Hello. Hello. Hellooooo. Is the first salutation that I hear each morning as I approach my canary castle to welcome the birds to a brand new day.
The building was built, rough-cut board and batten, with 16-inch on-centre two-by-six studs, stuffed adequately between with insulation and added plywood sheeting and vapour barrier in order to cut down on the proposed heating bills during the customary windy days of winter. It is so well built that any sounds are muted within unless one of the double-paned windows is left ajar on sunny days for added ventilation.
It sports five double-paned windows giving views front and back so there is little that goes on in any direction that Beta, a blue and gold macaw, does not verbally sanction. She sometimes mutters and grunts garbled bird language in assorted tone comments depending on what mood she happens to be in.
The more I work with birds and animals, the more I realize how little we know about them.
Perhaps the only dumb animal is the one we see in the mirror each morning. It has been proved to me many times over that they possess a sense of humour and have compassion, as well as timing of appropriate actions or salutations.
Let me give you a few recent examples.
When you approach the building, she calls out “Hello.” When you enter the building, she spreads her wings wide as though greeting you, and when a greeting hello is returned, she repeats the word hello, adding her name, Beta, as self-introduction. If there is a lady among those who enter, she repeats the hello in a masculine voice and higher-pitched feminine voice.
Her good-byes, when you contemplate leaving the building, are usually forthcoming first from her, likewise assorted, and often accompanied with a raised one-footed wave by flexing her toes in your general direction.
Because she was originally owned by a lady, she shows greater excitement the moment one enters. If a man enters that she has not before met, she shows strong resentment, tolerating little infringement on her space. Beta is not caged; she is on a freestanding multi-branched exercise area that dead-centres the bird room.
During the holiday season we had many visitors, as neighbours dropped by to wish season’s greetings. One was a close neighbour who had brought a friend with him specifically to show him my birds. But said friend, whom I didn’t know, had imbibed too frequently in bottled amber and was a little more forward than he should have been. Beta’s distaste for him surfaced immediately.
As he lurched forward with outstretched finger pointing directly into Beta’s face while boldly stating he had a way with birds, she opened her large, sharply-edged, curved bill, which is capable of breaking a finger, threatening to bite him. Even though cautioned several times not to do that, he kept poking at her. Beta got tired of his persistence; bowing her head and dilating her eyes, she lunged open-billed in his direction while spitting out a profound, no mistake, infamous four-letter word that started with F; the immediate post script was an equally emphatic “off!”
Though increasingly familiar with her multiple short sentence comments, it was the first time I had heard her utter such a harsh statement. Ordinarily, I would have scolded her profusely for the language abuse, but the timing was epic, so well deserved and obviously effective. Said stranger about turned, showing wide bleary-eyed embarrassing disbelief, leaving immediately.
Having ample reason, I joined her in laughter, as we oft’ times did, as she can chuckle a deep-throated “Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw,” over and over again, while dancing up and down, when anything seems to please her. Beta is becoming a fun bird to have around.
Take care, ‘cause we care.
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