In the same vein, Stanley’s behavior in our home contradicted much of what Lynn had told us. Though far quieter than Ollie, Stanley vocalized throughout the day at various volume levels, with an impressive roster of whistles, chirps, and the occasional squawk. Dinnertime unleashed Stanley’s miserly quartet of English-language words—“Big boy, Stanley” and “Hello”—along with an adamant rejection of his supposedly favorite foods. Pizza crust with or without tomato sauce was snubbed with a snap of the head. Apple slices were accepted into his beak only as a prelude to their being flung onto the floor. On the Neil Young front, not a single ditty from After the Goldrush, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, or a bootleg live LP roused a discernible tic of pleasure. Nor did the bathroom towel rack, shower, or leaky faucet.
True to Lynn’s word, Stanley was gentle, though “gentle” barely scratched the surface of his almost neurotic timidity. Any unfamiliar object passing within a seven-foot radius made him jump and flap his wings. As a cage-warming gift, I bought him the kind of pressed-seed-and-fruit treat on a stick that Ollie would rip apart and devour the instant I hung it from the bars of his cage. But Stanley regarded the parrot paddle-pop as a threat, retreating to the far corner of his cage until I removed it. Toys brought an even more exaggerated reaction. Because he already had a bell in his cage, I thought Stanley might welcome other diversions. But merely showing him a second tiny bell or a knotted rawhide string ornamented with chewable wood beads was equivalent to strolling into the room with a hawk perched on my arm.
Stanley’s nervousness made us nervous to approach him. Any encroachment of a hand into his personal space brought on the classic attack pose of lowered body, extended neck, and, if we persisted, bent head with open beak. But his demeanor markedly changed if we presented him with food. Unlike Ollie, who delighted in vigorously biting the hand that fed him, Stanley surprised us by accepting the smallest morsel of food with no attempt to nip us. I began with the largest double peanut I could find, nervously offering him the nut while grasping it by a withered root hair that dangled from the shell. Next I tried a single nut, then moved on to a series of progressively shrinking foodstuffs, from a purple grape, to a large lima bean, to a striped sunflower seed, and, finally, a couple of stuck-together cookie crumbs that Stanley had to brush his beak against my fingertips to extract. Had I been able to offer him a single molecule of a favored snack, I felt certain he would have claimed it with the same delicacy. Engaging in this safe form of physical contact with us was obviously as important to him as the food. Linda proved this the evening she softly called me into the kitchen while Stanley was slurping lukewarm herbal tea from a coffee mug.
“Sweetheart, look at this,” she told me.
As an overture toward being held, Stanley had climbed onto the mug that Linda was holding. I held my breath as Linda curled her index finger around the rim of the cup. “Watch it,” I whispered. Stanley leaned forward and softly encircled Linda’s knuckle with his black lower beak and horn-colored upper mandible.
“He’s just exploring,” she told me, then held her breath as he nibbled her finger.
I managed the same trick with Stanley a little later. But attempts to dispense with the mug and present him with a naked hand resulted in a nip. Even though they were minor compared to the bites that Ollie doled out daily, we were intimidated by the potential trauma that we knew Stanley’s powerful jaws could inflict.
“There’s really no reason to be afraid of him,” I explained loftily to Linda. “Most dogs or cats could kill their owners if they thought about it, but we trust them not to act like wild animals. So it’s the same with parrots. Just because they could take our fingers off doesn’t mean they will.”
“But you wouldn’t try to pet a wild dog, would you?”
She had me there. Stanley was a wild-caught bird. Stolen from his nest and forced to undergo a miserable journey to America, Stanley had every reason to despise people. He hadn’t fared much better as a pet, enduring four different owners in just five years of life. How deeply these circumstances had affected him was clear from the eerie noise he produced each evening once we had covered his cage and switched out the lights.
“What is that?” I asked Linda, turning down the volume on Wheel of Fortune’s “Bonus Round” the first time I heard what sounded like a person sobbing in our kitchen.
