Tag: birds

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It’s All in the Accent

For most people, clicks and tweets are the heartbeat of social media.

For me, they’re a daily avian conversation.

“Hey, Chompy, how’s it going?”

“SHRIEK! SHRIEK!”

Don’t call the cops – the screaming’s not coming from the victim of an attack, nor from a hyped-up concert crowd. These are the excited calls of Chompy, our 16-to-17-year-old cockatiel (like his feathers, his age is a little fuzzy) who has become a Bird of Legend among our family. His mighty beak defies all but a chosen few who approach his cage. His piercing song could stretch to the farthest reaches of The Stadium We All Know Is Really Mile High – probably from our own living room.

And somehow, over the past few years, he’s decided I’m his best friend in the world.

This is usually an honor that gets bestowed on my wife Heather, who is one of life’s Bird Women. She has gathered feathered friends to her since childhood: finches, parakeets, everything short of a Long John Silver parrot (and I wouldn’t make bets against that someday). It’s a little like living with Snow White, but without the squirrels who do housekeeping.

Chompy loves her, of course. But I’m the one who gets him dancing. And maybe that’s because I’m the one who knows the tune.

I mimic. Often unconsciously. In my reporting days, I had to be careful during an interview or I’d start picking up the accent of the person I’d just been talking to. It’s a minor talent that’s been handy on stage, or while reading bedtime stories to Missy, or even just for little pranks. (Imitating a cricket during a quiet moment is a great way to make a room full of people do a double-take.)

During all the years that we had parakeets, I would do my own take on the clicks, pops and flowing whistles of their song.  It was a harmless way to join the chatter, and even after our last (for now) parakeet passed away in 2019, I kept doing it out of habit.

All I can say is, Chompy must have missed his ‘keet neighbors. Because Heather soon noticed that every time I whistled the song, our big ol’ cockatiel would hustle to the cage side nearest me and begin calling out, excitedly dancing and playing with his toys.

Mind you, I have no idea what I’m saying. It could be parakeet Shakespeare or the bird equivalent of “We’ve been trying to reach you about your extended warranty.” But regardless, it’s what Chompy’s listening for. It’s what he enjoys and responds to. And so, it’s what I give him.

It’s amazing how fast a friendship you can build when you try to speak someone’s language. Feathers or not.

I don’t just mean talking to people. We do that constantly, blasting our thoughts at every hour of the day through every medium at hand. Calls, texts, social media, even face-to-face (or mask-to-mask?) conversation … the barrage rarely stops.

But for all our expertise at shouting out – not unlike Chompy’s SHRIEK! – many of us are still learning to listen. And that means many of us aren’t really being heard. We’re talking to ourselves, but with a larger audience.

To really talk, we first need to hear.

That can be as simple as listening to the words they choose (do they say “I see” vs. “I hear you”) or as deep as listening for the story and emotions behind them. It’s the skill of the actor, not just reciting from memory but responding to the moment. Or the quality of the parent or teacher, hearing the things that aren’t being said and need to be known. Or the ability of the friend who wants to understand.

And it’s the gift that more of us need to possess.

When we take the time to understand, we can be understood. When we listen, we can be heard. It’s how we can be a “we” in the first place, able to shoulder a world’s challenges that need every one of us.

And that’s something worth shrieking about.

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Learning Normal

“Scott … he’s not letting Potatoes near the seeds again.”

I sighed. This had been a running theme of our first day or two in the Finch Family Revival. We’d finally managed to get a pair of birds, Potatoes and Molasses, named for a silly song on a favorite cartoon. On arrival, they were everything two finches should be: cute, energetic, curious.

But they were also not the matched pair we’d been seeking. Potatoes is a society finch. Molasses is a zebra finch. For those of you not steeped in the intricacies of Birdie Lore, that’s the Odd Couple: the quiet-living, polite individual suddenly asked to be roommates with Mr. Pushy.

Most of the time it didn’t seem to matter. They’d quarantined together for a week at the pet store and seemed appropriately friendly and affectionate when it came time to discover the strange new setting of Chez Rochat (or at least a comfy cage within it). But when Potatoes would land on the seed tray, Molasses would get uncomfortably close. “Ahem. Excuse me. You know that’s MY spot … right?”

And off Potatoes would go, putting off her meal until later that night.

We tried a separate dish. Results were … ambiguous at best. We weren’t taking them back – we’d never returned a pet in our marriage and we weren’t about to start now. Reluctantly, knowing how social finches were, we bought a second cage and began putting it together. And then we gave it one more day, partly from hope and partly from the knowledge that moving just ONE finch out of a cage is like trying to catch a single specific fly out of a swarm: a matter of grace, delicacy and no small amount of luck.

Something happened.

Potatoes grew a backbone.

Molasses hadn’t stopped coming over with his “Watcha doin’, why’re ya here, lemme see, lemme see.” But Potatoes stopped retreating. And faced with that, Molasses didn’t push it. Before long, the two were eating together at the seed tray like old buddies on lunch break.

They’d had to relearn what normal meant. And they pulled it off.

That gives me hope for the rest of us.

