The Complete Collection

Birdie moves lightly and quickly, heavy air means nothing. She hops up to the top perch and wipes her beak, sharpening it, checking, the way dogs sniff trees.

She’s yellow, the yellow of a lemon. Her tail feathers and wing tips are lighter, almost white. The feathers on her upper legs are lighter too. Her legs are orange-pink, lighter than pigeon legs, delicately thin. She has three toes forward and one back like all tree birds, and her nails are long and thin, translucent, with a fine vein down the center. She’s medium-sized for a canary and has a rounded, very feminine head; her eyes are bright black, her beak exactly the color of her legs. Small pink nostril holes are tucked under the feathers of her head at the top of her beak.

She peeps again and turns around on the perch to face the other way. She does this without seeming to use her wings. She springs lightly up, twists her body, and is facing the other way. It’s the same move an ice skater makes when she jump turns, only with much less effort. Birdie does this while still eyeing me left and right, shaking her head back and forth, a bird ‘no’.

Her eyes lose focus and she goes into total vision. She isn’t looking at me anymore. She jumps down to the bottom perch and sees the water cup. She tips her head in, dips her beak into the water, and tilts her head back. She does this three times. Like pigeons, she can’t swallow up. She lets the water flow down into her throat. It looks as if she closes her beak over a certain small quantity of water, not more than a drop, then holds it till she tilts up so it rolls down her throat.

After drinking, she hops to the floor of the cage. A bird needs sharp gravel to grind food in its crop. She hops around, making sand rattle on the paper again, takes a few grains, then jumps up on the bottom perch again for some birdseed.

The seed I’ve bought contains rape, a tiny black round seed; canary seed, a thin tan-colored shiny seed with a white fruit; rolled oats; and linseed. She dips into the food dish and spreads seeds around till she finds one of the rolled oats. She picks it up, peels off the shell and eats the fruit. It’s done quickly. While she’s eating, she looks over at me twice. Birds are very suspicious while they’re eating. She eats about five seeds; the rolled oat, two rape seeds and at least one canary seed. She uses a different technique to peel each type. She doesn’t eat any linseeds. Linseeds are to keep the feathers in condition.

It’s amazing how well birds can work seeds out of the shell using only their beaks; no arms, no hands.

Later, I try eating birdseed to see what it’s like. I spend hours cracking seed with my teeth. One mouthful takes a full hour. You can’t eat the shells because they’re bitter.

After Birdie’s eaten, she leaps with one slight flick of her wings, a hardly noticeable flick, from the bottom perch, turns around in midair and lands on the top perch, at least four times her height. It’s as if I jumped off the porch right up onto the roof. She peeps at me from there. I try to peep back.

She checks the bars of the cage with her beak and nibbles some cuttlebone. Cuttlebone is from a fish; it has calcium and other minerals for birds. She constantly tries to talk to me, or maybe she’s trying to discover any other birds around. There’s a sad sound in the peep, interrogative, going up at the end, peeEEP? She opens her beak half way when she says it and of ten says it just as she leaves one perch for another. Perhaps it’s a signal to let other birds know she’s changing position. I don’t really know enough about canaries.

When it gets dark, I cover her cage with a cloth to protect her from drafts.

The next day is Sunday. I see her trying to bathe in the water cup so I put a saucer of water in the cage. She goes down immediately with a peep that’s different from the others, shorter, more like PEep? She stands on the edge of the dish, shakes her feathers impossibly fast, stretches out her wings to show feathers individually, then throws herself into the water with another short PEep? She goes in and out, splashing, wiggling. There’s a concentration, a total involvement; nothing passive. I’ve watched hundreds of pigeons take baths in water or in dust but it was slow motion compared to Birdie.

After she’s splashed all the water from the saucer and made a soggy mess out of the newspapers on the floor of the cage, she flies wildly around, almost crashing into the bars. Her flight feathers are so wet, they hang bedraggled, resting on the perch. The feathers around her face clump in little bunches. She dashes back and forth, from perch to perch, shaking, vibrating her whole body. Drops of water fly across the room even onto the lenses of the binoculars. They’re like comets charging into my miniature world.

