Fowl Weather (36 page)

But newcomer Louie nearly knocked Dusty off his leather throne. When I made a version of the shoelace-and-bauble toy for Louie, she bested the big parrot by untying each knot in under fifteen seconds, using just her beak. Thus, a toy with four wooden pieces amused Louie for about a minute, which was less time than it took for me to string the thing together.

Unlike Dusty, who refused to loosen the laces if I fixed my eye upon him, Louie wasn't the least bit shy about performing her stunt for an audience. That made her the only one of our birds who faithfully fulfilled our brags in front of company. Dusty balked at talking, Howard hovered but rarely landed on my head, and Ollie neither bit us into oblivion nor unleashed his usual torrent of hideous squawks for the amazement of strangers. But Louie proved utterly dependable with the shoelace trick. All I had to do was tie a knot and she immediately undid it, to the oohs and ahhs of onlookers.

This did not please Dusty, who was loath to lose the knot-loosening concession, so he came up with a dazzling topper of his own. His modus operandi had always been to drop the leather laces to the floor of his cage when he had finished untying them. But one afternoon as I was about to change his water, I noticed that he had looped a shoelace through the metal bracket that held his dish in place. My exaggerated acclaim for this latest stunt turned genuine when I realized that he had decorated the end with a fancy knot that neither Eagle Scout nor New England fisherman would be apt to duplicate.

“Oh, my gosh,” I asked him, “did you do that?” He stretched his neck and bit his rope toy in response, in a sure sign of his delight.

His handiwork became an almost daily ritual. Before leaving for work in the morning, I'd put in my request: “Are you going to tie me a knot today?” If Dusty found himself in a generous mood, by midafternoon he'd leave me another of his creations. More often than not, he'd dunk the knot in his water dish, and I'd have to hang out his little piece of artistry to dry.

“Two of those would make a nice pair of earrings,” Linda observed.

“Let's give him some gold wire and a few diamonds and see what he comes up with,” I suggested.

Instead of filling the gap left by Stanley Sue, my interactions with Louie and Dusty made me miss her all the more. I started thinking that the only way to get over her death would be to get another Timneh.

Bill Holm oh so helpfully advised me in the matter while we tramped through the woods near the river, making too much noise to find any migrating spring warblers.

“If Turbo were to be, say, crushed by a boulder, I'd grieve.”

“Turbo? Who's Turbo?”

“But I would probably buy another Volvo and love it,” he rattled on. “I couldn't bring myself to call it Turbo, because nothing could replace him. Volvos are not interchangeable.”

“Only the parts and pieces,” I said.

I didn't see this as an issue of interchangeability. But I had to admit that should anything happen to Bill, I would certainly want another self-obsessed Swede for a pal.

The simple fact was that I seemed to need a Timneh the same way a schizophrenic needed voices in the head. But I wouldn't expect another parrot to take Stanley Sue's place—not unless it miraculously developed a penchant for clipping off rabbit tails, slitting open dove necks, and eviscerating the woodwork. Stanley Sue
would eternally remain my sweetie no matter what other Timneh brought its complicated disposition into my life.

O
VER THE YEARS,
Linda and I had taken in orphaned birds—from starlings to geese—as well as the occasional wayfaring cat. Few folks offered us mammals, which had resulted in a glaring deficiency in the skunk department. As I poked my head down the stairwell in response to voices just inside the living room, I knew without a doubt not only that Linda was discussing an animal but also what kind of animal was involved.

“I didn't know if you'd take it,” a man said, “so I didn't bring it with me.” Even from the top of the stairs, I begged to disagree. He might have left the skunk at home, but he carried its essence with him.

“Sweetie,” Linda called. I followed my nose downstairs, and she introduced me to Lou Parrish, our neighbor from a mile down the road. “A poor mother skunk got run over in front of Meijer, and one of the babies sat next to her body for six hours.” I shook Lou's hand, wondering if this act transferred Pepé Le Pew's calling card to me. “The baby hadn't had any food all day, and Lou's kids felt so sorry for it that he finally picked up the baby and took it home, and gave it food and water. His daughter held it in her lap and petted it, and she didn't get sprayed.”

I nodded at our neighbor. He seemed fatigued by the rescue process and apparently ignorant of the fact that the miasma of skunk clung to his clothes. The baby must have picked up the smell from its flattened mom. I hoped that Lou wouldn't offer me a ride in his assuredly odoriferous van to pick up the foundling. I had no grudge against skunks, since they infrequently visited us. Yet I felt slightly disturbed that we were evidently the go-to people in the area when it came to them.

Linda didn't even need to open her mouth. I knew what she was going to ask. “Can we take the baby and keep it in the barn? Lou's got to go out of state this afternoon. He has to visit his son in Oklahoma, so he can't take care of it.”

I couldn't come up with an excuse to head out of state myself. “I guess it's okay. As long as it stays in the barn,” I added with my usual naïveté. Fate, aided by Linda, would soon decide otherwise. I failed to take another important fact into consideration, too: one of us would have to transfer the skunk from Lou's pet carrier to a rabbit cage in the barn. That task automatically fell to me.

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.

A
T 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 rippling of my fingers prompting, “Let's go get our treats.”