Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  After Lou dropped off the baby, I suited up for the transfer. I didn’t expect to get sprayed, but I decided to play it safe by swaddling myself in multiple layers of clothing. If I did get blasted, whatever the nylon ski parka failed to deflect wouldn’t get past the sweater underneath. If it did, I relied on a flannel shirt to keep the scent from getting to my skin. Shielding my hands, eyes, and face—while providing exquisite accessorizing touches—were gloves, a stocking cap, and a surgical mask. Making my way toward the front yard, I kept behind the pine trees as much as possible lest I cause a vehicular accident among those unprepared for the sight of an Arctic physician out for a stroll on a spring day.

  I could easily have found the carrier on the front sidewalk with my eyes shut—and they essentially were, thanks to stocking-cap slippage. Without stopping to examine the carrier contents, I hurried my pungent cargo to the back door of the barn. Recognizing me despite the padding, mask, and headwear, Barred Rock hen Brenda blocked my path by whining for treats as soon as I got inside. Her plaintive voice attracted fellow flock members, and they crowded my feet for first dibs on whatever tantalizing morsels might emerge from my hand luggage. I didn’t need an audience for what could easily turn into my moment of ignominy. The chickens failed to shoo, forcing me to rattle their pans of scratch feed to draw them to a less populated part of the barn. Myrna, the small beige cross between a Buff Orpington hen and a tea cozy, never walked when an opportunity to be carried presented itself, so I manually transported her a safe distance away.

  Setting the carrier on top of the stanchion rails, I popped open the front grate and pulled out the half-grown baby, which took not the slightest offense to being held as I fiddled with the door of the rabbit cage and deposited the orphan inside. Continuing to ignore me, it stuck its snout into a metal dish containing canned cat food and diced grapes. Overwhelmed by the animal’s charm, I stripped off my gloves and petted its back through the bars with my index finger, enjoying the bristly texture of its fur. With its jet-black eyes, wide white stripes, and trusting nature, the baby was impossible to dislike—although its carrier wouldn’t win any friends until it experienced a close encounter with a hose.

  I CONDUCTED SO many Internet searches over the next two days that I nearly made Google gag. My first goal was locating breeders in Michigan who raised African grey Timneh parrots, in case I made up my mind that I wanted one. Based on the evidence of their Web sites, some of these breeders had a chirp on their shoulder when it came to the people who might be buying their birds. The worst was a fellow located just north of the border between Michigan and Mars whose sales philosophy boiled down to this: If you buy an ill-tempered parrot from me that screams, bites, plucks its feathers, and refuses to talk or eat, it’s your fault, so don’t bother me about it.

  Naturally, I was eager to buy from him. Then I found a breeder in nearby Lansing whose Web site emphasized the health and happiness of her birds and entirely omitted demonizing them. (Note: she didn’t raise any orange-chinned pocket parrots like Ollie.) I exchanged a few e-mails with Julie, who told me that her Timneh hen had recently laid an egg, which indicated a potential visit from the stork. But she cautioned me that even if the egg turned out to be fertile and hatched, it would be months before I could take the youngster home. The bird needed to develop oodles of socialization skills, such as no screaming, no biting, and no plucking feathers. Just as important, it also had to undergo health exams, inoculations, DNA testing, and finish in the top third of its class in the SATs. So we decided to keep in touch and see what developed.

  I also scoured the Web for the skinny on raising skunks. I wanted to reassure myself that a skunk wouldn’t spray a non-threatening nonentity like myself who supplied it with its daily vittles. I also didn’t relish getting stink-bombed if I offended it by offering the wrong kind of food. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know about skunks. I nearly got blinded skimming the massive amount of information posted by aficionados of the pungent family Mustelidae, whose members include weasels, ferrets, otters, and that guy wearing bad cologne who gets in the elevator with you. One Web site featured a photo of a woman being used by numerous fully scented rehabbed skunks as a jungle gym, which went a long way toward easing my fears. Another site stressed the need to provide a vegetarian diet, which meant that our orphan could sit at the dining room table and eat right off my plate.

