Meet Deneb

In my youth, when I was still eligible for specially priced meals at diners, when payphone calls actually cost a dime, and one could ride the Sacramento public buses all day for forty cents, my mother occasionally took my sister and me to get haircuts at a hair salon called, "EJ's Little People." The salon was filled with amusements, including old office equipment, coloring books, stamps, games, and other curiosities, including a Mynah Bird. About the size and coloration of a magpie, the mynah's claim to fame is that it can talk. Or rather, in the case of the bird at EJ's Little People, is alleged to to talk. There was a sign on the bird's cage enumerating all of the phrases that the bird supposedly knew, allowing kids to try their hand at coaxing the bird to utter them. As I recall, the bird knew how to wolf whistle pretty well, but a marginally convincing "hello" was as much as one could expect it to actually say, and then only after a fair bit of urging. The tantalizing possibility remained, however, that the bird might say a good number of other things if only the right trainer were to come along.

That ideal bird trainer was not to be me, not while I lived at home at any rate. We had various dogs and cats over the years: a hamster, a rat, and many fish, and even for a brief time a Black Widow spider. I don't remember where we found the spider, but it died one or two weeks later at school during a pet "show and tell" day when somebody knocked over and broke the empty pickle jar in which it lived. The fall didn't kill it; the teacher squashed it as a precautionary measure. The spider was not really a pet in the same way that the other animals we kept were pets, but its untimely demise was upsetting nonetheless.

What makes a particular animal a pet, anyway? Surely it is not the affection demonstrated by the pet towards its master, nor its innate capacity to do so. My mother, I'm reliably informed, kept a dead duck for several days when she was young, for example. I imagine that the only display of affection understandable by humans that a Black Widow could demonstrate would be to refrain from biting, which it did during its brief time in my care (admittedly, I never gave it a chance to do so). On the other hand, the hamster I owned was ill-tempered and liked nothing so much as to bite the hand that fed it, literally. I loved it anyway, though the vicious rodent act got old and I secretly wanted something tamer. My sole impression of the suitablity of birds as pets while growing up came from my violin teacher, who kept a Budgie. She addressed the bird as we might have spoken to our dogs or cats, though it did not return her affection in any way that I could see. Furthermore, it did not attempt to speak (at least in our presence), but only whistled when it felt the urge. In short, I was unimpressed.

It may be that all those years I thought of parrots simply as kin to the mynah and the budgie, a bit more colorful than the former and a bit more talkative than the latter perhaps, but no more disposed to affection or loyalty. Birds were somehow a bit too alien; I simply related to mammals better (apart from my short fling with the Black Widow, which I probably kept for the same reasons that kings once stocked dry castle moats with lions or bears). As I now know, there are a host of reasons why parrots might not make good pets, especially for kids, but my presumptions of their stupidity and indifference were ill-informed. I don't know when I first read about Alex, the African Grey Parrot, but it must have been recently, perhaps late 1998 when I visited Puerto Rico with Kelly for the first time. Now here was a bird I could relate to! Smart, very smart, and eminently educable.

My further research instructed me that most parrots, African Greys especially so, are emotionally sensitive and display a wide range of feelings. They become bored easily, and unlike dogs or cats whose worst retaliation for being left alone most of the day might be to tear apart the garbage or leave a special "present" in their masters' shoes, parrots turn to self-mutilation. If there's any animal sadder or uglier than a parrot who has plucked out all of his feathers, I don't know what it is. I attribute my three year hesitation in buying a parrot mostly to this fact. African Grey Parrots are widely considered to be as intelligent as a four-year human child and as emotionally dependent as a two-year old. Consequently, a busy lifestyle in which the owner is not home much is not an option.

When I finally made up my mind to buy a parrot, Kelly surprised me and ordered one for my birthday. This is surprising, if you know Kelly, because of her nearly religious intolerance for animals in the house. There was even a period of "giver's remorse" in the weeks after my birthday before the bird arrived in which Kelly tried to convince me that the bird ought to be just fine on the patio. I will remind you, gentle readers, that the temperature on our patio ranges throughout the year from mid forties to high nineties, is located beneath apartment decks from which barbecue smoke (poisonous to birds) frequently emanates, and opens onto the busiest area of the apartment complex. To her credit, and my relief, Kelly relented and we purchased a nice cage and a HEPA filter to keep the air fresh inside.

Finally, today, October 30, 2001, our little bird arrived. I must say that she was in a good mood for having been forced out of her home and onto an airplane from the breeder in Oregon. We have decided to call her Deneb, which means "tail" in Arabic, after the star of the same name. Deneb is one of the stars of the Summer Triangle asterism and represents the tail of Cygnus the swan. Our Deneb is not quite as big as a swan, but she has already tried to take flight like one; one trip across the living room and one through the kitchen into the laundry are enough to convince me of her escape potential. She is probably a bit more oral than a swan, taking everything into her mouth that she can, including fingers, ears, shirts, and anything else within her reach. Did I mention that since parrots can easily reach fifty or sixty years old, Deneb is likely to outlive me? A friend for life.