Kirby

When I woke up yesterday and came downstairs HWNSNBP told me that he thought there was something wrong with Kirby and I could soon see that he was right.  The last couple of years Kirby had taken to sometimes sleeping/resting on the bottom of his cage rather than on one of the perches because sometimes he would fall off.  Yesterday was a little different though.  He couldn't get himself up the side and was walking in circles, often losing his balance as his leg would go through the bars on the bottom.  I took him out of the cage and he made no attempt to nip at me and let me stroke him without a fuss.  He closed his eyes off and on and I found a basket with a dishtowel to put him in so I could watch him while I ate breakfast.  He periodically got up and walked around in the basket but didn't attempt to jump out.  I held him as much as I could all day.  Towards the evening he was starting to have tremors or it could have been seizures, but he wasn't eating and I knew it wouldn't be long.    It was very hard putting him back in the cage last night because I was certain that he would be gone in the morning.  Well, as HWNSNBP told our daughter, he must have wanted to say good bye once more because he waited until I came downstairs this morning and picked him up.  It was a matter of a few minutes when he took his last breath and his little head rested for the last time on my fingers.  

My sister had given each of my kids a cockatiel when they were pre-teens.  She thought that they were both males but they weren't.  Kirby was Rachel's bird and the male of the pair.  When they were a couple of years old Pepper, the female, started laying eggs on the bottom of the cage a couple of times each month.  We would remove them because there was no way that she could incubate them on the grate.  After I did a little investigating, we decided to get a roosting box for the side of the cage and sure enough, she laid four eggs in there and began to incubate them.  

I really didn't think that they would hatch, but one evening when Rachel was at band practice and Chris was watching tv I heard a peeping noise.  The first egg had hatched.  And within the next day or so two of the others did also.  The fourth egg failed to hatch.  I don't have any pictures of the babies as I was told that it would not be good for their developing eyesight to use a flash. This was all before digital cameras.  They grew pretty fast and after the first two weeks we had to separate the babies into a cage of their own so that we/I could hand feed them from that point on.  The reasoning behind that is so they become easier to handle and aren't afraid of human touch.  It was an almost round-the-clock job keeping them fed.  I was lucky at the time that I was substituting and could come home at lunchtime to feed them.  

I fed them with a syringe and had to be careful to get it in their mouths at the right angle or they could choke.  I had visited a woman nearby who raised cockatiels to learn how to do this correctly.  She had told me how to prepare their food and what kind of schedule that they needed to be on.  

It was all going well until they began to fly.  The first time one of them took off, he went splat right into the wall and I thought for sure that he injured himself but he didn't.  I couldn't keep them uncovered after that point.  Eventually they graduated to the same pellets that we feed their parents.  We had people lined up to take them but they backed out and we were left with all five of them.  

We kept the females in one cage and the males in the other.  The females were the first to pass on.  And then it was my little Pidge - my heart broke when he died because he was so imprinted on me.  He would snuggle under my chin when I was watching tv, loved to be handled, and he was a talker.  I cried for days after he died.  

Kirby, the dad, was the last of the brood.  All the while that he and Pidge were together in the same cage Kirby was learning how to talk from his son Pidge.  But, he wouldn't talk to us, he would stand on the top of the cage and face the wall and talk under his breath - so low that you could barely hear him.  Then when Pidge died he talked a little more, but gradually he stopped.  He did continue to mimic our whistles and at one point could do a few bars of Happy Birthday.  But mostly he was an echo to our whistling.  Kirby wasn't as cuddly but could be affectionate when he wanted to be.  Especially when his crest feathers were being replaced.  The feathers have a coating to them when they're new and when you stroke them, the coating will gently fall off.  Cockatiels are considered very dusty birds because of this constant feather regrowth.  

I will miss sharing a Cheez It with him every day.  I will miss his whistles, and watching him sunbathe at the top of the cage.  I'll miss his tickling my ear(s) when he sat on my shoulder.  I'll miss his narcissistic love of himself in shiny objects.  I won't miss his screaming when he was upset or when those certain commercials with horses, hawks, football whistles, basketball sneakers, or screaming children got him going.  But I'll no longer have to tell him that it's okay and he's safe because he's forever safe now.  

Thank you for all of your love Kirby.  You'll be forever in our hearts.  Fly free with your family now.