The following day, our vet, Dr. Benedict, told me over the phone, “It’s amazing the range of vocalizations these birds can emit. They can imitate anything and everything from your voice to a ringing telephone. But you have to remember that those sobbing sounds are just air passing through his throat when his muscles are in a state of relaxation.”
“So he’s not really crying?” I asked,
“The phenomenon has no meaning,” he assured me in one of several potentially disastrous misdiagnoses of our pets. Though we trusted Dr. Benedict, we trusted our senses more. Stanley was clearly upset at having been thrust into yet another new environment with unfamiliar people. We did our best to put him at ease. Whenever one of us heard him sobbing, we would lift his cage cover and talk to him, reassuring him that he had finally found a home with easily manipulated humans who would cater to him for the rest of his life.
The crying was so persistent throughout the summer, we warned our pet-sitter Hannah about it before leaving on vacation to South Dakota, lest she think our home harbored a troubled ghost. Once we managed to breach the wall of Hannah’s phone calls to her boyfriend, she confirmed that our bird was continuing his crying jags. But things turned around when we returned. Stanley was relieved to see us and immediately seemed more relaxed. As soon as we flung open his cage door, he climbed on top, fluffed his feathers, and preened contentedly, eyeing us with the same affectionate attentiveness he had heaped on Lynn. That first night back, he didn’t cry. In fact, he never cried again. Instead of sobbing when he wanted his usual after-bed peanut, he summoned his servants by ringing his bell. Bell-clanging accompanied by squawks meant that the TV in the living room was too loud, or that we were otherwise disturbing his beauty sleep. If I retired him too early, his vocal with instrumental accompaniment flowed unabated, and I soon learned for all our sakes not to cover him up until he was good and ready.
Stanley began slowly warming to us, and slow was the operative word. Far more reticent than Binky or even Ollie, Stanley was the teacher who relentlessly hammered home the true meaning of patience. Where Stanley was concerned, changes unfurled at a glacial, geological pace in which progress was measured by microscopic increments rather than discernible movement. One day I noticed that his cage lacked a perch close to the door. Maneuvering to the cage front from the single perch required him to climb horizontally around the cage walls, which struck me as awkward and inconvenient.
Normally, I would have simply installed another perch. But the mere sight of a notched and smoothly sanded stick sent Stanley into a wing-flapping tizzy. Introducing this malevolent entity into his world required first positioning it nonchalantly on the chair beside his cage for a day or two. Once he had ceased his vigilance over the perch, I was able to slip it inside his cage and set it on the bottom grate, tucked up against the cage body, where it called the least amount of attention to itself. A few days later, I attached it to the bars at the level of the bottom grate. Over a week’s period, I gradually raised the perch an inch or so at a time, until finally it stood triumphantly at the same height as his other perch. But Stanley made a mockery of my success by treating the new piece of cage furniture as if it simply did not exist. Not only did he refuse to step on the perch for months, but he also stretched and contorted himself to avoid any accidental contact with the interloper.
Two parrots were, we realized, exponentially more work than owning one, giving us our first taste of the multiple-pet complexity to come. Like Ollie, Stanley insisted on eating dinner with us. In other words, we shared our table food in order to avoid ear-splitting disturbances. African gray parrots are prone to vitamin deficiencies that can lead t
o health problems if the bird is restricted to a seed diet, so we were only too happy to provide the pasta, tofu, and Jell-O that a wild bird would have scavenged from the forest. But he didn’t make it easy.
Ollie’s small cage sat on the counter behind my chair at mealtime. Serving him involved depositing scraps into a small food dish tied securely to the top of his cage. Not counting the food morsels that occasionally rained upon my head and the frequent squawking fits, that was the extent of the fuss with him. Stanley, however, would not tolerate a dish of any description on his cage. He shrank from the seed containers, plastic jar lids, quarter-cup measuring cups, and pudding bowls we auditioned as if they were cleverly disguised pythons with their own dinner plans in mind. Yet he would happily take nourishment from an ordinary spoon—as long as the spoon remained in my hand. If I gradually lowered the spoon until it rested on the bars on top of his cage, ever so gently uncurled my fingers, and crept three paces back to my chair, before my fanny touched wood, the spoon would hit the floor, scattering food in all directions. Clamping the spoon to his cage bars with a clothespin only served to divert his attention from eating to prying open the clothespin and flinging down the spoon.
