I consider myself a fairly serious “bird victim,” although I don’t keep a life list the way hardcore birders do. Also unlike them, my interest in birds doesn’t include every single species. As much as it pains me to admit it, I probably wouldn’t get out of bed to see a Red Footed Falcon even if it WAS the only one ever spotted on American soil. Raptors (falcons, hawks, eagles, Republicans) tend to bore me. So what if they reach supersonic speeds when they swoop down on their prey? They got no brains, just big, nasty beaks and Manchurian Candidate eyes. Personally, I prefer birds with more personality: parrots, birds of paradise, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, touracos, toucans, cardinals, Canada geese, roadrunners...I’ll even take a decent Christian buzzard over a raptor any day of the week. Since I’m not a professional birdwatcher like David Sibley, I don’t have to pretend to be interested in the drab and dreary assassins of the avian world, rare or not.
When I lived in L.A. I became a cockatiel breeder, sort of by accident. Cockatiels are those smallish, usually yellow-and-gray Australian parrots with punkish little crests of feathers on their heads and orange-colored cheek patches. For their size they have a great deal of spunk and character. I started out with one, then got another, and another, and pretty soon two of them became fruitful and multiplied. By that time I was fairly besotted. I liked cockatiels so much that the prospect of having dozens of them actually appealed to me. And sure enough, that was what I wound up with. I soon discovered that one pair of cockatiels can easily produce several clutches of eggs in a year. The average clutch was about six or seven eggs, roughly half of which usually produced surviving young. You do the math. In my case, Wuzz, the female, turned out to be a Gold Star Mother: she was a veritable assembly line. At one point we had nineteen juveniles of varying ages in our bedroom aviary, the newborns hissing like teakettles at feeding time, others just fledging, and the rest flapping wildly around the room on their new, still-pinfeathery wings.
I became entirely absorbed in the experience, feeding the newborns by hand, a little later providing the chicks with their first solid food, watching them shed their downy, nestling feathers and gain their juvenile plumage, and finally standing by in amazement as they took their first jerky, tentative flights around the room. Now that truly WAS “awesome,” as the ditz on Martha’s Vineyard put it. Some of my friends clearly thought I was a nutcase, but I wouldn’t have traded that experience for all the Red Footed Falcons in Massachusetts.
Fortunately, because the parent cockatiels were fancy hybrids, their offspring also turned out to be quite handsome, so we were able to find good homes for all of them, except one female, Cutie, whom we kept because she was the first of all of the chicks to hatch (the day after Christmas, as it turned out). My former husband still has her in L.A., along with her father Bubba (the Gold Star Father) and a younger male, Mr. Shmegiggus, an escapee from someplace who flew in through an open window one day and insisted on being fed. He must have liked the grub, because he’s still around. Mama Wuzz passed on a couple of years ago, full of years and honor.
Living with birds has enriched my life more than any other experience I’ve had (I suppose writing and performing music has come pretty close at times). I don’t blame those hardcore birders a bit for trekking out onto a dusty airstrip in the hopes of catching a fleeting glimpse of the Red Footed (although not being a raptor fan, I find their enthusiasm absurdly comical). I suppose all of us bird victims seem pretty strange to the uninitiated. Not that we give a particular damn. We take our cues from the strange, feathery kingdom of Aves, and our thoughts are up in the air, not down on the ground.
