As a child, I learned to fear birds in captivity. Unfortunately, I haven’t learned to distinguish between pet birds, who certainly meant me harm, and wild birds, who only likely do. My pet parrots—with their shrill cry and sharp bite—have forever tainted for me birds as a whole.
Like the other three members of my nuclear family, I am allergic to cats and dogs. We aren’t deathly allergic—allergic enough that we couldn’t justify buying a cat or dog personally, but not allergic enough to prevent us from playing with friends’ pets and yearning after them.
My mom solved this small problem by introducing a worse problem: she bought pet birds. The oldest, Fang, she got in the early 90s, so he was a little over ten years older than me. Since he outranked me in seniority, he was allowed to bite me, but if I were to bite him, all hell would break loose (I was sensitive enough to these tacit social rules to never try this). Similarly, Fang could shriek freely, but when I did that (in this case, I had less social compunction), a similar double standard applied.
My parents claim that my roughhousing antics with my little brother made the birds nervous, but this made no sense because the swords that we waved were obviously plastic and foam, not steel. We never even drew blood (at least intentionally).
The dynamic reminded me of those old movies and novels in which the hardworking and put-upon family members have to tiptoe around the mother of the family whose “frayed nerves” she medicates with some combination of liquor and valium and who demands the windows be cracked open, the light allowed to filter in just so, as to maintain the proper amount of pressure against her weary eyelids. My brother and I quailed at the incessant but inscrutable demands the birds shouted across the house, stepped lightly as to not disturb their equilibrium. We bent to (what we inferred was) their will, satisfying demands as stringent as not throwing balls inside (at least not at the birds directly). And so for many years, this pair of green cheek conures marshaled their combined 140 grams to keep a stranglehold on our otherwise peaceful home.
They did have their moments, though. It was nice to watch them eat food, especially seed balls bigger than their heads. They maneuvered these morsels with their surprisingly dexterous talons, cocking their heads when suspicious of whether the item was edible (although usually concluding it was) and shaking out their plumage in indignation when a crumb nestled between their feathers. To the ground they offered a generous helping of whatever they were eating, an offering which might have been happily absorbed by a jungle’s canopy but which was less well received by our granite countertop.
I was also fascinated by their preening ritual. They sheathed their feathers with waterproof wax from a gland at the base of their tail, raking their beaks across their bodies as translucent flaky bits clouded around them before smoothing over the rough surfaces they had previously rended—sitting silently, but as if purring. These moments of contentment were fleeting, of course. In response to some invisible sign, they would tuck in their fluffed-out frame and extend their necks, sleek and wavering with the anticipation of flight. Then you could just make out a green silhouette followed quickly by a slant of red tail which I might’ve found pretty if it didn’t make me let out a little bit of pee.
After years spent cowering under their crisscrossing shadows, I thought I made a breakthrough. For a moment which I hardly had time to savor, it seemed the birds, at long last, actually liked me. I was probably about 8 and was sitting at the dining room table near the bird cages, which was my first mistake. Suddenly, a bird was in the air—Fang, the old and scruffy one (aptly named, as it turned out). I heard and felt him before I really saw him.
First, the fluttering of Fang’s wings; then pinpricks of pressure from his toes. Finally, for a few blissful seconds, the softness and warmth of his shuffling feathers. Suddenly, I was bleeding and then crying. He had bit me hard on the cheek and flown off and it hurt like hell.
This incident by no means quashed Fang’s appetite, but it made me wary. It also killed the naive hope that we might get along—it was war, and as my face and neck scarred over with the marks of battle, my once-tender heart hardened in the face of these domesticated wyverns.
In light of my cordial relations with the birds, my mom tasked me with changing their water every morning. This was the most nerve-wracking part of my day because it required me to reach into the birds’ cage to unscrew their water bowl, which doubled as their bath, in order to rinse out the morass of food crumbs, excrement, and ambiguous gray matter that they happily replenished on a daily basis.
When I was lucky, my parents drew the birds into another room, permitting me to dart in and out of the birds’ territory to change their water, anxiously checking my shoulder to make sure neither of them had materialized.
When I was unlucky, one of the two would fly back to the cage while I was unscrewing the water dish, at which point it would fix upon me its beady gaze. They have these dark eyes that are actually quite tiny, but that are ringed with loose white skin to make them seem bigger and to accentuate their scorn as I deprived them of the scum they had worked so hard to accumulate. This stand-off was broken by either the bird flying off (allowing my tensely-collected body to deflate with relief) or approaching me (at which point I would panic and wrench my hand out of the danger zone, dousing myself with water-dish-drek, but at least keeping most of my fingers intact). On the bright side, this daily ritual inured me to conflicts with children at school who might tease but tended, at least by second grade, not to bite.
