The first indication of Poppy's thawing was the call outs. She didn't want anything to do with us, until we made to leave the room, and then she would call out. A specific tweet, projected, definitely a question.
Here, where there are no dogs and she has run of the flat, she has no second thoughts about following us out of a room. She'll call out, and if an answer isn't coming off she goes.
She still calls for J, but for me she started to make much softer, meeker, sleepy little pips, which begin as my face is turning away, before my feet have moved. Warm little fuzzy squeaks which cuddle my heart snug.
In the last couple of weeks she has come to discover that fingers, too, can be used as scratching posts, are in fact capable of doing all the scratching themselves, and allowing me to so scritch her funny little feathered head until she croaks from bliss. She'll contort her head impossibly to get the best angle, pause to nibble at me furiously before slamming her wee forehead down on my knuckle, ready for the next scratch.
She brings me such delight, such delight.
I do so miss the dogs. Dogs and birds provide the same, immensely uncomplicated love, but differently. I can wrestle with a dog. I can chase a dog around the table then touch their tails. I can curl up with a dog and feel the warmth of comfort. A love you can wrap your arms around.
Keeping a bird, a small bird, is not like keeping a dog. I only know about dogs. With an allergy to cat hair, we never really had cats, so while I recognise some of the behaviours of cats, it's dogs I understand.
Dogs have teeth and claws and the ability to rip you open if they feel it is necessary. Most of the time it isn't. Most of the time dogs love you like no one else will. They think you're The Best Thing that has EVER happened. The best.
Birds, budgies, aren't that. They eat seeds and grain. Their defence is flight. They are prey the way dogs, cats, and indeed we humans cannot fathom. It isn't an eat or be eaten choice for them. It's simple: be eaten.
So the rapport built with a bird is slow to grow and requires patience and repetition. What you're earning in that little featherbrain is trust. Consider their size, and yours. It's entirely possible they don't recognise your hands and your face as belonging to the same entity. And you come blustering into their world and clutch at them with your big hands and they are so very small and delicate. With hot little feet, claws that curl around your finger. Soft, so soft belly feathers on the back of your hand. A heart beating out a tarantella and a beady little bird eye wide and fixed upon you.
You could break this bird with a finger. The bird knows it.
Months of patience, and repetition, and work.
And yesterday, Poppy didn't just let me scratch her cheek, she encouraged it.
On the 13th of February, in the small hours of a Glasgow morning, Moony died.
I never blogged about her in depth. She featured in my tweets and FB status updates, as being a small bird she was the right size to be consumed in small chunks. She was full of entertaining idiosyncrasies, from her frustrating determination to eat nothing but seed (You're a bird! You're supposed to like fruit, dammit!) to her perpetual disapproval of everything we did. Aged only 5 months when we first got her, she was growing her personality for the six months we shared our spaces, and that personality appeared to consist primarily of a grumpy old man. She was cross at everything, all the time. She didn't want to be social or play, and any attempt to do so would be met by her opening her beak aggressively and gawping at us. Very rarely did she actually bite.
When J was at work we'd spend our time quietly. I'd pop her on my laptop screen, and she would sit there preening herself and dozing while I whittled away the time. Watching her preen was my favourite distraction, in fact it still is. For those of you who haven't spent much time around birds, they are the ultimate contortionists. Her white brow was stained from rubbing it on the oil gland on her back. How many animals do you can rub the top of their head on their butt? Not many. She'd get really into nibbling her way through the down on her chest, she'd give her own chin a good dig and eat her feet with relish. The stiff but gentle rustling sound when she ran her pinions through her beak. And oh! When she'd start cleaning her butt, inevitably she find a poop that had dried to her feathers, to which her only response was to yank the offending feather out and toss the whole parcel away. Usually at me. If she wasn't on the monitor, she was on my head. She wasn't much of a shoulder bird. If ever she stood on fabric, her first instinct was to try and eat it. Most of our tops have holes in the shoulders. J had one t-shirt dedicated to her, and she made a fish net out of it. She didn't like shoulders though, too close to the face. We'd put her there and she'd simply climb our hair to our heads. There, she'd nibble away at our hair. Not quite preening, and not quite eating. Despite some good yanks and crunching noises, she never actually broke hair. She'd simply...be unsatisfied with its current arrangement, and so would take it upon herself to rearrange it to her liking. I would end up with literal bird's nest hair.
We'd take her in the shower. She wasn't much interested in getting wet, so we'd just sit her on the shelf and she'd be content with the sound of running water, occasionally making little fart noises to express her satisfaction. When it came time to get her out, she'd kick up a massive ruckus, squawking and shouting as we reached for her even though she couldn't wait to get out.
She was a quiet bird, really didn't talk much of her own accord. Occasionally a fart noise if she was content, often a yell if we were harassing her, but otherwise she was quiet. Except for mambo. Moony loved mambo. We had a little morning routine, to help wake us all up, which was playing Moony's playlist. A few songs she really liked, and mambo was top of the list. She'd perk up instantly, begin stretching and hopping around on her perch. Then she'd begin chirping along, singing, actually singing. Not shouting or yelling or squawking, but happy little trills and whistles. It was nearly the only time she expressed actual pleasure.
