The Bird who Gave us Away

My poor parrot, my poor DNA test confirmed male parrot, a behaviourally confirmed male parrot who, because of the lack of animalistic understanding due to growing up with us overly-loving humans, makes love to anything animate or inanimate, small or large, blunt or prickly. He grinds his little rear, rubbing onto all things in his vicinity, creating hybrid half-breeds of bird and ball, bird and shoe, bird and toy bird. 

Until we bought him an alleged female lorikeet. Now he tries to grind himself on her. 'She' is significantly smaller than him, but that is probably because of her youth, and three times louder than him. According to my father, she is a female because her held her and stared at her hole. Each bird has a hole, says my dad, but this one is a much larger hole. I plucked her tail feathers anyway and sent them off to a laboratory for somewhat of a conclusion. They would not be a good mix anyway because my poor, dear parrot cannot identify her as another bird, rather he treats her like an object and attempts to bite her feet and wings and exclaims excitedly when she reacts in pain either because of her reaction or purely because he is an evil bird pretending to be stupid. 

Either way, something else of dire concern just struck me before. I finished from the study, the new temporary home for this poor hump-victim, no matter what its gender, and I packed everything away, all set for another big day tomorrow. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to pull back the blinds behind her cage and check if whoever came in last from outside had locked the door - they had not. I thanked God in my head and then locked it. 

And it occurred to me, right there and then - had anyone decided to walk in, anyone being a lucky thief, the other parrot would not hesitate to move out of their way. I bet she, even though she does not speak at the moment, would conjure up some form of humanly dialogue in an attempt to guide the thief to our locations, specifically mine. All I did was hold her an hour for two days, and pluck some tail feathers - three, to be exact. Is that all it takes for this little bird to loathe the floor I stand on and the air that I breathe? Oh, why yes of course. 

I can just imagine it. Her ushering the thief right to me. "Take your time with her," she would say, "she plucked me." To which the thief would reply, "yes ma'am!" And then he would get to me and ask me why I hurt her and I would attempt to justify it with science, a love for my parrot and biology and gender and sexual encounters and he would scoff in my face and try to pluck some of my hairs in the same way that I plucked her feathers. "Science," he would say with each painful tug. And I feel horrible, I truly do, but I felt even more horrible knowing that my sister and father tried a couple of days prior to my attempt to pull them out, only very slowly, shifting them left to right, rotating them like a crooked picture, thus not being able to acquire one even with the help of tweezers. "There's a certain way," I explained to them as I prepared myself for plucking, "you pluck, you don't pull."

Now I stare at the bird cautiously. I do not try to scare it though it fears for its life whenever I pass or come close. And when I do come close, I do it only to feed it a fresh slice of apple. I sure hope she is a female.