He was also unpredictable about what he might decide to eat. The corn he enjoyed one night was resoundingly snubbed the next. But it wasn’t necessarily a matter of his liking or disliking for a particular vegetable or tuber, we learned. The key was serving them in the proper order, but the constantly changing preferred sequence was a secret so impenetrable it would have pleased cryptography experts at the CIA. Thus, the helping of peas Stanley disdained with dramatic throat puffs that mimicked gagging gained quick acceptance after he had made a few lunges at a spoonful of broccoli. Stanley’s behavior transformed our dinner table into a merry-go-round that sent me bobbing up and down, in and out of my chair, rounding the table, then circling back again.
BIRD EXPERTS AGREE that the first step in gaining control over a parrot is convincing it to “step up” on your hand upon command. Bird experts are easily identified by their scarred hands, and I realized that the road to a better bond with Stanley wouldn’t necessarily be painless. Hoping that Lynn might have taught him the appropriate verbals, I tried calling “Step up, Stanley,” from across the room and waited vainly for a raised foot to wave at me. Repeating the experiment a few inches from him resulted in the expected lowered head and threat to bite. And bite he did when I slid my hand closer. After examining my flesh for punctures and finding only a minor indentation, I shelved my usual cowardice and braved a second attempt. Stanley nipped me again, but when I refused to withdraw he seemed to sigh with his whole body as he graciously stepped onto my hand. Lifting him to chest level, my exhilaration soured when I realized I had no idea what to do with him now. To make Stanley think my command had been part of a grand plan instead of mere grandstanding, I took him on a short tour of the living room, pointing out such landmarks as the couch, TV, and coat rack.
Once I became skilled at picking up our parrot, I needed something to do with him. The logical choice was taking him into the living room after dinner to share the entertainment spectacle of Wheel of Fortune with us. Amazingly, the antics of Pat and Vanna failed to divert him from making his usual “put me back” peeps. I determined that he might be happier if he could move around a little. Wishing to preserve our heirloom burlap-fabric couch, Linda suggested setting Stanley on a broken birdcage that had been languishing in the basement. The microwave-size cage stood at seat level when I placed it on the floor, and to my great surprise Stanley had no hesitation about perching on it next to the couch. To occupy his time while the magical wheel was spinning, he readily chewed on magazine reply cards, which I transformed into irresistible objects through a series of accordion folds. He loved shredding these as much for the mastication as for the joy of watching us clean up the mess he had made on the floor.
Though I was delighted with the progress Stanley had made, I had to admit a basic feeling of disappointment as our first year with him ground on. African greys are potentially the best talkers in the bird world, able not only to remember complex phrases, but also to deliver them in tape-recorder-perfect, embarrassing imitations of their owners’ voices. Researchers have even wangled grants to investigate whether greys can use language deliberately. Animal behavioralist Dr. Irene Pepperberg taught her Congo African grey, Alex, to identify objects by describing their color, shape, texture, and numbers up to three. Presented with a trio of lime-colored, velveteen-flocked wooden blocks nicely arranged on a tea tray, Alex might tell Dr. Pepperberg, “Three square green fuzzy,” which is as good as I talk most days. Anecdotes made claims about grey speech that went way beyond those of Alex’s professorial responses. Pet Bird Report, a magazine published by bird behavioralist Sally Blanchard, carried reports of parrots requesting foods and beverages by name, or critiquing the city lights from a Bay Area high-rise window.
