Smokey the parrot

It’s Monday again, trash day, and I got my trash to the street.  Didn’t get the recyclables out there today, maybe next week.

I will now bore you with remembrances of the past.

Smokey the parrot had grey eyes when I got him which meant he was under 6 months old.  The eyes turn yellow at about 6 months of age.  We learned together how to be friends.  I later learned that a bird thinks your head is another bird and your body, when he sits on your shoulder, is a tree the two of you are sitting on.

Found this picture in an old album.  That’s Smokey and a much younger me, about 25 years ago.

He once tweaked my nose gently and then backed up with an amazed look.  Yes, a bird can look amazed.  My beak wasn’t very useful in his opinion. 

A bird’s beak continues to grow like our fingernails.  Since there wasn’t the normal “in the wild” ways for him to wear down his beak I had to clip the tip off it now and then.  His toenails also had to be trimmed.  The method of doing this was to wrap him in a hand towel, lay him on his back, and give him a corner of the towel to chew on (keeping the beak busy was a necessity) while I pulled one foot out at a time and clipped the nails.  The beak was a quick snip. 

When I used fingernail clippers on my own fingernails, he flinched every time I clipped. 

I forget what his first words were but they came fast and furious.  He sounded like the person he was mimicking.  He called the dog in my voice – the dog came.  If he was out on top of his cage he would call the dog over, turn his butt over the edge of the cage and poop on the dog.  A cute white dog with a blob on top.  Yuck. 

If I hadn’t been “obedient” to his wishes he would poop down the front of my clothes.  If I had been “good”  he backed up and pooped off the back.  Kind of a “poop on you” attitude.

As Thanksgiving approached that first year I thought it would be funny to have him gobble like a turkey.  I worked up a pretty good gobble and taught him to do it. 

He liked it so well that after Thanksgiving we came up with a way to use it.  I would sing “Old McDonald had a farm”, he would do the E-I-E-I-O part, then I would sing “on that farm he had a turkey” and he would gobble.  We added a rooster and a hen over the years.  He would ask to do the act by starting off with his E-I-E-I-O.  He had a wonderful crow for the rooster.  We were working on a duck sound when I passed him on to another home.

That’s a whole other story.

Later….