  Eager to share my skunkological scholarship, I ambled out to the barn to find Linda peering beneath an old storage cabinet, calling, “Skunky! Skunky!” This didn’t bode well.

  “Don’t tell me the skunk is loose,” I said.

  “Last night I put food in his dish and I was just about to try and pet him, like you did, when he sort of started at me, or I thought he did, and I was afraid I was going to get sprayed, so I jumped back,” Linda told me. “And I think that maybe I forgot to latch his cage door.”

  It smelled as if the skunk had stayed in the barn, though a determined creature with any climbing ability could have found a nook to navigate or a cranny to convey it to freedom, and the barn had plenty of both. Hoping to convince it to stick around and enjoy a pampered lifestyle until it grew up a bit, I grabbed a nearly empty can of cat food from the refrigerator, added diced vegetables, and set it on the cement floor near the skunk’s abandoned cage.

  By the next morning, every speck of food had disappeared. “The skunk is still around,” I assured Linda.

  “One of the hens could have eaten it.”

  I scoffed at the suggestion. “First of all,” I lectured her, “chickens don’t like canned cat food, and there was enough of that in there to discourage them. Second, if the hens had pecked at the can, they would have knocked it across the barn. They’re not exactly gentle with those beaks.” More than once we had offered a piece of lettuce to Eloise or Rosie and nearly lost a finger in the process.

  Adding another mix of cat food, fruit, and veggies to the can, I replaced it and told Linda to anticipate a visit from our skunk later in the day.

  When late afternoon lugged itself across the land, I opened the barn door to find our fat hen Buffy attacking the can with the precision of a neurosurgeon as she whisked up the last few microscopic morsels of cat food. The peas, corn, and diced grape had already journeyed down her gullet.

  “I guess the skunk got away,” I said. We both hoped that the youngster had the necessary survival skills to make it out in the world.

  AT THE SAME TIME, we had another wily customer to deal with in the barn. Beset with spring fever, our white Embden gander, Matthew, had started pressing his romantic perspective upon the female geese with excessive gusto, resulting in rows of feathers plucked from their usually graceful necks. Temporarily housing him with fellow gander Angel proved disastrous. Matthew beat the tar out of the larger goose, forcing us to move him to the barn until his hormone levels ebbed.

  Our expert carpenter, handyman, and dead-mouse-in-the-stove extractor Gary had built the pen attached to the barn with a dividing fence down the middle, which gave us the option of keeping Matthew by himself. I exercised that option after witnessing the tail end of a fight between the usually invincible Victor and the lovesick gander, which ended up costing Victor a toenail. As a testament to Victor’s intelligence, or at least his trust, he tolerated my handling his foot and applying a dab of antibiotic to his wound. I couldn’t even imagine attempting such familiarity with Matthew.

  The Embden expended his energies pacing back and forth along the fence and honking at the females far across the yard. “We miss you,” they honked back, though I assumed they enjoyed the break from his denuding amour. After a few days, his restless fire subsided to a simmer and the pacing stopped.

  Whenever I did my chores on his side of the pen, I gave him a wide berth—not out of concern that he would go after me, but because I didn’t want to add to his stress. I spoke softly to him, informing him in advance, “Now I’m going to change the water in your bucket,” or calmly herding him inside each evening with a rip
pling of my fingers prompting, “Let’s go get our treats.”

  He tolerated my presence; then his tolerance turned to interest. While I cleaned the floor of the barn with water and a push broom, he would step inside and, with his bright blue eyes, supervise. One evening, on a whim, instead of shooing him into the barn I called his name, and he trundled in. To make sure that this wasn’t a coincidence or his reaction to the mere sound of my voice, the next evening I called, “Buffy! Victor!” Matthew didn’t stir from the outdoor pen. But when I wailed, “Matthew!” he waddled in and fixed me with his glittering eye, shaming me into tossing an extra treat in his direction.

  Matthew was the last bird I’d consider hand-feeding. A small strip of fencing indoors separated Matthew’s side of the barn from the middle section where the ducks and hens meandered, and I noticed him standing next to it in anticipation. Carefully I poked a piece of kale through the wire, keeping my digits on my side. He took it without drama. In an uncharacteristic fit of boldness, I leaned over the fence and offered him the kale from my unprotected fingers. With a gentleness that equaled his earlier unchecked ardor for his girls, he delicately plucked the greens from me, pausing once to tenderly nibble my hand as if to exercise his curiosity.

