Overthinking an Undomesticated Budgie

A bright blue flick of movement, almost too small to see. White feathers spark the light, even more startling than the blue. What was that?

I am not a birdwatcher in the true sense. I don’t know names or habits. I don’t keep lists or have binoculars. Sure, barn swallows have been dive-bombing me most of my life. I felt thrilled when I saw a Great Horned Owl in the barn tree. Every year, I hope the Canada geese will rise young on my pond beside the mallards. But the last few years have been quiet. Fewer birds, less nesting. We’ve missed the Mountain Bluebird migration and the Pelicans haven’t stopped here in years.

You don’t need to be a scientist to notice the drop in numbers. Research says we’ve lost over three billion adult birds since 1970. “Common birds—the species that many people see every day—have suffered the greatest losses according to the study. More than 90% of the losses (more than 2.5 billion birds) come from just 12 families including the sparrows, blackbirds, warblers, and finches.” But here on my prairie, it feels like way more, especially in the last ten years. With all the changes from global warming, this feels like sad proof. Have you noticed?

Most of my bird watching happens in scratch breaks during mucking, while feeding the horses, or when Edgar Rice Burro and I watch the sunset. The line between wild and domestic animals fascinates me. We draw property boundaries on maps, but animals don’t care. They travel without passports and intermingle with livestock. Birds especially. You can’t fence them in or out. It’s one of their best qualities.

It’s fledgling season. Only one starling nest in the barn this year, but I watch it. Four hatchlings with fat yellow lips and nearly enough feathers to fly.

There were two Canada geese families on the pond, four adults and five goslings. I was ecstatic to have them. Then a week later, one of the adults was missing and all the goslings were gone but one little singleton. It could be coyote pups learning to hunt, we hear them yodeling in the night. But I fear it was the pair of Rottweilers next door. If it moves, they chase it down. City dogs who think all wildlife are intruders. Some loss is nature but some is us.

That was when it happened. A soft wing sound very close. Was a budgie parakeet on the fence panel a few feet away? I froze. Then a pair of sparrows spirited him off, so quickly I wasn’t sure I believed what I saw.

My grandmother (born in the late 1800s) always had a budgie. She lived in North Dakota, up by the Canadian border where winters are bleak. A budgie was a delicate, fancy thing for a house without indoor plumbing. I only saw my grandmother a handful of times, but how she must have worked to keep that bird alive. He flew out of his cage and around her kitchen when she cooked, and I thought it was simply the most exotic thing in 1950s North Dakota. 

I saw the flash of color again, too clean, blue and white. On the ground now, his round beak picking at hay scraps in a horse pen. Parakeets are house birds. He’s not hardy enough for the outdoors. He hopped up to a fence panel, and I asked quietly, not too close, if he’d come to my offered finger. Chasing him would never work, but he might be hand-trained. He flitted off.

I wondered if I should trap him. There was lots to eat and I’d seen him in the birdbath. I called a friend who knows about birds, and she suggested a cage with a mirror; he might flock to others of his kind. He was flashing between leaves, flying to the haystack with the sparrows, then back to the tree. Maybe I’m nuts, but it looked like he was friends with everybody. I was undecided.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.    -D.H. Lawrence

I followed him through pens, quietly wondering if I should toss a hay net over him, but worried that I’d kill him trying to save him. Then he’d flutter away, sparkling bright next to the brown sparrows, leaving me half worried and half filled with glee. He ate from our birdfeeder, next to blackbirds and doves. His beak is just so wrong, but he even got along with a marauding striped gopher. 

A few days later, my farrier was between trims when he blurted out, “What was that?” Peering into the next pen, “Oh my,” he said, not believing his eyes. We often talk about the undomesticated nature of horses. How often does the cure become worse than the original condition for our pets? Humans think we are gods who can control outcomes. But what if the budgie wasn’t a problem to be solved?

I knew budgies weren’t native to Colorado, and winter would kill him. Who’s to say that he wouldn’t leave with the blackbirds? Who’s to say he didn’t come with them? Does he value his freedom, or is it that I value mine so much? 

The summer after second grade, I spent two weeks with my grandmother and her budgie while my mother got cancer treatment. Sometimes I rode bikes with a cousin, but I remember days were long. My grandmother scolded me often, always telling me I would be the death of my mother. I was in grade school; I took it literally. Of course, I had no idea that was happening at home. Our family kept secrets.

But that was when my grandmother decided about me. It might have been a misplaced emotion at first, but she continued thinking I was wild, meaning bad, and I was certain to ruin my young life. I probably did talk back, knowing me. Her biggest fear, and my unfulfilled destiny, was that I would have a teen pregnancy, like so many local girls. But weren’t we all just looking for someone who liked us? 

By the time I was thirty, she was critical that I didn’t have children. I swear, horses are not nearly so fickle. Why are humans such disaster thinkers, always braced for the worst outcome? Would it be so hard to say a kind word? And what makes us think wild things need to be locked up and saved?

It’s been two weeks now and I see the budgie most days. Today he was in the far pen next to the pond. If he was brown, I’d miss him at this distance, but there he was—a target for predators—a fearless small bird who is living large. I’ve been putting some extra kibble in the feral cat’s bowl in the barn, hoping he was either too old or that his taste ran to varmints. The tabby leaves dead mice around the barn in payment for the kibble. But that’s the circle of life, too, as true as goslings and Rottweilers. As inevitable as gravity. 

 I’ve given up on the cage idea. Maybe I’m selfish but I get such joy to see this little bird in the big world, not afraid to show his colors. One way or another, he will fly away. As birds do. For now, I choose to see him as a tiny blue miracle, a harbinger of beautiful and rare things ahead. 

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