Simon learning to share home with other creatures

In addition to sharing his household with me and with our roommate, Simon must also endure the company of two other creatures.

The little green Quaker parakeet didn’t realize that adding Catherine to the flock meant adding her two cats.

At first, we ensured that there was no interaction between the cats and Simon. Security measures included the installation of a kick plate on the bottom of Simon’s door to prevent little paws from reaching under the door in an attempt to jack it open.

Simon has his own room now, complete with a television, a PlayStation, a comfy chair and a radio set to NPR.

The boys, whom I call by abbreviating their names to Boo and Mechi, are not allowed in Simon’s room. This annoys the solid black Boo to no end.

The benefit to Simon having his own room is that the Cheerios that are occasionally flung at my head are contained in one space.

However, Simon has spent so much of his life with me in the center of everything that I think he misses watching the day-to-day of my life. Before now, we’ve never lived some place with enough room for him to have his own space.

I think Simon misses watching dinner being cooked, the floors vacuumed and the books being read.

So, a couple weeks ago, I decided to conduct an experiment. I brought Simon — locked up tightly in his cage — downstairs and set him on the dining room table while Catherine’s boys still roamed the house.

For a few minutes, the boys remained upstairs. Then slowly, the black Boo and his yang, the white Mechi, crept downstairs.

Boo set up camp about 10 feet away from the dining room table and Mechi, the more shy of the two, set up camp about 20 feet away, and the two stared up at Simon without blinking.

Simon glared back.

Then Boo got up and crept a few feet closer. Mechi got up, too, and crept a few feet farther away.

This process repeated as I watched from the couch.

Then Boo hopped up onto the dining room chair, and Catherine flew out of the kitchen and knocked him from the chair so swiftly that Boo didn’t have any time to react.

Mechi took that as his sign to scurry upstairs, out of the danger zone.

Boo backed off and laid down about 15 feet from the prey he had been eyeing and turned his gaze onto his owner, glaring at her for interrupting his hunt.

Simon chuckled.

The scene that played out before him didn’t seem to alarm him. Perhaps he knew we wouldn’t let the boys get to him, or that he was locked up securely in his cage since he had already tried all manner of escape, or he was itching to nip one of their noses if they dared push it up against his bars with their quarter-inch spacing.

Whatever the case, Simon enjoyed his interaction much more than the two boys did. They did not reappear for the remainder of the evening.