She was such a strange little bird, the anti-budgie, if you will. By breed supposed to be highly social, playful, busy, but by nature she was a cross disapproving misanthrope. A bird after my own heart. She wasn't very good at flying. J clipped her wings just a little, to prevent her from getting altitude. She would fly a loop of the room and if she hadn't found somewhere she approved of landing on by the time her stamina ran out she would simply stop and drop, usually landing on the ground with a thud and a squeak. She fell behind the fridge once. And into a (thankfully not hot) pot of water. And into my tea. Then taptaptaptap walk around uncertainly until one of us would fetch her, usually giving us a wee nibble for daring to pick her up even though she expected and wanted it.
Her presence made our horrible little flat that much more of a home. J has a lifetime of experience with birds, but she was my first. I fussed over her and worried about her getting too cold. As an animal she is prey, not predator, so I had to work to gain her trust, and when given it was that much more rewarding. She kept me company when I was alone, kept me laughing.
Glasgow was hard on us. Lack of work, financial stress, a horrid cold damp home, these things were purely circumstantial, but still conspired to resurrect my depression.
This little bird kept that misery at bay. She was a small thing, a fierce, difficult and contrary thing.
Buckingham Palace is, well, yes. It is yet another stately building in a city full of stately buildings. Historians and architects alike may despair my plebeian ignorance and lack of appreciation, but apart from watching the guards stomp back and forth in an attempt not to lose their toes to frostbite, there really wasn't much to behold. The Queen wasn't in so it wasn't though we could pop inside for a cuppa either.
Out the front is, however, the Victoria Memorial, which is a very large ornate and ostentatious affair with statues and 'gifts' from various members of the Commonwealth which look surprisingly similar to communist propaganda monuments from the Soviet era. But with lions.
Presiding over all this is an angel of "unclear entitlement" (according to wikipedia) which could be both Peace and Victory. Wiki also claims that the statue is bronze, not the goldiest gold that ever golded, as I assumed.
I mean, seriously, look at it. That's bloody gold, that is. No photo manipulation either. The winter sun did its thing.
Anyway, gold or bronze aside, you will agree that it is very, very shiny. And free of bird poop.
London is obsessed with bird poop. I've never seen so many spikes placed upon surfaces to deter birds from perching. Spikes everywhere. Everywhere! On railings and fences and window sills and ledges and gutters and street lights and statues and signs and EV.ER.EE.WHERE.
This angel of "unclear entitlement" does not possess spikes. Nor does it wear birds or bird poop.
We can only assume therefore that Her Majesty the Queen has appointed herself a sniper to sit atop the palace roof and take out the little buggers before they even make landing. If you look to the left wing you'll see a set of stairs on the roof, leading to a raised platform. Perfect position to preserve the splendour of Queen Vicky.
This is perhaps not the most illustrious position to hold, but it would be a sure sight better than being one of the guards standing watch by the front doors, with nothing to do but stomp back and forth in an attempt not to have their fleet fall asleep.
I suspect that the Royal Sniper may have had some practice in the gardens, as there are multiple signs about the place requesting that one does not feed the pelicans. One would be quite willing to oblige however one does find that actually, there are are no pelicans. One must make do feeding the swans, geese, ducks and squirrels instead.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
I love the sounds of Moony's preening. The stiff yet soft rustle and shuft of her feathers as she runs her pinions through her beak. It is the sound of safety, it means that she - a creature who is by her very nature born to be prey - is relaxed and comfortable. Sitting on my head offers no threat to her, and so she may primp herself to her little heart's content.
You wake. Every day. Without fail. The mattress a thin briar of coils and your pillow never quit right for your neck. No alarm wakes you. There is no pressing need for your wakefulness. You wake, and sometimes you stay awake. Sometimes you even get right out of bed, shower, dress, prepare yourself for the day as though the day might contain anything to prepare yourself for. That is not the norm, for more often than not you wake and, finding nothing has miraculously changed in your environment, you force yourself back to sleep.
So much sleep and yet never enough. You could blame the weather - Glasgow is hardly known for its bright and sunny disposition - or you could blame the stress of finding yourself once again unemployed and, despite your excellent track record and qualifications, seemingly unemployable. You could blame the belligerence of a city soundscape on your too sensitive introvert ears. You could blame a change in medication, even though there has been no change except for branding, but maybe, possibly, who knows.
You could blame higher powers, even though you believe in no such thing. That incident and that incident and that incident and that incident; this long run of significantly bad and usually pointless bad luck. You whisper in quiet moments, barely heard over a washing machine that devours the power so fast you can watch the credit on the meter tick down, that you're not supposed to be here, that Glasgow doesn't want you.
You could even blame yourself.
You don't want to be that cliché story of a deluded young couple running off to the big city and that big city being cruel, hard and chewing them up to spit them out broken and grey, but perhaps you no longer require any chewing to be broken.
You go to sleep, eventually.
You wake, inevitably.
Every day. Without fail. Opportunities and chances to change the tuning of your heart strings. Get out of bed even if there is nothing requiring you to. You know you won't get them but apply for those jobs because you would love to be wrong, please, be wrong. Go exploring because you will find the charm in the city even if the city will not charm you. You wake and even though it cost you dear you fight your little war inside and out. Because this too will change.
You wake up and there is still one bird, chirping and relentless.