Eventually, I graduated from changing their water (which I pawned off on my little brother) to cleaning their cage and sweeping underneath it, as well as excavating canyons of flaky bird-crap sediment. This was more work and even more disgusting, but with less risk to life and limb.
Also, as I got older, I wisened up. I placated the birds and tempered their irritation. Rather than bristle at the ailing mother’s exacting demands, I learned to bring coffee with whiskey and honey just how she liked it—but still bore the same blackness in my heart.
And in exactly the way your relationship with an ornery parent might soften as time passes and the parent grows ill, and fear gives way to grudging obligation, so did my relationship with the birds—not because they were growing older, but because I was. I began to regard their cries as those of a child rather than those of an enemy—as a sign of discomfort that demanded I address it.
And so the physical toll became a mental one. Their piercing calls, which in the past, I might have ignored or even savored, now meant I had to give them attention or drag them to another room because they didn’t want to fly. I could go only minutes without having my attention divided and refocused. Worse than the sharpness of their shrieks was the time between them, which hung in the air like the space between prison bars. These brief reprieves hummed with anxiety and anticipation for the next shriek, tension building as the silence lengthened suspiciously. The effect reminds me of the short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which smart members of an equality-obsessed society are fitted with handicapping devices that periodically emit noise to scatter their thoughts—except this device was configured for Einstein and instead given to me.
Fast forward to my early twenties and physical distance has not stopped the parrots from pulling my strings. They trained me too well. I moved from my hometown in Arizona to Philadelphia, only slightly out of earshot of the birds’ shrieks. Now, however, I often wake with a start at the chirping of the songbirds who nest outside my window. I’m sure these are honest, law-abiding birds who haven’t made mincemeat of toddlers, but I’m conditioned to experience the same cascade of emotions as before, albeit dulled: anxiety, obligation, and finally acceptance that I cannot will away their chirps, so I scamper upstairs to grab my noise-canceling headphones. I speculate that the songbirds aren’t as innocent as they seem, and might be in cahoots with my pet parrots at home. Unrelatedly, I fear my parrots have poisoned me against birdkind.
And yet, I love my pet birds a lot. I think I resented them mainly because they didn’t like me—when they started liking me, I resented them less. In a way that no other pets are, they are bright and full of personality and zest, which are unfortunately the qualities that also make them impossible to handle. When Fang died (at the ripe old age of 29), death revealed exactly how important he was to me and my sense of home. It helped that as he got older, he was a less athletic adversary and a more willing companion. After his death, dinnertime especially felt hollow, lacking his characteristic plate-marauding, shoulder-surfing, and beer-tasting, as well as the victory dance that followed these exploits.
Shortly after that, we got another parrot, Mango, to keep Kiki, Fang’s partner, company (which didn’t quite work out, although that merits another post). I miss both of them when I’m away from home, but can only handle so much of them when I’m back—in this way, they’re more like relatives than pets (which I think was exactly the problem).
Strangely, birds have become a talisman for me. They just crop up in unexpected places; subconsciously, I gravitate to them. My profile picture is a kookaburra, the animal I studied in my second grade Australia unit; I was excited to learn that kookaburras brain their prey on branches (and I think they would make gentler pets than parrots). At the time of writing, the picture for my blog is an illustration of a raven from a poem (guess which) in an Edgar Allan Poe anthology. When an ex-girlfriend first took me thrifting (before I learned to pattern-match her tastes), desperate to make her think I was cool, I gravitated toward what I knew best and picked a shirt with a parrot on it (which I’m wearing now). If I were reincarnated, I’d like to be a bird. I’ve come to realize that I’m often suspicious of things I identify with, and this might be what’s going on here.
I don’t want to think too hard about what makes me like a bird (specifically our birds), although I suspect it has something to do with their neurotic, almost electric dissatisfaction. I understand, also, their fear of displacement and their yearning to be socially included (they often shrieked as the party went on after their bedtime, expressing a feeling I viscerally relate to). It’s possible that seeing these emotions I understood play on these animals, lacking human inhibitions, was hard for me to watch, and I was so critical because these failing were my own. I certainly wouldn’t want to accept that I ever looked like that, nervous and tense and quivering. On the other hand, a lot of these things are probably just normal human tendencies, and I can just as easily attribute my affinity for birds to some combination of Stockholm syndrome and animated kids’ movies. Either way, it seems like I’m still always checking my shoulder for a pair of claws, unsure if I want them to appear or not.
This is all to say that as soon as I’m settled in adult life, I’ll be buying a cat and an industrial quantity of allergy pills.