About 100 million of us are now at least partly vaccinated from COVID-19 (including the Rochat household). With that, the rules of “normal” are starting to get rewritten again: how to travel, who to visit, when the masks can come off and when they still need to stay on. We’re finding out once again how to live with each other, especially during this transition period when some are protected and some aren’t.

When the dust settles, it’s highly likely that some pieces of how we live and work won’t look anything like they did before. (And sadly, as we saw recently in Boulder, some pieces of it may be all too familiar.)  But one thing will be just as true as it was in 2019 – or, for that matter, as it was during that oh-so-chaotic 2020.

We still have to do this together.

That doesn’t mean rolling over for the demands of the callous and the cruel, any more than sharing a cage meant Potatoes had to starve herself. But it does mean remembering what we learned during the Great Pandemic, or should have: that we all depend on each other, that small acts of compassion can make big differences, that it’s worth giving a little to get a better world.

That when the world changes, we can change with it. And remain neighbors through it.

A finch can learn it. Maybe we can, too.

Meanwhile, anyone need an unused bird cage?  

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You’re a Scarce One, Mr. Finch

Psst! Want a line on the next hot commodity? Lean in close and I’ll tell you.

Zebra finches.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Well, not in that regard, anyway.

For some time, Heather and I had marked out Friday on our mental calendars as “Z-Day,” the day when we would finally restore a zebra finch or two to the house. It had been almost a year since our tiny D2 had flown this world, and we needed some energetic beeping in the house again. Apparently, so did our cockatiel Chompy, who had been getting excited ever since seeing the new cage go up.

There was only one catch.

“What do you mean, you don’t have any zebra finches?”

That was the theme of a long Friday afternoon and evening. Store after store after store in a 75-mile radius gave the same answer: Sorry, nothing now, try back in a couple of weeks. (Well, except for the one that said “Sorry, we just sold our last two this morning.” Sigh.)

If you want to blame COVID-19 … well, you might be right. This is a world where many things are slowed down by precautions and quarantines, and I suppose it’s not surprising that live birds aren’t an exception.

Still, while it may be reasonable, it’s still hard.

That’s sort of the theme for this stage of pandemic life in general, isn’t it?

You know what I mean. We can all feel “normal” getting closer. Most of us by now know someone who’s gotten the vaccine, or even several someones. There’s been hints of hope in the air, signs that maybe the drawbridge can start to open this year, that by fall or winter we’ll have regained more pieces of the life we used to know.

But “close” isn’t the same as “here.”

And reminders of the gap between the two still abound.

Thinking about it, grade school was great training for this. You spent a lot of time doing things that were necessary, whether you really wanted to or not. And the closer you got to summer vacation, the more interminable those last few structured days and hours felt. To an anxious third-grader, the last week before summer is a lot like the last 20 miles of a long car ride: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

Then and now, the answer’s obvious. It’s not the answer we want, but it’s obvious all the same.

And we really don’t want to be kept into summer school this time.

And so we go on. Teased every so often by the promise of what’s ahead, only to run up against one more reminder of where we still are.

Frustrating.

But time will pass. Things will change. Finches will come, along with many other things.

We’ll get there.

Oh, it won’t be the same world. It never truly is from day to day, even without a sudden pandemic muddling things up. Just as with any other crisis in our history, there’ll be lessons we learn, behaviors we change, newfound strengths or scars that we carry with us. “Normal” is a moving target, one that we redefine with each generation.

But more normal than now? Less isolated, less wary, more “a part of” than “apart from?”

Yes, I believe that. Absolutely. We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do, but we’ll get there. And when we do, we’ll have a new appreciation for the precious things in life. Like togetherness. Hugs. Mobility.

And, of course, zebra finches.

You don’t get much more valuable than that.

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A Last Flight

Sharpie’s initial startled burst of activity had worn off. Now our yellow-and-green parakeet sat gently in Heather’s grasp, occasionally flexing her wings or tightening her talons against my wife’s shirt.

“Shhh,” Heather breathed as she ran her finger gently over the feathers of Sharpie’s head, over and over again.

Sharpie’s eyes slowly eased shut. They opened, closed, opened again, confusion and fear giving way to trust.

“Shhh.”

The eyes closed one more time.

Heather waited, then looked up at me, holding her while she held the bird.

“I think she’s gone,” Heather whispered. “I can’t feel her heartbeat anymore.”

After 11 years of company, Sharpie had flown.

Losing any animal that you love and care for is never easy. With  Sharpie, it was like the end of an era. Of our many Colorado birds, she was the only one that we picked out ourselves, the only one that was not a gift from a friend. Just two months after we returned to the state in 2007, we had gone in search of a parakeet; Heather, one of life’s “bird ladies,” had pointed at a small one that had caught her eye out of the small flock in the store.

As the attendant reached in, another bird jumped in the way and was picked up instead. She was the same color – and kinda gutsy – so Heather took the volunteer. We named her Sharpie, since her yellow was the color of a highlighter, and took her home.

Starting with a hand, ending with a hand.

