Bird Housekeeping?

You already know I have brothers and a sister. BIRD brothers and sister. My "sister" is Lou who is the meanest love bird ever. She is always scowling and trying to bite Mom when Mom is trying to feed her. She's been in our family since waaaaay before I was adopted. Like maybe at least 10 years? She was a "gift" to Mom in exchange for Mom rescuing someone else's love bird who kept running away from home after his parents moved Lou in with him. Mom says she totally understands why.

Then there is Kal (short for Kalamazoo) who is Lou's natural born child. His father, Blue Bird (rest his soul) broke into our house by chewing a hole in the screen and he would visit Lou whenever he could. Finally one day Mom surprised him while he was singing romantic songs while sitting on the top of Lou's cage. He flew into Mom's bedroom and right into the landscape mirror on her dresser. Stunned, he was picked up and plopped into Lou's cage.

They were a loving couple and had several clutches of eggs but nothing ever happened so Mom figured he was shooting blanks. Until one day there were three eggs, and that night there were two. Like eggs don't just disappear. So she looked really close and saw a naked pink little bird baby she named "Timothy Buckley the Second" or "Timbuktu". He didn't make it even 24 hours. Lou tossed him around and stomped on him.

After that, the next day, another egg hatched and THIS time Blue took over. He sat on the baby, Kalamazoo, fed it (it's yucky how they do that but I'll tell you another time), and wouldn't let Lou stomp on it. After a week or so it started to sprout feathers, and then after that is started learning to skootch around the cage. Mom says it was pretty interesting watching a hatchling turn into a bird.

So Kal grew up and they were a family. Then my Aunt Vicki thought Kal needed a girlfriend so she gave us Scooby-Doo who turned out to be a boy. But the other birds, especially Lou, picked on poor Scooby so he stayed in his very own cage. He escaped whenever he could and he'd mope around the other big cage. When Blue passed on, he was even more determined to make friends with Lou. Kal didn't care one way or the other. He just sat happily by himself during the day, ignoring the other birds, and at night he'd crawl into his coconut shell bunk bed (that my Aunt Allie gave him) on the side of the cage.

Then Scooby become even more impatient to date Lou. So the last time he got out, Mom just tossed him in there and he's been Lou's doting husband ever since. I guess that sort of makes him Kal's step-father, and Lou is Mrs. Bird-Doo now.

OK...so there you have the picture of our bird family. Birds are messy. I try to help as much as I can as you can tell from the picture. I learned a long time ago to quit trying to eat birdseed because it would make me throw up. Now I just snuffle the feathers around to help Mom when she gets busy.

That's it for today (and yesterday). Oh, Dear Diary, I just CAN'T write every day. With all the year end taxes and payroll stuff and reports and things, my mom is so busy she can't think straight. She says that either she's going to teach me to type OR I'll just have to do it when she has a minute.

So that's just the way my life is.

Love, Mary-Margaret