  This soon became a nightly ritual. He’d come inside to watch me clean, or stay out until I called. After I was on the other side of the fence, he’d pad over and accept his bread and greens from my bare hands. I enjoyed these encounters so much that when the mating frenzy had died down throughout the flock, I carried him back to the goose pen with a heavy heart. I knew that his reunion with the girls would close the door on our close rapport. But I had Linda. I had my other birds. I had rabbits. I had cats. So I let Matthew have his harem and forget about me.

  He surprised me the following week. While the geese foraged in the yard, I pulled up a few acres of dandelion leaves, which our tamer geese Liza and Hailey loved. They took the leaves from my hand as Angel, Patty, Matthew, and the ducks muttered to themselves in the background. But after a moment Matthew joined the two African geese and snatched the greens from my fingers. He did this with a degree of reluctance, not wishing to compromise his top slot in the pecking order, but that he did it at all was the supreme compliment.

  ON MY DRIVE home from work, I spotted a coyote. Though I’d never seen one in situ before, I recognized it instantly. With its head hung low, mouth open, lolling tongue, and outstretched tail, it trotted across a field about a mile from our house.

  A ripple of concern passed through me, but I knew that our ducks, geese, and hens were in no danger as they puttered around in their pens. Then I started thinking that if a coyote roamed this close to us, five years ago it could have stood in the woods in the moonlit shadow of our bedroom, raised its head toward the starry sky, and blasted me awake with a bloodcurdling howl. At the time, I’d sworn that there was nothing canine about that howl—but in retrospect, I wondered.

  My mother dealt with misperception in her own unique fashion. After Linda and I had taken her out for ice cream one Saturday afternoon, we returned from watching the geese at a neighborhood park to stroll the carpeted corridors of Testament Terrace. “That sure is an attractive bouquet,” Linda remarked as we approached an artificial floral arrangement topping a round table. “They keep everything looking so nice around here.”

  Mom beamed. “Bob helps me with the housekeeping,” she said, referring to my departed dad.

  I told Bett about this on the phone, and mentioned that it must console Mom to occasionally think that Dad was still alive. “I miss hearing her talk about the old days, but that’s pretty much gone. I wanted to hear that story about Dad being arrested.”

  “Dad was arrested?” Bett asked. “When was he arrested?”

  “You’ve never heard that story?”

  I didn’t have the details, which made me sorry that Mom couldn’t fill them in. But I did remember Dad telling me that—years before my presence glorified the world—he had gone out on the porch in his pajamas one Sunday morning to get the newspaper just as a police car made a U-turn and pulled over across the street. Dad walked up to the parked cruiser and informed the officer that his driving maneuver had violated the law. In response, the cop hauled my dad off to jail, and he sat there in his pajamas until my mother bailed him out.

  “Dad must have told me that story three or four times,” I said to Bett. “But I haven’t heard it since high school.”

  “I’ve never heard it before.”

  “Well, how about the time he bought a 78 record called ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ and broke it in half at the front counter of Dodd’s Record Shop?”

  “No,” she chuckled, “I don’t know that one either.”

  This came as something of a revelation. While I’d expected the three of us to remember our father in different ways, I’d never considered the possibility that he might have told each of us different stories about his life. The next time we got together, I decided, I would ask Bett and Joan for their favorite anecdotes from and about him. I might actually learn something.

  I had definitely learned something from Matthew the goose, and from the other animals, too. The mixture of wildness and comfort they brought to my life was life itself in miniature. There was no arguing with a gander—or with a parrot that bit off a bunny’s tail, mice that nested inside the dining room chair, creatures that shrieked in the middle of the night, or a crazy former classmate. There was no reasoning with death or Alzheimer’s disease. I could resist them, ignore them, or gnash my teeth over them, but I couldn’t prevent them from occurring. My likes and dislikes all rolled together didn’t add up to a golden orb weaver’s egg when it came to stopping the spinning, seasonal procession of events. Weather fair and foul ruled. The ice storm didn’t care if I objected. Floodwaters chuckled at resistance. Snow made sport of rainforest dreams. The saucer people faded in and out, but occasionally they used the telephone. So I might as well accept the call.