Sharpie was there as I changed jobs, as we changed homes, as we saw others come and go. The dean of the flock, not as loud as some, but adding her voice to the mix when others piped up (including the occasional playful whistling human).She was a theme, a constant.

Nothing in life stays constant, though.

We knew she was getting old. She had been looking ruffled as birds do, though the last few days had been something of a rally. And then, on Thursday morning, I came down to feed the birds and saw her struggling on the bottom of the cage, unable to fly, trying to climb to her perch.

I got Heather out of bed. She got Sharpie out of her cage. And together, as Sharpie quietly left the world,  we said goodbye.

Goodbye. It’s a powerful word. We don’t always get the moment. But sometimes it feels like the word echoes from every corner.

It was at this time last year that our 21-year-old cousin Melanie died in bed while staying with us. A lover of animals who wanted to be a vet tech, I think she would have appreciated sharing her time with a veteran pet.

It’s the same week that held the anniversary of Mel’s dad. The passing of Heather’s great aunt. The same month that held so many more.

We all get a lot of lessons in saying goodbye. And perhaps the biggest is that “goodbye” is not the same as “letting go” or “moving on.”

You can’t. Not really. If someone has meant enough to you, they’ve replaced pieces of your heart with their own, woven themselves into your life with a brilliant thread. When they’re pulled away, it leaves a gap. And while the sharp edges eventually become duller and the angles become a little more rounded, the hole never truly heals.

In a painful way, that’s a treasure. A sign of how much they were valued.

We do have to say goodbye. For ourselves as much as for the one leaving, maybe more. We have to be able to shape life around the new reality, acknowledge it, take the steps into whatever comes next.

But it doesn’t mean that their presence won’t still be felt. That memories won’t invade at curious times, like a visitor at the door. That something real isn’t still there.

Whether a small bird or a full-grown human, they touched you. Shaped you. Left their fingerprints in your life, mind, and memory.

What is remembered, lives.

Today, as I think about it, that’s especially fitting.

After all, every Sharpie must leave a mark.

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Goodbye, Dude

The Dude abides no more.

Picture a small bird. No, smaller than that. A zebra finch, about the size of your thumb, lively with song, gray with age and deaf as a post.

That was The Dude. Yes, was.

I found him in the cage Wednesday night. Just five hours earlier, he’d been his usual self, hopping and flittering and singing that unique burble that only a finch possesses, somewhere between a running faucet and a squeaky toy.

He wasn’t gone yet. Not quite. But he was clearly on the threshold, his small body curled in the corner, barely moving, barely breathing.

Heather couldn’t stand for him to be alone in the dark. We brought his cage to our bedroom and sat up with him. We promised if he was still lingering in the morning, we’d go to the vet and do the gentle thing.

It wasn’t necessary. In the wee hours, he turned once on the bottom of his case, just enough to notice. And then he made the final flight, the one without wings.

Nine years had come to a quiet end.

If you’ve not kept birds, you may not realize how uncommon that is. Most zebra finches last between five and seven years as pets. There have been older ones, sure, but even if The Dude wasn’t quite George Burns, he was sure as heck Christopher Plummer.

Maybe a bit of Harrison Ford, too. After all, he did get a ride in the mouth of Big Dog Blake and lived to tell the tale.

Amazing, in a lot of ways.

But then, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. If there are two things that our families do well, it’s birds and long-lived pets.

The birds come from Heather’s side. She and her sister Jaimee are the Bird Ladies, embracing anything in feathers. Before The Dude’s passing, our informal aviary comprised three parakeets, two zebra finches, one society finch and a cockatiel whose shrieks could wake Rip Van Winkle. No partridges in pear trees, but I’m sure it’s a matter of time.

The pets that won’t quit, meanwhile, are a hardy Rochat family tradition. Growing up, I had a dog that made it to 13, a cat that made it to 17 — heck, I had a goldfish that lasted around 13 years. It didn’t happen with every pet, every time, but it was strong enough to make a trend.

Put ’em together, and you get a heck of a flock.

And also one where it’s really hard to say goodbye.

It’s human to assume that what has been always will be. That only gets stronger when a gentle soul does indeed keep going day after day and year after year. Maybe they’re a little slower or a touch more careful over time, but they’re still there. Still wonderful. Still loving.

And then, one day, that love leaves.

And so does a little of you.

I wouldn’t trade the time for anything. No way. But deep roots pull harder when they’re finally torn free. Even the smallest of bodies — a finch, a gerbil, a horned toad — can leave a hole the size of the Grand Canyon.

The hole will be filled, with memories and tears. But it never will be what it was before. Neither will you.

And on balance, I think that’s a good thing.

I am a better person than I would have been without Mitzi the dog, Twinkle the cat, and a host of others, right down to the tiniest Dude. And I know I’m not alone in that feeling. There’s a care that only animals can teach, as they magnify the best and worst you choose to show them.

And if it hurts to leave, you probably did it right. It’s a hard comfort. But it’s also an assurance that you touched a heart to a heart and brought both back full.

That’s a treasure beyond words. And as I think on that, I realize that I got the first sentence of this piece wrong.

Down where it counts, The Dude abides.

And he always will.