Mutterings and Musings

Tom & Jerry parrots

Challenge: Write about one of your fondest memories.

I've had several pet over the years; I grew up on a farm, so there were always semi-feral cats for taming, alongside the piglets we had in the kitchen once, and the farm dog my sister and I used to play-ride around the garden as a horse (he was a collie-whippet cross; not very big, but lightening fast and as docile as could be with the two mad girls he lived with, and a ferocious guard dog to anyone else).
My sister went through a gerbil phase of many years, upgrading to degus as she became a teenager. I discovered birds; finches and canaries in the garden - my uncle gave me his old aviary when he built himself a bigger one - and then parrots.

Harry was my first parrot, if you could call him a parrot. Technically, yes, little Haribo was a parrot; a sierra parakeet. Parakeet simply means 'small parrot with a long tail.' In Harry's case, it meant very small parrot. He was about the size of a British robin and, as I believe Tinkerbell was once described, only big enough for one thought at a time.
By the time I was at uni, Harry had a younger sister, Akeira. Green-cheeked conures are also parakeets - small parrots with long tails - although conures are also renown for having extremely large personalities. About the size of my fist, Akeira was nearly three times the size of Harry, but they happily shared a cage in our uni-house sitting room. Like typical siblings, they pretended not to like each other, but if you snuck up on them, you'd often catch them playing or snuggling together.

Akeira had issues.
I've gotten three more conures since Akeira, and they are all mad.

Our uni-house was infested with mice at one point (we later worked out they'd made a nest in the sofa and actually lived inside it). Obviously the seed bowl in the parrot cage was free-dining for them, so they used to slip through the cage bars, gorge themselves on seeds and then scramble back out. If you switched the light on fast enough in the night (late-night film watching), you'd catch them in the act. Only, the bars weren't that big, and the mice would be so full of food, they'd get stuck and have to wriggle themselves free. Akeira, not being too bright (or maybe being very bright), used to watch the mice do this and came to the conclusion that if you press your nose up against the bars and wiggle your bum, you can get out of the cage. Ironically, it did actually work for her, because the humans learnt it meant she wanted to come out, so we'd open the cage door.....
The cage had two doors; a main one on the front and a vertically opening hatch on the side, right beside the sofa. Being lazy students (still lazy, no-longer student), we used to just unhook the side hatch and let her push it open herself.All well and good. Until conure-brain kicked in. Conure-brain is very much like raging-psycho-brain, but without people-skills.

Conures are evil. Well known fact in the bird world. Conures make cats look trustworthy.*

Akeira use to press her beak against the bars, wiggle her bum, and of course be let out. She'd climb to the top of the cage, right above the hatch, and just sit there. About twenty or so minutes later, Harry would decide he would like to come out as well (he never came out at the same time, because that would be admitting baby sis had had a good idea). So he would approach the hatch and tentatively try and push it open (it was a bit heavy for him, but he could just about do it), when, suddenly, it would open - like magic! And he'd hop out.

Just to have Akeira drop the hatch down on him.

Yup, she'd wait until he approached, then lean down, take the hatch in her beak and strain upwards (it looked very uncomfortable) until he was perched on the lip of the hatch, and then drop it down on his face. And she would do that at least once a week. She wouldn't even come across the sofa to me or my housemates (she was in love with one of them) for cuddles until she had dropped that damn hatch on Harry.**

*I miss having cats and feel an affinity with conures. Best Beloved doesn't always appreciate my tastes in humour or in animals+.....
**Best Beloved really doesn't get my sense of humour sometimes. He has little concept of schadenfreude.
+I also have a hedgehog. Hedgehogs eat insects, it's an essential part of their diet. This morning BB found a large cockroach in the living room. We live in the UK. We do not have wild roaches (well, not really). I was in a lot of trouble.