Finally, most of the water shaken off, Birdie begins to preen herself. She takes each feather in her beak and combs it out to the tip. She leans back frequently to the oil sack at the tip of her tail and spreads a thin film of oil over the newly washed feathers, one at a time. The bath, from beginning till end, finishing with a satisfied flurry of fluffiness, takes almost two hours.

I’m really in love with Birdie now. She’s so dainty, so quick, so skilled, and she flies so gracefully. I want to have her fly in my room free but I’m afraid I’ll hurt or frighten her putting her back into the cage. It’s very hard to wait.

That afternoon, I give Birdie a first taste of treat food. I try peeping when I give it to her, the question peeps, peeEEP? I give treat food in a special cup shaped to fit between the bars of the cage and rest on the edge of the middle perch. I keep my hand as near to it as I can when she comes to eat.

The feed has a smell of anise and is sweet. I only put a few grains of seed in the dish. Birdie looks at me where I am with my hand near the food. She cocks her head and tries to see me from different angles. She comes close, then flies away. She pretends she isn’t interested at all and goes down to eat the regular seed. I know she’s curious. At last she comes up and quickly steals one seed out of the dish. She goes to the other end of the perch to eat it. She queeEEP?s at me and I try to queeEEP? back. She comes again and takes another seed. She eats it looking me in the eyes. I don’t move.

She puts one foot onto the little dish to hold it and eats the rest of the seeds. Her foot’s within an inch of my fingers. I can see the tiny pink scales and light veins running down her legs next to my own massive whorled fingerprints. I can smell her, the smell of eggs when they’re still in the shell, probably the smell of feathers. I don’t remember just that smell from pigeons. Pigeon smell is musky with something of old dust; this is a thin perfume.

When she’s finished, she lets go of the dish and wipes her bill on the perch but doesn’t go away.

I queeEEP? at her but she only looks at me. I queeEEP? again. She sees me; she’s questioning what I really am. It lasts maybe ten seconds, a long time for a bird. Then she goes down to the floor of the cage and eats a few grains of sand. I’m very happy.

Next day, I think about Birdie all day at school. I don’t even want to look at people. People can be so gross, especially grown-ups. They grunt and groan, make swallowing and breathing noises all the time. They smell like putrid meat. They crawl around with heavy movements and stand as if they’re nailed to the ground.

At lunch, walking around the track, I practice jumping and turning around. It’s hard to do. It’s much easier if you do it when you’re running. Standing still and jumping up is almost impossible. You’ve got to twist hard enough to get around in the little time you have from the jump and yet not so fast you’re still twisting when you hit the ground. You have to twist back against yourself with your shoulders in the air. I almost do it once by getting down in a crouch and taking an easy jump up and a slow twist. For a second, it feels right, a little bit free, but then I hit the ground wrong and fall. I get too loose up there. I have to speed up my body thinking somehow.

When I come into my room after school, Birdie queeps at me. We keep queeping back and forth while I change from school clothes. I have to go down again and sweep off the back porch. If my mother ever gets an idea I’m spending too much time with a bird, it’ll be like the pigeons all over again.

After the gas tank, I hid my pigeon suit up in the rafters of the garage. I know she’s still looking for it, says she’s going to burn it – going to burn it for my own good, she says.

I can’t figure what she thinks is unhealthy about birds. Does she want me to spend all my time chasing after girls at school or making myself the strongest man in the world, like Al; or maybe hopping up cars and tearing them apart. What’s so healthy about that?

I don’t want any trouble, that’s all. I do a good job on the porch and water the flowers on the window sill. I pick up some papers and a couple of old rusty cans from the back yard. Kids are always throwing tin cans over the fence. If my mother’d stop running out and shaking her mop or broom at them, they’d quit. I still haven’t figured out where she keeps those baseballs. They must be worth a fortune.

Back in my room, I get out some treat food and walk quietly over to the cage. Birdie’s queeping with me. I’m listening to hear if she has anything else to say; I can’t hear anything different. Canary is still a foreign language to me. I got so I could understand most of the things pigeons have to say. They don’t really talk, they only signal each other.

