Theme
8:26pm September 2, 2014
My reward for rescuing my friends birb from somewhere my (wheelchair user) friend couldn’t stand up and reach.  I am apparently a very good Quaker parrot rescuer because I don’t flinch or pull away or scream even when being pecked in seriously painful (but not very damaging) ways.  Quaker parrots know all the best spots to hurt a human – nipples, the inside of elbows, grab the skin at the back of your neck and twist, that kind of thing.  And this one was both sick, and pissed, so she bit all over both of my hands as I tried to get her down from where she was.  I’ve seriously got scars on my hands from this birb. She’s a very sweet birb when she’s with her human, but not so sweet to anyone else.  Although she likes to dance with me.  I get the feeling she wants to be my friend, but being my friend would require shedding her badass image that she likes to send out, as a way of dealing with years of abuse and neglect.  So I try to just ignore the bites and she’s warming up to me more and more.   She even lets me pet her head sometimes when we’ve got her wrapped for meds – she could struggle at that point, but she doesn’t, and she seems to actually enjoy it, it’s almost like she’s saying “I have an excuse to enjoy this now, because I can’t get away from you, so I’m going to act like it’s all your fault, but I’m going to lay here looking ridiculously happy and even helping you pet me a little, as long as you don’t acknowledge it, no don’t acknowledge it at all, because I am a seriously bad-ass birb and I can’t show weakness or affection except with my main human.” But according to her main human, the less you react to her pecking you, the less she pecks you, and the more she warms up to you as a person.  So I’ve learned to just take the pain (I’ve had surgery where anesthetic failed, bird bites are not going to faze me) and she’s getting more and more friendly with me.  I love dancing with her.  We rock side to side in the same rhythm.  I can tell she likes me, she just isn’t sure if she can or should like me. She actually reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger, and her human has seen that too.  She says she has this habit of taking in “rescue cases” and that the bird and I both qualify.   This is not offensive to me (and it’s nothing like that horrible “broken baby bird” comment someone made about me once, context is everything) because we have the kind of relationship where that kind of joking around is okay.  She saved my life, and she did so under circumstances where she lost a lot in her own life in order to do it.  She did it because she cares that much about other people.  And she saw a lot of her younger self in me, and wanted to spare me some of the worst experiences in her own life, because she wasn’t sure I’d survive them.  I lacked a lot of the survival skills that she had, and she was quite worried I’d end up on the streets and die there. Anyway, this parrot came from a rescue group after such severe abuse and neglect that when she came to us she was emaciated and had no feathers just about anywhere.  We didn’t think she’d live out the week.  My friend told her, “I don’t know if you’re going to live, but even if you only live a few days, I will make those the best few days of your life.”  To our surprise, her body was tough enough she pulled through.  But now she has hepatitis and we’re quite worried about her again.  But she’s been through so much, if any bird can survive, this one can, both emotionally and physically she’s just tough as nails. She’s also very cute, and very sweet, but she is guarded about showing that side of herself, and can get angry if people notice it too much.  I swear, it really is like looking at me several years ago.  I felt like I had to be a fighter, all the time.  I felt like showing love and affection was showing weakness that could be taken advantage of.  I felt like coming on strong, and hostile, was the best way to go, sometimes. I was wrong, of course.  And when my tough facade started melting, I was so happy.  So happy and so sad, all at once, for all the years that I had missed because I was too busy trying to be tough, trying to disconnect from other people because they might hurt me the way I’d been hurt, that I wasn’t connecting, I wasn’t having the experiences I had always wanted to have.  And all those years of thinking that cutting myself off from my innate lovingness, tenderness, and compassion was making me stronger, when it was actually doing the opposite.  I see all of this and more in this bird.  Parrots have highly complex social and emotional lives, with better social skills than humans have.  The way she has had to live has really messed her up.  But she’s really blossomed since moving to a safe environment where she’s loved and provided with everything she could possibly need.  It doesn’t matter that there’s only one person she loves, she at least loves that one person with her entire heart.  As she feels safer maybe she’ll find more friends, she seems to want us to be friends, she just doesn’t want to admit it to herself because that wouldn’t be badass in her eyes.  And she desperately wants to be badass. (She’s also unbearably cute, and doesn’t understand that people have trouble seeing her badass side when she’s looking utterly adorable.  She even has this song that sounds totally cute and sweet until you hear the words, which are “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, shit.”  But it sounds ultra-cute until you hear the words.  Cuteness can be quite the handicap when you really really want people to see you as powerful and strong and brave and curmudgeonly.  Of course, she is all those things, it’s just most people can’t see past the cute.  She’s amazingly brave and strong to have pulled through the hell that she had to live in, both emotionally and physically.) Anyway… bird bite.  Not a big deal, but holy crap her beak was sharper than usual today.  At least she didn’t dig a ditch in my hand the way she did one time – she just dug out a chunk of skin and I’ve still got the scar.  But I love her.  I can’t help loving her.  She is so reminiscent of myself when I was younger, and she’s got such an intense and loving personality under all the bluster and bravado, it’s impossible not to love her.  And I know that her human loves her even more, and that if anything happens to her, she’ll be devastated.  I remember when she lost her last bird, who was the most asshole unlovable bird on the planet, like hard-core bird people could not stand this bird.  And she was still crying and screaming inconsolably the whole way to the vet and back.  She has a much better relationship with this bird, so I can only imagine if the hepatitis gets to her… I don’t want to think about it.  :-(   They have such an amazing bond.  I want them to grow old together.