  JULIE PHONED ME with the bad news that her Timneh egg had turned out to be a dud. But she told me about a friend of hers, Susan, who had bought back a female Timneh from the people she had sold her to, because their children kept bothering the bird. Julie assured me that Susan was so conscientious that when Julie’s husband had been in the hospital, they had trusted their Quaker parakeet Koko to Susan’s care. Julie e-mailed me a photo of the Timneh gnawing a pad of sticky-notes that was eerily reminiscent of the photo of Stanley Sue chewing a raisin box that had originally convinced us to buy her.

  I phoned Susan and, through the shrieks of macaws in the foreground, managed to decipher the directions to her house in Belleville and learn that the Timneh’s name was Bella. Bella from Belleville, said Bobo. I repeated this to myself around ten thousand times through the course of my three-hour drive across the state. It sounded sort of propitious—and obnoxious enough to bore itself deep into my brain, not unlike the chorus of the Little River Band’s “Reminiscing,” which tormented me from an oldies radio station for a full nanosecond before I managed to wallop the off button.

  I discovered that Susan had surrendered her sunroom to her parrots. Sidling toward a wicker chair for an introduction to Bella meant attempting to avoid a pair of pterodactyl-size macaws leaning out from a couple of birdie play stations. Cayenne and Hannah may have only been teasing, but most birds can’t resist bullying less courageous creatures—and they revel in giving cowards such as myself an extra tweak. Squawking fiendishly, they brandished their gargantuan beaks as I ducked and dodged my way through the feathered gauntlet. Cayenne’s pincers flashed uncomfortably close to my shirtsleeve, and I braced myself for the groan of tearing fabric.

  I learned that gaining a seat didn’t mean that I had achieved sanctuary. “These wicker chairs belong to the birds,” Susan informed me as her Congo African grey parrot Gracie strutted across the floor and began scaling the front of the chair in which I had parked myself.

  “Is she friendly?” I asked as I hopped to my feet, taking care not
to step within reach of the macaws. I didn’t trust the mischievous glint in Gracie’s eyes, though I was pleased when she stood on the armrest and told me, “Nice shoes.”

  “She’ll trick you into picking her up,” cautioned Susan. “But I’m not sure if I’d try it.” I took the warning to heart as Gracie proceeded to excavate the well-gnawed front of the chair’s arm. “Bella’s different. I had a houseguest from South America last summer, and she told me, ‘You have to watch these other birds, but I never have any trouble with Bella.’ “

  I still felt timorous about taking the Timneh from her. “Does she bite?” I asked, expecting an immediate denial as I extended my hand toward the bird.

  Her thoughtful pause halted my forward momentum. “Bella has a mind of her own. She might pinch your finger if you’re holding her and she wants to go somewhere else, but she won’t hurt you. She’s a very sweet bird.”

  While I’d been excited for hours about the prospect of meeting Bella, I still wasn’t prepared for the jolt I received when she stepped onto my hand—thanks to her sharp toenails digging into my flesh. “I meant to trim those,” Susan said as I winced.

  While most Timnehs look like other Timnehs, Bella had an expression all her own. A fold of skin above each eye made it seem as if she were slightly lowering her lids in a laid-back but decidedly playful attitude. When I brought a finger near her head to see if she might let me stroke her back, she opened her beak and clicked a friendly admonishment that sent my hand scurrying to the safety of my pocket.

  “What do you think?” I asked Susan. The purpose of the visit was for her to appraise me as a prospective owner while I appraised Bella, who considered me with a soft look quite unlike the usual steely stare of a grey.

  Susan shot a photo of me holding her bird, then packed Bella into the pet carrier I had brought, along with wedges of orange and apple for fortification on the road. I daydreamed about snitching some fruit for myself as a prelude to ransacking the rest of the house, but I was too excited by Bella to revert to crime.