touch him. (When I pick him up, his feet touch my hand, but that’s it.) About a week ago he started letting me stroke his head, but only through the bars of the cage and only for a few seconds and only with my right hand and only at bedtime. I was so touched by that initial expression of affection and trust.

A couple of days ago, he started letting me sometimes touch his head when he’s out of his cage. He’ll sit on top of his cage and I’ll stand on a chair and stroke his head while he chortles softly to himself. The night before last, he even let me cuddle him in my arms while stroking his head. I felt like Dr. Doolittle.

Kazoo has a very different relationship with GC. He thinks GC is a lot of fun. Whenever GC comes over, Kazoo makes a great big noisy fuss and says all his words at the top of his lungs. And GC makes a great big noisy fuss too, and the two of them get all excited for a few minutes. But he doesn’t let GC touch him much.

Kazoo eats dinner with us every night, because it’s important for flock animals to eat with their flock mates. He has a parrot stand at the table, and we put food in his dish. We’ve even started bringing Duncan’s dish to the dining room at suppertime, so he can eat with us too. (Duncan has always attended suppertime, but never with his bowl until now.)

Kazoo is 13 years old and all he’s ever eaten is parrot pellets and peanuts. Every day I serve him a bowl of chopped fruits and vegetables (and a couple of peanuts) for breakfast, along with his bowl of pellets. Every day he eats the peanuts and pellets and ignores the rest. But one day he ate a snow pea! I can’t even tell you how thrilled I was. And now he’s eating wedges of Granny Smith apples too. He’s a surprisingly delicate eater, by the way. It takes him about 15 minutes to eat a wedge of apple. He holds it with his foot and takes tiny bites with his beak. It’s very sweet.

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In other bird news, Billie and Lester, the original grown-up lovebirds from the Humane Society, have laid five more eggs. They’re due to start hatching on December 18th. And Oboe, the littlest lovebird, has a new cage. He’s still in the same room with the other lovebirds, but he has his own cage. They all get out a couple time a day to socialize and play together. It’s working out well. Also, GC built Oboe a training perch, and now that I’ve got my voice back, I’m going to start regular trick-training sessions with him.

I went to someone’s house a couple of days ago to buy some second-hand bird toys and accessories, and they have an African Grey, an Umbrella Cockatoo, some Quaker parrots, a Conure and some barking dogs. It was a very lively household!