The Toast does not support the idea of having horrible, dirty birds living inside your home as pets, but we do not blame Katie for that and found her narrative enlightening.
In the spring of 2009 I got a text message that contained a picture of a bright green bird and the question “Interested???” beneath it.
Although aware of the weirdo stigma attached to parrots and their owners I’ve always been compelled by them and their alien intelligence. I had long since sworn to myself I would never own one for all the right reasons: I worked too much and wouldn’t have the time, the pet trade is an unethical horror-show, it’s cruel to own such an intelligent and long-lived creature, etc. None of this ever stopped me from lingering around their cages at the zoo or going to bird shows to gawk, but I was comfortable with my parrot-free existence until fate dropped one in my lap.
Sometime in the mid ’00s, Lee County Animal Services got involved with an elderly lady who lived in a run-down house on a valuable piece of property in the woods near the banks of the Caloosahatchee River here in the southwestern wedge of Florida. I only know what the officers noted upon arrival: the filthy house, sickly cats, free-running chickens and an expensive green bird in a big cage. The woman was not, shall we say, cooperative with the intrusion and for the next few years the agency– along with its municipal partner in crime, code enforcement–waged war on her, culminating in April of 2009 when conditions in the home had deteriorated to the point of justifying the seizure of the bird, along with her ailing Chihuahuas and multiple cats. Pictures taken as evidence are hard to believe, chickens and ducks roam free throughout the house, cats are in bird cages, a moldering dead rat disintegrates into the blanket on the chair she spent her days in, the fridge is packed full of rotten food, the shower filled with boxes, the toilet unusable, piles of animal feces on the floor.
Coincidentally enough, during this same period of time I met and eventually married a man who had an adult daughter that worked at Lee County Animal Services. She’d been an officer at the time of the agency’s original involvement and was working the adoption kennel when the raid finally occurred. It was she that texted me, knowing that I not only had a fondness for birds but was also a giant sucker. And so it was that Bruce came to live with us.
Bruce is an Amazon, a medium sized stocky green bird. He has a splash of yellow feathers on his head and he has brilliant blue streaks in his wing feathers interspersed with some red. Beyond the obvious, however, nobody knows much more about him. There are multiple varieties of Amazon and equally as many guesses as to which one of those he belongs to. His age is unknown, the band on his foot is untraceable (although it does indicate that he was bred domestically and not caught in the wild.) Even his gender is a guess; absent a DNA test, there’s no way to confirm that he is a male, unless he lays an egg.
He spent the first few weeks sitting glumly in his cage, quietly grinding sesame seeds to dust with his beak. If, as Emily Dickinson wrote, hope is the thing with feathers, Bruce did not get the memo. The loyalty and gratitude one encounters in a rescued dog or cat was nowhere to be found. He watched us cautiously and intently for weeks while I dutifully moved him into as big a cage as the screened in porch would accommodate and upgraded his feed to a mixture of pellets and good seed mix. Like all good adoptive mommies I scoured online for information, and much like human mommies I encountered some very shrill advice. One blog I encountered suggested that the only cruelty-free way to live with a bird was to dedicate the entire house so that he may fly free throughout it. Working was frowned upon, a diet of organic fruits and veggies a must.
Not being in a position to quit my job and not sure that allowing him to fly free in a house containing two dogs and multiple ceiling fans was such a good idea, I did try and provide him fruit which sat rotting in his cage until I threw it away. He began to warm up to me, allowing me to scratch his head and putting his foot through the bars of the cage like he wanted to hold hands. One night he moved over to the side of the cage and said, very clearly, “I love you.” I was beside myself.
The more settled in he got, the more he talked. Thanks to the unusual environment he’d spent the last few years in, he had picked up some very distinctive phrases. He repeatedly admonished a Carmen, in a thick elderly twang, to get her ass off the damn couch. He called for a Gracie repeatedly, inflection on the last syllable. He hollered at Carmen the most, asking “where you at?” and “I know you’re out there.” He counted, “1, 2, 3, ow!!” In rainstorms he would bathe himself in his water dish while singing “Rock a Bye Baby,” or his version of it anyway. “Rock, rock….babayyyyyyyyyy….” long pause while he splashed. “When the wind blowwwwwwssss…..” more splashing. “Rock. Rock.” Sometimes he would just yell “God DAMN, God DAMN” over and over again. He frequently threatened to tear Carmen’s ass in two.
We grew rather fond of the creature my husband came to lovingly refer to as “the crazy green bastard.” And he warmed up to me enough to allow me to hold him for long periods of time, give him tummy rubs and let him walk around while we had cocktails or watched TV. He was not openly hostile to my husband or anyone else but I was clearly his person of choice.
For roughly two years, Bruce and I lived a parrot honeymoon. He’d call “Where you at?” when he heard my car pull up. He’d greet me in the mornings with “Hi Bruce, I love you.” Or sometimes, the mortifying “Do you know mommy loves you?” in my exact voice. The calls for Carmen diminished; the drunken sailor version of “Rock a Bye Baby” became scarce, replaced instead with the various whistles my husband taught him. We took him to Georgia to visit my parents and we took him camping in our RV. Our friends and family delighted at the charismatic feathered fellow who lived in the cage on our porch.
In retrospect, of course, I should have known what was coming. All of the literature I encountered had sections on what happens to Amazons when they hit sexual maturity, named things like “the screaming hormonal monster” or “dealing with the nightmare that is a sexually mature Amazon” or “Surviving your bird’s transformation from Jekyll to Hyde.” As an English major you’d think I’d see foreshadowing when it’s right in front of me but, love-drunk with my silly bird and clinging to my hopeful belief that since nobody knew how old he was he was probably old enough to have already gone through bird puberty, I simply laughed these off.