So I had hopes that Stanley would be a kind of homunculus with whom I could converse, joke, collaborate on crossword puzzles, and conspire against Linda. But his phrase book began and ended with “Big boy, Stanley” and “Hello,” which barely opened the door to banter, much less discussions of particle physics. Even worse, the more comfortable he grew with us, the less exercise he gave these four words, apparently deciding that they were superfluous psychic baggage from his former life with Lynn. Instead, he sharpened his mimicry skills on household sounds, including door squeaks and oven-timer beeps. Whenever Linda was foolish enough to kiss me in his presence, he made kissing noises back at us. I learned that this was mockery when the same editorializing greeted any nice words that I lavished on Ollie or our cat Penny. He’s made an impressive mental leap from imitation to recognition of the larger context of smooching, but I had expected that intelligence to manifest itself more in his striving to develop desirable human traits like mine. Vaguely and hollowly, I longed for more from Stanley.
“Look what I’ve been reduced to,” I complained to Linda in the living room, while a Wheel contestant from Bangor was busy buying a vowel. Perched per his usual routine on the couch-side cage top, Stanley lowered his head and presented the nape of his neck to me. His pupils contracted with bliss as I rubbed the skin beneath the shafts of his feathers with a crooked index finger.
“Stanley loves you,” Linda shot back.
“Then why doesn’t he rub my neck once in a while? Everything is give, give, give. It’s the same thing every night,” I sighed, little realizing that I would soon have cause to long for uncomplicated tedium.
The following evening, when I bent down to pick up Stanley, he refused to cooperate, backing away and flashing me a wary look. “Step up, Stanley,” I insisted.
“Step on Poppy’s hand,” offered Linda from her perennial kitchen-sweeping posture.
“What did you just call me?”
“You’re their poppy.”
“I’m not anybody’s poppy,” I grumbled, thrusting my hand at Stanley a second time. He reluctantly got on board. But once I began carrying him toward the living room, he unleashed a harried yelp and flew back to his cage. Deciding that some benign inanimate object such as Linda’s broom had scared him, I tried again. This time the squawk was louder, and he bit the back of my hand, drawing blood. “What’s gotten into you?” I demanded, retreating to the bathroom to douse the tiny wound in torrents of cold tap water. But I knew better than to press a disaffected parrot.
The issue of his behavior grew more serious over the next few days. Sensing I was agitated over this new development, Stanley considerately didn’t bite. But he refused to stay on my hand, crying out and fluttering desperately across the room each time I tried to lift him. When he emitted the same painful squawk while scaling the bars of his cage, I scheduled an appointment with Dr. Benedict.
I’d always been impressed by the liberties that the quiet and diminutive Dr. Benedict managed to take with an unfamiliar bird. Shortly after we acquired Stanley, I took him in for a checkup, and our vet had handl
ed him with aplomb at a stage when Stanley would barely glance at me, much less climb upon my coffee mug. This time neither of us succeeded in picking him up, forcing us to corner Stanley on the floor and throw a towel over his head as if we were parrot-nappers. Carefully wrapping the whimpering bird to protect himself from the beak, Dr. Benedict wiggled the bird’s toes with his fingers, gave him a lightning-quick nail trim, then probed the length of his legs. “Here’s the difficulty,” he murmured. In the area the doctor called Stanley’s groin, and which Linda referred to as “Stanley’s armpits,” where each of the bird’s legs met his rounded abdomen, our vet showed me an angry lima-bean-size patch of featherless, abraded skin. He couldn’t say what caused the painful condition, though he added, “Except in the case of certain rashes, symmetrical lesions are extremely rare.”
“So you think this is a rash?” I asked, once we had returned Stanley to his carrier.
“It would be worth checking the literature,” he told me with a smile, implying he was leaving to do just that, as he popped out the examining room door. He reappeared minutes later accompanied by a stern young woman who towered over him in a telltale veterinarian’s smock. “This is my new colleague, Dr. Stallings,” he told me. “I’ve asked her to consult with me.” Having already performed the glamorous part of the job, Dr. Benedict was turning Stanley’s treatment over to an associate, apparently freeing himself to trim more nails and check the literature on other problematic cases. Since brusqueness often passes for efficiency, I was impressed by the speed with which Dr. Stallings produced a squeeze bottle of ointment from the lab, complete with a perfectly centered, pasted-on instruction label and a baggie full of cotton swabs as a sidekick.
Bob Tarte Page 6