I slide the dish between the wires of the cage onto the perch. She comes up to the perch and stands on the other end. Now, there’s definitely a change in her voice. It’s still queep but much louder, like somebody saying, ‘really?’ It’s qurEEPP?, from deeper in her throat. I can hear it but I can’t do it; I give her a regular queeEEp? back. After a half dozen of these loud qurEEPP?s, she hops left and right along the perch over to me. With each hop she completely turns her body direction to the perch, at the same time keeping her head toward me. Each hop lines the other eye up with mine. She’s shifting her vision from eye to eye as she advances. Incredible, almost impossible to describe, but she does it without seeming to notice.

When Birdie gets to the dish, she puts her feet on it the same as last time and takes her first seed, shelling it without going back along the perch. She has her wing and leg muscles flexed to jump back if I make a move. I’m yearning to shift my finger through the bars of the cage and touch her foot. I feel caged out of her cage.

When she’s finished with the treat food, I stay there with my hand on the cup and bring my face up till my eyes are looking through the bars not more than a foot from where she’s standing. Birdie stands there and looks at me, cocking her head one way, then the other. She gives a qurEEPP?, then jumps down to the perch below. I watch her eat some seed, then some gravel. Being really close like this is even better than watching through binoculars.

When Birdie shits, it’s a semi-hardened mass much smaller than pigeon shit. She tosses it off with a slight thumping of her ass. Most times it’s a single flip, but sometimes it takes two or three. She shits once every five minutes or so. The shit itself has three parts I can see. There’s the outside part which is clear as water, just wetness, then there’s the white part, more solid, something like cream, and then the center which is brownish-black, blacker than human shit and somewhat shaped to come out the ass, like human shit. There’s practically no smell.

Every day that week, when I come home from school, after I’ve done chores, I go upstairs to my room and watch Birdie. First, I change the feed and water; then, if she tries to take a bath in the new water, and she usually does, I give her some water in a saucer. After that, after I’ve watched her bathe and talked to her, I give her some treat food on the end of the perch. She isn’t afraid of me at all now. That is, not for a bird.

The only thing a bird has going for it is that it can fly away. If Birdie knows that living in a cage makes her so vulnerable, it must be terrible. Still, she always keeps herself ready to escape even though there’s no place to go. I try to think what it would be like to have some gigantic bird come and stick his claws into the window of my room with some potato chips or a hoagie. What would I do? Would I go over and get some, even if I had enough regular food in a dish somewhere else?

After the first few days, when I come into the room, Birdie is down on the floor of the cage, running back and forth, looking out over the barrier that holds in the gravel. I think she’s glad to see me, not just because I give her treat food, but because she’s lonely. I’m her one friend now, the only living being she gets to see.

By the end of the week, I rubber-band the treat food dish onto the end of an extra perch and put it into the cage through the door. I lock the door open with a paper clip. At first, Birdie’s shy, but then she jumps onto the perch I’m holding and side-hops over to the treat dish. It’s terrific to see her without the bars between us. She sits eating the treat food at the opening to the door and looking at me. How does she know to look into my eyes and not at the huge finger next to her?

After she’s finished eating, she retreats to the middle of the perch. I lift it gently to give her a ride and a feeling the perch is part of me and not the cage. She shifts her body and flips her wings to keep balance, then looks at me and makes a new sound, like peeEP; very sharp. She jumps off the perch to the bottom of the cage. I take out the perch and try to talk to her but she ignores me. She drinks some water. She doesn’t look at me again till she’s wiped off her beak and stretched both wings, one at a time. She uses her feet to help stretch the wings. Then, she gives a small queeEEP?

Generally, Birdie looks at me more with her right eye than her left. It doesn’t matter which side of the cage I stand. She turns so she can see me with her right eye. Also, when she reaches with her foot to hold the treat dish, or even her regular food dish, she does it with her right foot. She’d be right-handed if she had hands; she’s right-footed or right-sided. She approaches and does most things from the right side. Even when she’s stretching her wings, she always stretches her right wing first. The only exception is she sleeps on her left foot. I think when a bird sleeps you get a good idea of what birds think of the ground. A bird will usually search out the highest place it can find to sleep and then separate itself as best it can from the ground by standing on one foot; in Birdie’s case, her lesser foot. A bird, balled up in puffed-out feathers, standing on one foot, looks nothing like flying. A lizard looks more capable of flying than a sleeping bird.

