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December 1, 2004
For the Birds
It’s December, my birth-month. It’s time for a new beginning. It’s time to get the writing bug back up my butt. It’s time to start making some money.
I’ve been having strange dreams that I usually can’t remember, mainly because of my bird, Dickie, who insists on making annoying blue-jay calls while I’m still sleeping. When I figure out how to easily record the noises and transfer them to my PC, I’ll let you all listen to some of the sounds of my house, but I don’t have a proper recorder, and my dictation machine has no proper computer connectivity. After the last row of jay-calls this morning I started going under again and dreamed up the name “Britetta Tome,” the whimsical host of a cable access TV show on bird psychology. Look for her in one of my stories soon.
When Michael and I met, he had a dog, BJ (who died after I bailed Michael out of jail—Banjo, my boy, is the dog today), and a cockatiel and I had a Persian cat, Joplin. The cockatiel flew off when he was cleaning the cage. At some point, we decided we needed a child of our own, so we went out and bought a Siamese, Coco. Then we wanted cockatiels, so we got a mating pair of birds, who don’t really have names, but they have produced three clutches, from each of which we still have one chick: two females, Uno and Rosie, and Dickie, the aforementioned living alarm clock, who’s just about 2 years old.
Cockatiels are hard birds to teach to speak. Dickie’s already developed a repertoire of tunes; most of which he’s made up himself--but I was proud that he quickly picked first few notes to the refrain of Verde’s Spring. Lately he’s been making unintelligible bird-mumblings, signaling a possible beginning to talking according to The Complete Book of Cockatiels, by Diane Grindol:
Most birds start off imitating tone and intonation before the actual words are formed. This sounds like gargling, or singsong garbled intonations. Some birds don’t mimic exact sounds per se. I have met a few people with talking pet budgies who never realized their bird’s fast, high-pitched chatter was actually words.
Dickie’s latest noise is a series of descending squeaks that sound remarkably like the “Ha ha ha ha ha” I was trying to teach him a few months ago. It’s amazing what he’s willing to pick up and what he isn’t. “Pretty Bird” has returned not as words but as a three-note tune. He sings it often enough that I know exactly where he got it.
Cockatiels live long lives relative to mammal pets, and I’ve found sources on the net that quotied from 10-17 years to 10-30 years, although there have been recorded cases of birds living into their 40s. This means Dickie could easily be with me into my sixties, so there’s plenty of time to learn how to say “Faaaa-bulous,” and other charming little ditties, like:
“You’re beautiful!”
“What a stud!”
“I love you, Daddy.”
Posted by Bastique at December 1, 2004 1:43 PM