The Sun is Shining and More Smokey

A beautiful day in the 40 degree range.  A promise that spring will come.  Ran some errands, got some estimates for my PLANS.  I might as well spend the money before the government takes it.

Found another picture of Smokey.  This is not pretty.  He liked to take food from my mouth but this time he got carried away and tried to take out my dentures.  He was always taking off my glasses by flipping the ear piece over my ear.  I learned to take them off before he came around. 

 

One evening we got home to a smoke alarm low battery beeping.  It took quite a while to figure out which one it was.  We replaced the battery.  There was still a beeping.  It took even longer to figure out that it was Smokey who had been left to listen to that sound all day and had perfected it, even down to the timing between beeps.

It took a few days for him to stop that. 

We learned as we went.  When he started throwing tantrums in the evening we figured out he was overtired.  I subscribed to a bird magazine and learned a lot from that.  Birds need to follow the sunrise and sunset so they molt properly and get enough rest.  So in winter we covered him and carried his cage to a back room at sunset so he could get his proper rest. 

In summer I would set his cage out on the picnic table on the back deck for a while on nice days.  He wolf whistled at an elderly neighbor.  I didn’t want her to think it was my husband so I explained it was the bird.  She said that’s fine – that’s the only kind of wolf whistle she got anymore.

It was bound to happen when you have a bird who can fly in a house with doors.  He flew away, across the street and behind the houses.  I was frantic.  It was summer which was good, he wouldn’t freeze.  I ran where he had gone and found nothing, I enlisted the neighborhood children to help find him.  After an hour of looking I went inside for a break. I was thinking about putting his cage outside.

My next door neighbors called an hour or so later to ask me if I was looking for a bird.  There was one in a bush in their back yard.  I rushed over, plucked him out of the bush, and carried him home.  I thanked them profusely. 

He had flown to an area that he could see when he was outside in his cage.  He was trying to come home.  Bless his little heart.

After that I studied up on how to clip a wing.  It isn’t hard to do.  You just spread the wing out and clip the wing feathers toward the back, the ones that fold under when he is sitting still.  Just one wing, so he can fly or rather float a little, not fall down splat. 

Later….