In the fall of 2011 things were tense. My two dogs had died unexpectedly within six months of each other, and I was taking it badly. I was about to give notice at a job that I was deeply unhappy at, but needed to stay in through the end of the year. At said job I’d been recently re-assigned to a thankless position dealing with high volumes of difficult clients, and was working longer hours than usual. When I was home, I tended to sink into bitchy blue funks. Through my distraction, though, I’d noticed that Bruce’s demeanor was changing. Since the early days we’d kept Bruce’s cage open and his wings clipped so he could roam around his cage and stand-alone perch freely during the day. We have a large screened-in porch which functions as our second living room, and so he had the feel of being outside while still safe from predators and a part of the human flock. Around this tense time, the arrangement had to be revisited, as Bruce took to lunging viciously at my already-suffering husband, wings pinned back, pupils in slits, feathers raised. This was not a playful swipe, this was meant to hurt and he came awfully close to connecting beak to flesh quite a few times before latching onto the poor man’s arm while his back was turned as he innocently watered a houseplant striking distance from the cage. It didn’t draw blood but it left a deep and nasty bruise, and Bruce’s days of free-roaming the outside of his cage came to an end.
He changed towards me, too. His pupils would dilate when he saw me, and he would coo and cluck in an alarmingly creepy manner. He’d back away from me with his wings extended as though to invite me to dance with him. When he would allow me to hold him, he alternated between the trance-like cooing and hissing and panting with an occasional nip thrown in for good measure.
“He’s trying to mate with you,” my vet explained to me. As he said this, three vet techs–all visibly terrified–were attempting to contain Bruce in his towel cocoon while the vet trimmed his nails and wing feathers. The noises were unearthly, demonic-sounding, as Bruce protested and snapped. The vet looked at me kindly and with something close to pity as he said, in a quiet voice one would use to speak to a very small child, “Amazons get hot when they grow up.” When I suggested this was a seasonal issue, or some sort of mood disorder he shook his head, Bruce still screaming in the towel in his hands. “This is how he’s going to be.” I asked if it was something he might grow out of and a vague shrug was all I got. “Maybe.”
Upon my return from the vet it took me a full forty-five minutes to get him from the travel cage to his full size cage and I only succeeded after resorting to heavy gardening gloves. Bruce hasn’t had his wings clipped since.
And so, nowadays we share our home with a mean-spirited eccentric with the brains and temperament of a human toddler that can bite hard enough to shatter a human finger bone. His hatred of my husband has transformed into pure misandry. He lunges at the side of the cage like a cobra with a triumphant “Ha ha!” when a Y chromosome, regardless of age, gets too near his fortress. He will grudgingly allow me to pet his head through the bars sometimes, but, more often than not, will ignore me or snap irritably at my fingers. One morning not long ago I heard the distinct sound of laughter, a Disney villain-esque chuckle; a “Ha! Ha! Ha!” with a pause for a whistle, followed by “Yeah! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Bruce had pushed open a latch I hadn’t closed tightly and was sitting on top of his otherwise locked cage. Upon seeing me he ruffled his feathers, pinned his eyes, said “Hi Bruce! Yeah!” and let loose a string of high pitched giggly Ha!s. Clearly, he was proud of himself.
Inconveniences like these only happen on work days, which this was, and when I’m running late, which I was. Leaving him out of the cage was not an option but how was I to get him back in? Foolishly I stuck my finger out like in the old days and asked him to step up while I opened the cage door with the other hand. At this he looked me right in the eye, shrieked “Ow!” and sunk his beak into my finger with gusto. It dropped me to my knees and in the ensuing torrent of tears and cussing he took off flying from the top of the cage only to fly head first into the screen door. I sucked on my finger trying in vain to come up with a plan as Bruce bounced up from his collision, cocked his head at the screen and then turned around and sauntered back towards me and the cage. Parrots walk like ducks, therefore it’s not a particularly graceful gait but even allowing for that it was a damn fine impression of the sort of walk of shame one does after falling in front of a group of people. He silently waddled past me, hopped into his open cage, climbed to his favorite perch, and turned his back to me while fluffing his feathers. It appeared life outside the cage was not all it’s cracked up to be. No escape attempts have occurred since.
The What to Do About Bruce conversation is a frequent one at my house. My husband insists Bruce would be happier if we gave him to Busch Gardens or a parrot rescue but I am not keen on the idea of abandoning him like that. Bruce has always been a caged bird, he’s never experienced other birds and I don’t believe in dumping an animal just because he’s inconvenient, or as in Bruce’s case, a vicious, feathered eccentric. And while we can’t handle him like we used to, it doesn’t seem to bother Bruce. At night we watch TV and he’ll busily destroy a new toy or whistle along with a theme song or holler a wordless exclamation at a football game. His taste in nuts has changed over the years from almonds to peanuts. He used to prefer the grape-shaped fruit pellets, but now seems to favor the orange. When I give him a new toy or re-fill his peanut dispenser he’ll sound downright joyous when he says “Ha ha ha yeah!” I don’t think Bruce is miserable, I think he’s fine. It’s the human family that has to adapt to the bird and not the other way around. We’ll never know how old he is and Amazons live to be 25 to 30 years old. Who knows what version of Bruce we’ll have by then or when that will be? I can foresee a time when having a feathered misandrist roommate with a taste for legumes and tree nuts might be the only company I care to keep. So I shut the husband down when he brings up relocation. I buy raw peanuts in bulk and sweep feathers out of every corner in my house. The essence of Bruce, the force of nature that is his personality, so distinct, so individual is a privilege to be a witness to. I adore him for all of his quirks and am happy to be his caretaker.
But I think I might invest in a good pair of falconry gloves, just in case he ever gets out of that cage again. And male houseguests are forewarned: I cannot guarantee your safety.