Because of the way Birdie sleeps, I want to build my bed up against the ceiling of my room. My mother gets all hot and bothered, but my father says it’ll be all right if I pay for the wood myself and don’t knock holes in the walls or floor. We only rent the house.

I pinch wood from the lumberyard at night. I do it the same way Al and I got the wood for the pigeon coop. I sneak in at night and push it out under the fence in back, then go around and get it. I buy bolts and use my father’s tools. Because I can’t attach to walls or ceiling, it has to be self-supporting. The job takes me two weeks. When it’s finished, I fit the mattress and springs into the frame up high. I put the old bedstead out in the garage. I check my pigeon suit and look around for the baseballs.

I build a ladder up to the bed by drilling holes and pegging in steps. It’s like a ship’s ladder when I finish. I even run electricity up there and hang curtain rods from the ceiling. I snitch some material from Sears and make curtains. It’s a great little nest, even better than the loft in the tree. I can crawl up there, pull the curtains and turn on the light. A private place.

By now, Birdie jumps right on the stick when I put it in her cage; even without treat food. She’ll eat the treat food off my finger, too. I wet my finger, push it into the feed bag and some sticks on. I hold my finger at the same place on the perch where I usually put the treat dish and she comes over to pick it off. Her little beak moves fast and is sure and gentle. She cleans it all, down to the little bits caught in my fingernails.

Next day, when Birdie jumps on my perch, I pull it slowly out of the cage. I’ve practiced a lot with moving the perch up and down or back and forth inside the cage so she knows how to stay on and not be scared. As I pull her out through the door, she looks up at the top of the door passing over her head and hops backward to stay in the cage. When she comes to the end of the perch, she hops off into the cage. I begin all over, but it’s the same. After three or four times, I get the idea to put some treat food on my finger so she’ll be eating as I pull her through the door.

This works and when Birdie looks up she’s out of the cage. She gives me a strong qurEEP? when she sees where she is. I hold the perch as steadily as I can and she stands there looking at me. Then she unfocuses and lets the room come to her. It must feel to her like going on a rocket ship and getting out of the earth’s atmosphere.

I hold her there a minute, then slowly lower the perch back to the cage. As I push it through the door, she jumps off the perch and down to the floor. She goes over and eats one seed, then hops to the other side and takes a drink. It looks as if she’s checking to see if her world’s the same as when she left it. She queeps back and forth with me for about half an hour after that. She’s as excited as I am. It’s wonderful to have her free right there in front of me, to know she can flip her wings and fly out into the room. It makes everything different, it makes my room seem as big as the sky.

I’m getting better at queeping. You have to do it with your throat, tight, deep, and use your lips. It can’t be done by whistling.

The next day I take Birdie out of the cage again. This time she only ducks under the crosspiece at the door. I put some treat food on my finger and she hops over to eat it. She touches me for the first time when she puts her foot onto my finger while she eats. I keep her out on the perch for almost five minutes and give her some rides by slowly moving the perch up and down or back and forth. She queeps at me each time and watches my eyes.

I take her over to the cage and instead of putting her in the door, I lean the perch on top of the cage and she hops off. Then, I put the perch just into the opening of the door. After a few queeps and some peEEPs, she jumps onto the perch and into the cage. It’s really a shame to close the door after that.

She knows she’s been smart and brave. She goes over to the perch where I feed her treat food and gives a couple good loud QREEP?s. She actually is saying something new like QREEP-A-REEP?. I put some grains onto my finger and she eats them.

