Bird Lover

My father was a bird lover.

Pretty much any kind of bird, although he was partial to waterfowl and gamebirds.

I learned to love birds from my dad.

It probably had to happen since I was surrounded by them from the day I was born.

My dad was raising parakeets when I was little, but that ended before I can remember.

The birds that I remember were peacocks,

jungle fowl,

golden pheasants,

assorted ducks, and Canadian Geese.


We had a pretty big "pheasant pen"complete with a cement pond and a fenced enclosure out behind our house and that's where they all lived, usually.

They all had their wings clipped so they couldn't fly away but the peacocks could still manage to fly to the roof of the pheasant pen and then down to our yard. The patriarch of the family was named George. I'm pretty sure I chose his name and I'm pretty sure at the time that I wasn't really aware that George was also my Grandpa's name. I just knew him as Grandpa and my Aunt Ruby, his wife, called him by his nickname, Bert. I didn't name the peacock after him. I just liked the name George. George liked to stand in front of our sliding door in the back yard and spread his feathers and strut back and forth.

He was very vain.

I always felt bad for the mama peacock, I can't remember if she had a name, maybe it was Martha, because she wasn't nearly as pretty and didn't have a long, beautiful tail to flaunt.

We would always know when my dad was on his way up the hill, coming home from work, because the peacocks would all cry "Help. Help" at the top of their lungs.

We didn't have much luck having baby peacocks but one time the eggs that the mama sat on actually hatched and I was very excited. We had three male peacocks that I named Winken, Blinken and Nod. They liked to perch on the railing on the porch outside my bedroom window and I would wake up to their morning cries. I was sad when they got sold to the Birds.

The Birds were real people who were friends of my parents and, of course, raised birds for a living.

Sometimes it was my job to feed the birds, the actual birds, not the people birds. My mom would save the celery leaves for me to feed to the Canadian Geese. They would eat them out of my hand and I enjoyed feeding them, at least the females. The papa goose, whose name was appropriately Greedy, was not very nice and tried to take my finger tips off a few times. I also learned not to hand feed the Mamas if there were any goslings around. Geese can bite pretty hard if you get between them and their babies.

One day I took the short cut through the pheasant pen to get to "my mountain playground" and accidentally left the gate open. When my dad got home from work he discovered the gate open and all the geese gone. He and I got to go on a "wild goose chase" except these were suppose to be tame geese. We found the whole gaggle swimming in the canal at the top of the hill behind our house. The only problem was that they were enjoying their freedom and not too anxious to return home. Finally we got them out of the water and gathered together and led them with a stick back to the pen. There is a famous picture of a girl herding geese that has always reminded me of this experience.


I love birds, I really do, and that is why I felt bad the couple of times I caused the early demise of one of these feathered creatures.

When my Grandpa and Aunt Ruby left on their mission I was about 4 or 5 and they left their pet parakeets in our care.


I really loved those little birds, except when it was cage cleaning time. I enjoyed feeding them and playing with them. One day their cage was hanging on a cord from the ceiling in the downstairs of our house and I decided to give the birds a merry-go-round ride. I twirled the cage around and around and around. I was so sure they were having a wonderful time. When the twirling finally stopped one of the parakeets dropped to the bottom of the cage.

Dead!

Now , I have to admit that there is one species of bird that I do not love, do not love at all, and that is the Magpie.


When I was growing up their were a lot of magpies that lived in the trees on the hill behind our house. I did not like them. They would come to our house every day and eat my cats' food and traumatize my sweet, little kitties. One day I was in the kitchen and there were a couple of magpies chowing down on the cat food and I decided I was going to scare them good. I made a fist and gave a big pound on the window, while yelling at the top of my lungs, and my hand went right through the window. The magpies didn't even budge, but I was scared, good, mostly about what my mom was going to say because as luck would have it I didn't even have a cut hand to distract her from the broken window.

The event that sealed my dislike for magpies forever though was a horrible scene I witnessed one day in my backyard. The jungle fowl mama had a new flock of chicks. The chicks were tiny and had gotten through a space in the chain link fence and were playing on the side of the fence where the mom was not. I was watching them from a short distance and enjoying their little chick antics when all of the sudden the mom started to frantically try to get through the fence to reach her babies. While I stood there trying to decide what was happening, a dirty, evil magpie swooped down from the sky and grabbed one of those tiny chicks and carried it away. The mother was traumatized, I was appalled. I tried to believe that the magpie was just taking the chick on a fun flight around the valley, but I knew better. A bird eating another bird? That's just gross. I quickly gathered the remaining chicks and pushed them through the fence to their mom. I decided then and there that I was the sworn enemy of all magpies - forever.

One day my oldest brother was visiting and decided to go out shooting magpies. Now, I am opposed to shooting birds in general, but these were magpies he was going after and I was happy to accompany him on this adventure. I had never shot a gun and he was showing me how to hold it and aim and fire. I fired and low and behold a bird fell. Unfortunately, the bird I accidentally hit was not an evil magpie but a beautiful woodpecker. I was devastated. I remember it as a mother with a nest full of babies, but that is probably just a vivid imagination brought on by repressed guilt. After that I decided to just hate magpies, but not harm them. Today hate may be a rather strong word, but the magpie is still my least favorite bird.

That is why I was somewhat taken back today when I read in our newspaper that it has been discovered that magpies are self-aware. What does this mean? It means that my least favorite type of bird is the only creature, that is not a mammal, who has demonstrated an understanding of his own identity. In a study a black dot sticker and a colored dot sticker were placed on the necks of a group of magpies. Each was then put in a cage with a mirror. Several of the magpies looked in the mirror and then pecked at the colored dot on their own neck. They were aware that they were looking at a reflection of themselves. The fact that they did not peck at the camouflaged black sticker proved that they did not just peck at the dot because it felt annoying. Supposedly this means that magpies are the smartest and most human-like birds out there. Not peacocks, not jungle fowl, not geese or parakeets or woodpeckers. Magpies. It's something to think about.

Somewhere along the line my dad decided that live birds were a lot of work and he started cutting back on the real birds and began collecting wooden decoys. This was easier for him, but harder for my mom, because then she had to dust all of the birds. We won't get into the decoys now though. That's a topic for a another blog someday.


Today I am thankful for

Birds - is there anything better than waking up to the song of a bird?
My Dad - who taught me to love birds and lots of other things too.
My Mom - who supported my dad in all his endeavors even though it usually meant more work for her.
Cars that work - at this moment - every car in our family is in working order. Hooray!

For my birthmonth present today I put off doing the laundry until tomorrow.