Enslaved by Ducks (9 page)

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 handled 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.

“Apply this to the injured area twice a day,” she informed me. Detecting my hesitation, she said, “You can handle your bird, can’t you?”

“Certainly,” I nodded, envisioning Linda taking on the job.

We managed to bushwhack and towel-wrap Stanley that evening in the manner taught to me by Dr. Benedict. He chewed
at the folded material as we swabbed his twin groins with a Q-Tip, but he didn’t make a serious effort to pay us back with a bite. His gentleness impressed me even as his condition worsened. Within forty-eight hours, his droppings had become watery, and soon we were changing the newspapers on the bottom of his cage three times a day. A phone call to Dr. Stallings elicited the bland response, “That’s a typical side effect of the medicine. If it continues,” she said, “it may mean your bird has suffered liver damage, and we would have to investigate possible treatment protocols for that condition.”

Numbness radiated through my body. “And this is all because of the drug you gave me?” I asked.

“It happens occasionally.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” I demanded. “Why wouldn’t you warn me about the side effects of a drug before prescribing it?”

“It’s your responsibility as a pet owner to ask about side effects before administering any medicine,” she insisted. “If we were to get bogged down with the question of side effects, we couldn’t even prescribe aspirin.”

Sickened and depressed, I basted my worries with the glum certainty that I had somehow harmed my bird through negligence, failing Lynn, failing Stanley’s previous two owners, and reneging on a promise whispered through a cage cover to spoil our bird, not ruin him. I managed to squeak a request to Linda to make an appointment for Stanley with the dependable Dr. Hedley.

Dr. Hedley divided his time between his private clinic and consultations with zoos in several cities. Though neither massive nor obviously muscular, he projected a sense of strength that made it easy to envision him wrestling an ostrich to the ground to administer an antibiotic injection or placing his head in a lion’s mouth to check its molars. If anyone could help Stanley, I figured it would be a man who dealt regularly with rhesus monkeys and Maribou storks, and
Dr. Hedley didn’t disappoint me. He told me he’d been busy at his northern Wisconsin cottage excavating hollows in dead trees at fifty-foot elevations to serve as housing for pileated woodpeckers.

“Doesn’t the height bother you?” I asked.

“If it doesn’t bother the woodpeckers, now why should it bother me?” he laughed. “Actually, your bird looks pretty good. We’ve got a couple of leathery scabs developing where the injuries were, and they make a natural bandage better than anything I could prescribe.”

When I showed him the medication Dr. Stallings had prescribed, he assured me Stanley’s watery droppings were nothing more serious than a short-term side effect. “But I would never use a cortisone-based medicine for a bird,” he admonished. “The problem is that birds won’t leave an injured area alone. They lick it, and any topical ointment gets into their systems through their tongues. Our best bet is to let Stanley continue to heal without any intervention.”

Eager to prevent another parrot owner from going through a similar experience, I naively called Dr. Benedict that same day and told him what Dr. Hedley had advised me regarding Dr. Stallings’s prescription. Dr. Benedict had been our vet of choice in dealing with the difficult Ollie, and we enjoyed such a good rapport, Linda had more than once considered inviting him over for dinner. After hearing me out, he was silent for a moment.

“So you’ve been badmouthing our practice,” he said.

“I haven’t been badmouthing anyone,” I replied, as my delight at sharing a clinical insight evaporated. “I didn’t mention any names,” I insisted, failing to mention that Dr. Stallings’s name was clearly visible on the perfectly centered squeeze-bottle label. “I simply told Dr. Hedley what another vet had instructed us to do and the effect it had on Stanley, who seems to be doing a little better,” I
added brightly. But Dr. Benedict would not be lured into discussing Stanley’s health.

He made me explain in detail how we had administered the ointment to our bird, then quizzed me on minute aspects of the procedure like a prosecuting attorney probing for the weakness in a robbery suspect’s alibi.

“Dr. Stallings’s instructions call for the application of a thin layer of the ointment. How did you determine whether you were applying a thin layer or not?” he asked with great satisfaction.

After several minutes of cross-examination, I managed to hang up the phone.

Following Dr. Hedley’s orders, we ignored Stanley’s abrasions, and he healed, to enjoy once again a half-hour of television after dinner. But I soon learned to avoid nature programs, since the appearance of a hawk in flight prompted him to emit an ear-piercing alarm call. A year later, his mysterious condition recurred, though it was far milder the second time around. Dr. Hedley was in Illinois treating a wildebeest, forcing us to try yet another vet. The lanky and affable Dr. Fuller told us that Stanley’s problems were behavioral. When I asked for a translation, he told me, “He’s chewing on himself.” He reminded me that parrots occasionally engage in feather-plucking and other self-mutilating behavior when they become agitated over a prolonged period of time. “You told me this occurred the first time almost exactly a year ago. Is there anything that happens this time of year which might be causing your bird anxiety?”

“Nothing that I can think of,” I answered. “This is the time of year we always go on vacation.”

“That could well be the cause,” he said. “Especially if your bird has a tendency toward nervousness.” Just to be on the safe side that
nothing microbial was amiss, Dr. Fuller took a blood test, then asked if I’d like a drop of Stanley’s blood reserved for determining his gender through a new DNA test. I agreed to the procedure without giving it much thought. But a week later I was shocked to receive a laboratory report in the mail that stated:

Subject’s name: Stanley

Type of bird: African grey Timneh parrot

Gender: Female

“I knew it,” Linda moaned. “You never should have gotten him tested.”

“We had to know,” I insisted. “I really should have figured it out a long time ago, anyway. She’s way too much of a pest to be a male.”

Nevertheless, I didn’t want to start over with a brand-new name. Stanley had been through enough trauma in her short life, and suddenly calling her Guinevere or Edwina could send her over the top. Recalling that bird behavioralist Sally Blanchard had rechristened her African grey Bongo as Bongo Marie once she had learned the parrot’s true gender, I promptly adopted Stanley Sue as the full legal name for our pet.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Linda complained. “That’s my middle name.”

“You took my name when we got married. You were Linda Bush. Now you’re Linda Tarte. So you can share one of your many names with Stanley. Fair is fair.”

As it turned out, Stanley’s self-inflicted injury did not amount to much the second time around, though she was fussy about hopping onto my hand for about a month. Dr. Fuller opined that Stanley was learning to trust us. My thinking was that finally calling her a name that more or less suited her gender had deflated a latent sexual identity problem. Or something along those lines. But so much had happened
over the last twelve months that Stanley’s gender switcheroo was a minor adjustment. Our animal population had suddenly exploded. Somehow, when my attention had apparently been vaguely directed elsewhere, we had taken on a rabbit, a ring-neck dove, and three parakeets, a combination that dramatically complicated our lives.