In a few weeks, I have Birdie so she’ll fly out of the cage when I open the door and then she’ll land on the perch when I hold it up to her. She’ll fly off the perch to the other parts of the room, up on my bed, or on the window sill or on the dresser. Then she’ll fly back to my perch. She flies so beautifully with her head out and her feet tucked back. Her wings in the room make a whispering sound. If I want her, all I do is hold out the perch and call her with PeepQuEEP. This is a sound she knows. Probably it’s more her name than Birdie. ‘Birdie’ doesn’t mean anything to her when I say it. I keep thinking of her to myself as Birdie but PeepQuEEP is the name I call her with.

At first, I give her a little grain or two of treat food when she comes to me, but after a while I don’t. I know and she knows we’re playing together.

Sometimes she teases by flying back toward the perch and then, at the last minute, swerving away and landing somewhere else. One time she lands on my head this way. I can watch her fly all day, and I even like to watch her hopping around. She searches all over the floor and finds little things I can’t even see. I watch her carefully to get any droppings. If my mother finds any bird shit on anything, the whole game is finished.

It’s a long time before Birdie lets me stroke her head or her breast. Birds are that way; they don’t even stroke each other. Birdie learns to like it though. She’ll come to my hand and puff up when I run my finger over the top of her head or down her wings. Her toenails need cutting, but every time I try to wrap my hands around her to pick her up, she panics.

Usually when I let Birdie out, I pull the window shade, but one day I forget. She flies out of the cage door when I open it and straight at the window. She hits the pane of glass in full flight and falls fluttering to the floor!

I dash over and pick her up carefully. She’s unconscious, limp in my hand. There’s nothing deader than a dead bird. Movement is most of what a bird is. When they’re dead, they’re only feathers and air.

One of her wings seems dislocated. I carefully fold it back and hold her in my two hands to warm her. She’s still breathing very lightly and quickly. Her heart’s beating against my hand. I look for something broken or bleeding. Her neck is hanging loosely over the end of my fingers and I’m sure she has a broken neck. The way she flies, with her head so far ahead of her body, confident with her flight, this is what would happen.

Her eyes are closed by a pale, bluish, almost transparent lid. There’s nothing I can think to do. I pet her head softly. I PeepQuEEP at her and try to breathe warm air over her. I’m sure she’s dying.

The first sign she shows is to move her head and lift it from hanging over my finger. She opens her eyes and looks at me. She doesn’t struggle. She blinks her eyes slowly and closes them. I PeepQuEEP at her some more. I stroke her head. Then, she opens her eyes and straightens her head. She couldn’t do that if her neck were broken. I begin to hope. I pull her legs out between my fingers and straighten the toes so she’s standing with them on my thigh while I hold her. She closes her eyes again but she keeps her head up. She doesn’t grab with her feet on my thigh. The toes are limp and fold in on themselves.

I hold her quietly some more, petting her head and queeping at her. Then she queeps back; tired, a faint queeEEp? I queep and she queeps again. I loosen my grip and she manages to stand on my thigh. She’s all puffed out in a ball and her feathers are ruffled from the sweat of my hands. I cup her on both sides with my hands so she can’t fall. I hold her again and try to smooth her feathers. I feather out her wings one after the other. They seem all right. I let go of her and she stands alone on my thigh. She bristles and fluffs out her ruffled feathers. She leans back and runs each flight feather in turn through her beak. She shits. Then, she straightens herself and hops along my knee and queeps, quite like her old self. I queep back and put my finger out to her. She hops on it and turns. She wipes her beak on my finger. She’d never done that before. It’s wonderful to see her moving again. I didn’t know I was crying but my face is wet. I carry her over to the cage and she hops off my finger and into the cage. She’s glad to be back in her safe place. She eats and drinks.

I watch her for about an hour after that but she’s fine. I can’t believe my luck. It would have been awful without her. From this time on, I can always pick her up and hold her. A few days later I cut her toenails.

I begin wanting to tell somebody about Birdie and all the things she can do. I try talking to Al about it but he isn’t interested much in birds anymore.

She’s such fun. I leave her out at night sometimes and train her to sleep on top of the cage so her droppings fall onto the cage floor instead of all over the room. I put her cage on the shelf behind my bed, so she feel comfortable. It’s the highest place in the room. In the morning, she hops down onto my head and picks at my nose or the corners of my mouth till I wake up. She never picks at my eyes.