I have snakes and I'm obsessed with early music, science fiction and Disney. I'm one step away from living in my parents' basement, partying on the sly with my SCA friends in their parents' basements, smoking pot and giving boys I like obscure and mythologically significant names.
Despite feeding the nerd fire with my extremely dorky posts, I must talk about my pets AGAIN. Just when I think I have them all figured out, they spin me around and make me pin the tail on the donkey. Frederick magically (or should it be magickally?) started eating again last week, Gwendolyn is constantly out of her shell, Stanze walked RIGHT INTO my hand last night...it's madness, I tell you. MADNESS.
Last night, using the dowels Christian bought to make the birds perches for when they're out of the cage (they need foraging areas you know, as we couldn't POSSIBLY let them think they weren't in the wild jungles of Ecuador), I managed to get Stanze out of her cage without grievous bodily injury. I figured out that, if you use one dowel to distract her beak and the other one to press against her abdomen, she's too busy concentrating on annihilating the first to fly away from the second. Some birdie instict kicks in and, while teaching that first dowel who's boss (she is, in all things), she'll unconsciously step onto the second. Now, this only works for as long as it takes to actually lift her from the cage, as she quickly figures out that she can run up the dowel on which she's sitting and bite bite bite those hateful fingers, so I have to have the first dowel ready to intercept her as she guns for my offending hand. She's speedy.
Bloated with my success at getting her out of her cage, I removed her from the living room (and her cage area) into the bedroom to lessen her sense of protectiveness for her daily stepping up practice. I was still a little leery of offering my hand as a sacrificial meal, so I passed her from dowel to dowel for about fifteen minutes until she stopped running at my digits and could sit still and take the proffered dowel with her feet rather than her beak. However, after about another five minutes, she got a really cheesed off look on her face as though to say that she got the point and look how good of a bird she was being, not having bitten me in ten whole minues, so could she please fly about a bit. Please?? She flapped pathetically to my bedside table without waiting for permission and hid beside a glass and back scratcher as though she thought the horrible probing stick couldn't see her through the magnifying properties of the water. I didn't want her to get the crazy idea that she was in charge, so I set my hand about six inches in front of her and said "come here" in my most stern and "I'm actually terrified of you but am pretending that I'm not" voice. She ran across the top of the table right into my palm and looked up at me with those little black, blinking eyes. Crack. My heart split in two and lay throbbing on the floor. I picked her up and she kept cocking her head and looking at me with the same bewildered expression which I'm sure I was giving her. She let me kiss her and kiss her and kiss her and I gave her a good scratch in return. It was the happiest I've been in months.
Of course, when she got within five feet of her cage, she whipped herself into a frenzy of hormones and fluff and chattered angrily at me when I put the cover over the cage, but I knew we had made progress.
My bird loves me.
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