If only we had loam instead of oak.

When I get home from work, the first thing I do is let Cyril out of his cage. I hear the rustling and impatience as soon as I open the door. The top of his cage has a "playtop" held open by a wooden perch, which he only sits on when we wants to be the highest being in the room. He usually waddles over to the little birds' cage and flaps for a few minutes, whether to establish that he could, in fact, gobble them up with one bite (although he's afraid of Fritz since the great October toe-biting incident) or to exercise, I don't know. He then climbs back into his cage, retrieves a pellet, climbs back out again and perches on the very front of the top of the cage and eats the pellet, holding it in his three toed foot, occasionally losing his balance from leaning over too far while trying to catch a glimpse of me in the kitchen, as I may be making him up a sumptous meal of beans and cooked squash. Mmmmm. Lima beans. He looks like a little spectator at a ball game, eating popcorn with one hand (foot) while watching the game with the one eye not facing the back wall. It must be hard to have monocular vision.

When we bought our first bird, all the books warned of the parrot blast radius. As parrotlets are so tiny, the amount of mess they created was equally tiny. However, Cyril is a medium size bird and makes a medium sized mess, right in front of his cage; a constant rain of bits of pellet, bits of his breakfast, bits of treats from the previous night, all in a little, filthy pile in front of his cage, into which I step every time I walk by, and then track into other parts of the house. I find broken pieces of nut shell in the bathroom, and not from my own consumption. Now, I know that the biological purpose of this disturbingly barbaric means of eating is to ensure future generations of the jungles and forests that are parrots' natural habitats, but my living room does not need to be planted. The food he eats wouldn't be good for growing anything, anyway. Well, maybe the squash. It grows well in Seattle living rooms, I hear.