While I was walking to work yesterday, a budgie landed about a metre away from me. Pretty, a nice green and yellow with a dark blue tail.
I stopped and it started feeding in the grass.
That’s unusual. They’re not native, there are no wild introduced populations in the area. In a neighbourhood lush with cats, tame birds don’t tend to last long enough to breed.
It’s a bit thick of any bird to land so close to people.
Just for the hell of it, I went to pick it up. It flew away of course, but only another metre. So I tried again, and again, and … I caught it.
Whee! So, now I have a budgie with its beak in a death grip on my thumb. I carry on and get to work, shuffling about one handed while I unlock, clear the alarm, turn on the computers, make coffee (priorities!) and ponder the old saying about a bird in the hand.
I put it in a box and give it a soy and linseed cracker (the nearest we have to birdseed - why were we not more prepared?)
It settles into the box, quite happily munching on the cracker and making no attempt to leave. I decide it’s a bit like the baby pigeons that periodically tumble out of the palm trees outside my house. All they need is a bit of food and quiet before they’re instantly tame. I pass them along to the local pigeon racing club and they hand them to new members as ‘classics’.
Tame. Hah.
Just before my workmates arrive, I tape the box mostly closed so the noise and bustle won’t upset the bird too much. This was a mistake. It awakens the bird’s latent Houdini complex and I spend the morning chasing it around the office and showroom as it repeatedly finds ways to wriggle and wrangle out. The last time, I catch the little bugger mid-air as he attempts a barrel-roll off the filing cabinet.
I tape that box good and leave a teeny tiny little air hole, which is permanently occupied by a teeny tiny little eye watching my every move.
I go round to my parents place at lunch time so they can keep the budgie safe while I get sorted. They have a bird cage! It’s tiny and got silk pansies in it, but it is most definitely a birdcage. We put the bird in (yes, we took the pansies out first) and give him a bit of apple, which he tries to mate with.
Mum and I keep quoting the Parrot sketch from Monty Python.
Realising that he *is *part of the parrot family and will eat his way out of the bamboo cage as soon as he’s satisfied the apple, I go online and source a used wire cage locally. Collecting that and my kid, we go back to Mum and Dad’s to find Dad has added a perch to the tiny bamboo cage. The budgie is sitting on it, which means he’s butting his head against the roof of the cage, but at least he’s stopped standing on his own tail.
In the bigger cage, he stands by the empty feeder and glares at me. We carefully take him home where I have birdseed for the outdoor birds that also rely on my generosity (suckerness). The budgie gets head down into the feeder and tries to inhale the seed. My daughter watches, fascinated, as he eats more than his own bodyweight in under three minutes.
She insists that we go to the store and get proper budgie seed and a cuttlefish and millet sprays. I explain that we’re checking the papers and lost pet websites and that the budgie will most likely be going home to its owners in the morning. But I am at the checkout while I’m explaining this. In a day I have spent $50 on a bird that could die of shock or be reclaimed.
Today at the Vet/Petshop, the lady at the counter says that most owners don’t bother trying to get budgies back- she hasn’t bothered with hers (blue). The mirror and bell and grit were quite cheap too. The kid came home from school reporting that three kids in her class have lost budgies (grey, yellow and white/blue)
Nothing in the papers, nothing on the net, nothing through the local pound.
I’ve called him Brian.
He was fairly old, and it was a cold night (we’d had him since I was a kid… I called him Skipper… yes after Barbie’s younger sister).