House a little noisier with one less bird

Sometimes when I get home, my housemate Cortney is already asleep. 

I make the valiant attempt at quietly working through my evening routine in hopes of not waking her. Sometimes, I am successful, sometimes not so much.

Simon, my little green Quaker Parakeet, always wakes when I come home.

He’ll mumble a greeting, or perhaps a gripe, quietly as though he knows of my ongoing effort at stealth. Then he settles back on his perch and falls fast asleep.

But, one night last month, I pulled into the driveway and noticed the kitchen light still on. When I walked into the house, Cortney stood still in front of the sink.

“I cleaned out the birds’ cage,” she said as I walked inside and dropped my armload of stuff in the dining area.

“Oh, good,” I answered absentmindedly, then added “You sure are up late.”

Then I looked at Cortney and her chin quivered.

“You OK?” I asked.

No, she wasn’t. We lost a member of our flock that night.

In addition to Simon, Cortney and I, our flock consists of the cockatiels Momma and Little One and the Budgerigars Dot and Gringo.

Little One died sometime after I left for work and before Cortney got home. Little One was a lutino color mutation, meaning she was predominately white with some yellow, rather than the standard grey cockatiel with orange cheeks.

Little One had been sick for some time with an air sac infection Cortney had tried and tried to treat. She even took the little bird to a vet in Northern Virginia on the recommendation of her vet here.

The difficulty with sick birds is that they often hide symptoms of illness until they are very sick. Illness is a sign of weakness and, in the wild, weak birds become prey.

While the treatments, I’m convinced, prolonged Little One’s life, they could not get rid of the infection.

Long before Cortney and I lived together, I had lost a member of my flock.

Tessa, also a cockatiel, died of kidney failure about five years ago. Tessa and Simon were a tight pair — they either caused trouble together or did things to annoy each other.

Simon grieved for her.

He would eat little unless I hand-fed him. And he would call out for her. 

After about a week, his mourning subsided and his craving for my attention became pronounced. He still enjoys being hand-fed, but that’s really because he’s spoiled.

Now, Momma, who shared a cage with Little One, isn’t grieving as deeply as Simon once did.

She’s never stopped eating and she’s always been one to push her way in if Cortney is paying attention to something else. Her method is the classic head butt, serving as her way of requesting a head rub.

But there is a marked difference in the house without Little One.

It is louder.

Momma calls out much more than before — to Simon, to me, to Cortney, to anyone who might stop for a moment and talk to her, scratch her head or just let her sit with them for a while.