Sigmund

It seems I haven’t told you about Sigmund yet. New foster bird. He came in with another grey and I brought him home because no one had really been able to handle him yet.


For the whole three weeks I have had him, he hasn’t given me a problem once. He steps up very nicely. I am thinking he just prefers the left-handed approach. I am still trying to get a handle on his vocabulary, but he is a very good eater.

Obviously, he has been a pretty bad feather plucker. But I am encouraged by some new feather growth and he does not seem to be picking at it.

So, my first Sigmund story starts with the note that last Sunday my mother fell in the garage and broke her foot. When I was awakened in the middle of the night by something crashing, I was sure it was her. I burst into her room and all was quiet. She’s looking at me like I’m a lunatic.

If it wasn’t her, it had to be the birds. I remembered that the morning of the earthquake, Kiwi had fallen on her face and gotten all bruised. I went downstairs and found blood all over Sigmund’s cage. He was sitting in the water dish, all shaken up. I had to towel him to get him to the bathroom and assess the damage.

He was all frantic and wouldn’t let me check him out, but the bleeding had stopped. I figured that he had fallen off his high perch and banged a blood feather that was growing in on his wing. There didn’t appear to be anything broken.

So, feeling all sick and light-headed, I put him back to bed, figuring I would ask our director to take a look at him the next day, just in case. He was not at all surprised. Apparently, Sigmund is a rather clumsy bird.

So here’s the funny part. My mother was saying that while a crashing noise made me first think “Mom fell” and second think “Birds fell”, her brain went to “someone is in the house”. Right at that moment I realized that our front door had been unlocked the entire night. She thought a second and said, “Well, I knew that no one was in the house because you had gone downstairs and would have screamed if someone was there.”

“Mom. I couldn’t scream. I’d lost my voice.”

She said, “I couldn’t have helped you anyway. My foot is broken.”