My reward for rescuing my friends birb from somewhere my (wheelchair user) friend couldn’t stand up and reach.  I am apparently a very good Quaker parrot rescuer because I don’t flinch or pull away or scream even when being pecked in seriously painful (but not very damaging) ways.  Quaker parrots know all the best spots to hurt a human – nipples, the inside of elbows, grab the skin at the back of your neck and twist, that kind of thing.  And this one was both sick, and pissed, so she bit all over both of my hands as I tried to get her down from where she was.  I’ve seriously got scars on my hands from this birb.

She’s a very sweet birb when she’s with her human, but not so sweet to anyone else.  Although she likes to dance with me.  I get the feeling she wants to be my friend, but being my friend would require shedding her badass image that she likes to send out, as a way of dealing with years of abuse and neglect.  So I try to just ignore the bites and she’s warming up to me more and more.  

She even lets me pet her head sometimes when we’ve got her wrapped for meds – she could struggle at that point, but she doesn’t, and she seems to actually enjoy it, it’s almost like she’s saying “I have an excuse to enjoy this now, because I can’t get away from you, so I’m going to act like it’s all your fault, but I’m going to lay here looking ridiculously happy and even helping you pet me a little, as long as you don’t acknowledge it, no don’t acknowledge it at all, because I am a seriously bad-ass birb and I can’t show weakness or affection except with my main human.”

But according to her main human, the less you react to her pecking you, the less she pecks you, and the more she warms up to you as a person.  So I’ve learned to just take the pain (I’ve had surgery where anesthetic failed, bird bites are not going to faze me) and she’s getting more and more friendly with me.  I love dancing with her.  We rock side to side in the same rhythm.  I can tell she likes me, she just isn’t sure if she can or should like me.

She actually reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger, and her human has seen that too.  She says she has this habit of taking in “rescue cases” and that the bird and I both qualify.  

This is not offensive to me (and it’s nothing like that horrible “broken baby bird” comment someone made about me once, context is everything) because we have the kind of relationship where that kind of joking around is okay.  She saved my life, and she did so under circumstances where she lost a lot in her own life in order to do it.  She did it because she cares that much about other people.  And she saw a lot of her younger self in me, and wanted to spare me some of the worst experiences in her own life, because she wasn’t sure I’d survive them.  I lacked a lot of the survival skills that she had, and she was quite worried I’d end up on the streets and die there.

Anyway, this parrot came from a rescue group after such severe abuse and neglect that when she came to us she was emaciated and had no feathers just about anywhere.  We didn’t think she’d live out the week.  My friend told her, “I don’t know if you’re going to live, but even if you only live a few days, I will make those the best few days of your life.”  To our surprise, her body was tough enough she pulled through.  But now she has hepatitis and we’re quite worried about her again.  But she’s been through so much, if any bird can survive, this one can, both emotionally and physically she’s just tough as nails.

She’s also very cute, and very sweet, but she is guarded about showing that side of herself, and can get angry if people notice it too much.  I swear, it really is like looking at me several years ago.  I felt like I had to be a fighter, all the time.  I felt like showing love and affection was showing weakness that could be taken advantage of.  I felt like coming on strong, and hostile, was the best way to go, sometimes.

I was wrong, of course.  And when my tough facade started melting, I was so happy.  So happy and so sad, all at once, for all the years that I had missed because I was too busy trying to be tough, trying to disconnect from other people because they might hurt me the way I’d been hurt, that I wasn’t connecting, I wasn’t having the experiences I had always wanted to have.  And all those years of thinking that cutting myself off from my innate lovingness, tenderness, and compassion was making me stronger, when it was actually doing the opposite.  I see all of this and more in this bird.  Parrots have highly complex social and emotional lives, with better social skills than humans have.  The way she has had to live has really messed her up.  But she’s really blossomed since moving to a safe environment where she’s loved and provided with everything she could possibly need.  It doesn’t matter that there’s only one person she loves, she at least loves that one person with her entire heart.  As she feels safer maybe she’ll find more friends, she seems to want us to be friends, she just doesn’t want to admit it to herself because that wouldn’t be badass in her eyes.  And she desperately wants to be badass.

(She’s also unbearably cute, and doesn’t understand that people have trouble seeing her badass side when she’s looking utterly adorable.  She even has this song that sounds totally cute and sweet until you hear the words, which are “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, shit.”  But it sounds ultra-cute until you hear the words.  Cuteness can be quite the handicap when you really really want people to see you as powerful and strong and brave and curmudgeonly.  Of course, she is all those things, it’s just most people can’t see past the cute.  She’s amazingly brave and strong to have pulled through the hell that she had to live in, both emotionally and physically.)

Anyway… bird bite.  Not a big deal, but holy crap her beak was sharper than usual today.  At least she didn’t dig a ditch in my hand the way she did one time – she just dug out a chunk of skin and I’ve still got the scar.  But I love her.  I can’t help loving her.  She is so reminiscent of myself when I was younger, and she’s got such an intense and loving personality under all the bluster and bravado, it’s impossible not to love her.  And I know that her human loves her even more, and that if anything happens to her, she’ll be devastated.  I remember when she lost her last bird, who was the most asshole unlovable bird on the planet, like hard-core bird people could not stand this bird.  And she was still crying and screaming inconsolably the whole way to the vet and back.  She has a much better relationship with this bird, so I can only imagine if the hepatitis gets to her… I don’t want to think about it.  :-(   They have such an amazing bond.  I want them to grow old together.

Notes:
  1. callmemonstrous said: thank you for your stories about animals. there’s so much that hurts and is bad and animals are just so wonderful.
  2. vulturechow said: this was nice to read
  3. withasmoothroundstone posted this