Category Archives: communication

Gregorio’s Mishap and Recovery

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When I got home last Sunday night, after unpacking just enough, the birds were all chattering busily as usual, welcoming me, I guess. At some point doing my chores, I stopped for a moment and remembered Gregorio, but before I could say his name he started singing an extra long version of his song, repeating and repeating, “Gregorio, Gregorio, Gregorio…” I could have had no better welcome.

I haven’t dared write about Gregorio’s trials until I was sure of a happy ending.

Backtrack a few weeks before I went to Ohio: on a beautiful Saturday I was out working in the yard. After a couple hours I went back in the house. There, in the kitchen sink, was a fallen moth trap with a bird stuck in it. A zebra finch male, to be exact. I was horrified, and I felt terrible, because I should have known better than to put moth traps in the kitchen. But I had been getting so tired of the Indian flour moths, I stuck a couple traps on top of the crowded little shelves that jut out over the sink, thinking the birds were too busy elsewhere to get into it, or just relaxed with the thought that the birds have lived in the house for so long with few mishaps, I stopped paying attention to the fact that just in the past few days the zebra finches were starting to explore regions they had ignored for ages.

Zebra Finches on top of the kitchen cupboard

I was just too distracted, lackadaisical, thoughtless to make the connection.

and checking out the inside...

So there he was, my little finch, alive but very still, stuck in the trap, having lost a lot of feathers due to struggling with the adhesive. I reached in and pulled him out as gently as possible. A few of his remaining secondary feathers were stuck together so I washed him gently under warm running water and dried him in a towel. What to do with him? I couldn’t release him, because he wouldn’t be able to fly around high enough to reach the middle door of any one of the finch cages, which is essential if a bird is going to eat in this house. The only solution was to incarcerate him temporarily. And he would have to grow some feathers before my trip, because I didn’t want to add yet another cage to the burden for my bird care person. I had no idea how long it would take for him to grow back his feathers. Right now all I could be concerned about was his survival. (By the way, I could not bring myself to take pictures of him in his worst state.)

I put him inside one of the finch cages temporarily and closed the door while I went down to the basement to find the infirmary. It’s a dumb little cage that I picked up years ago for not a lot of money, and whenever I have a bird to isolate from the rest, I use it. I started thinking about preparing an extra little breakfast tray every morning. I found a water dish and a few accoutrements to make the cage as homey as possible. I knew he would hate being confined, but there was no other option.

When I had the cage ready, I stuck my little bald creature inside and started to look for a place to put the cage, out of the way, perhaps, in the dining room. No, no, no! was the reaction I got from my little prisoner. He vehemently objected to being away from the action, hopping up and down and throwing himself against the sides of the cage, so I set him on top of the coffee table in the middle of the living room, where he could see and hear all the other birds and vice versa. Looking back, I realize that was already a good indicator that he was going to fight his predicament and overcome it.

It wasn’t until maybe the middle of the next day that I figured out it was Gregorio, when I had taken inventory of the other male zebra finch’s songs and he was the only one not singing. Poor little Gregorio. I felt even worse: the past week almost every tape I listened to, Gregorio was singing on it, and I thought I had grown tired of hearing him. Now I didn’t know if I’d ever hear him sing again.

The first few days were extremely awkward. A couple times he hopped out of the cage past my hand when the door was open while I was changing this or that other dish, only to flop down to the floor, where I’d catch him easily. Once he was a little harder to catch, underneath the butcher block island in the kitchen, but I scooted him out and picked him up. He finally got the idea that he couldn’t fly and became somewhat resigned to his fate. I was afraid he wasn’t eating well either, seeming to eat only spray millet, and I lectured him about eating better if he wanted to grow back his feathers. Eat your vegetables! I have a feeling spray millet is like dessert for birds, but even if that was all he was eating I didn’t have the resolve to remove it from the cage to force him to eat something else. It must have been comfort food too.

I don’t think it was quite a week when I heard him vocalize for the first time. He wasn’t singing yet but he was calling. That was encouraging. He was growing little fluffy feathers around his head. I couldn’t tell what was happening with his other feathers; he had lost most of his primaries and secondaries on one wing, and I knew he had a lot of contour feathers to grow back as well. Then one afternoon when I was sitting writing on the futon, his cage right next to me on the coffee table, he sang a little. “Gregorio, Gregorio.” I knew he was on the mend!

A few days before I wanted to release him, calculating his release date was going be five days before I left for Ohio, I had his cage perched on the kitchen counter where I took him every morning and evening to clean and refill things, and I explained I wanted to make sure he could fly high enough to get into a finch cage to eat and that was why he was still locked up. As if to challenge my protective caution, he flung himself all the way up to the top of his little cage. Look at me, I can fly this high, I can reach the cage door. Patience, my little man, patience. It’s only a few days, and we’ll let you out.

Gregorio was eating more of his food, and the fuzz on his head was filling in. Saturday came, and I set him up with his breakfast just in case he had to return to the cage. I put the cage on the coffee table and opened the door. Within seconds he was out. He first tried flying all the way up to a curtain rod and fell down to the floor, disgusted he didn’t make it. But as soon as I thought he might be able to break up his flight into stages, he did exactly that, landing on top of a cage, and then eventually making his way to the curtain rod. You know what they say about great minds thinking alike…

Gregorio upon release

It wasn’t until then that I took a few pictures of him.

bald but brave

When I saw him eating spray millet inside a cage, I knew he was going to be all right.

Gregorio inside a regular finch cage

One time I looked up and he was snuggling with a Society Finch. Another time I saw him paired up with another male zebra finch, which is how it’s gotten to be in this house with only one female zebra finch left, so the guys choose partners, not for sex but for companionship, and it’s really a nice thing to see. I hadn’t been worried about the other birds picking on him, but it was yet another reason to incarcerate him until he got back on his wings.

Well here we are now and I barely recognize him. He still looks a little flat-headed and his tail feathers are a little stiff, but he’s zipping around with all the other birds, up to his old mischievous ways, and needless to say I don’t have any moth traps anywhere the birds can get to.

All the while as I was writing this Gregorio was singing his song. He knows I’m writing about him, and I’m sure he’s trying to add his two cents. He just started up again. Gregorio, Gregor, Gregorio, Gregor…

 

A Return to In-Keyness

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waterfall in Peru...

 

What does it mean? What is the significance of the birds singing in key with human music, with people unwittingly responding the same way, talking in the key of the music in the background, or of the music ringing in their ears after a performance? It’s not hard for me to imagine the vibrations left by the instruments still wafting in the air. Is it just a natural phenomenon, a matter of course, something to be taken for granted, or is there some significance to it? Is there perhaps something right in front of our eyes, or our ears, or our entire beings, that we are missing by ignoring it? We certainly ignore a lot of things that we take for granted. Heaven knows we’re too busy to waste time reflecting on or paying attention to natural phenomena when we have work to do, dinner to cook, phone calls to make and receive, social networks to attend. To try to slow down your day long enough to listen, or to look, fully with the senses you were born with, is the equivalent of an altered state. Why is this? It seems to me we shouldn’t have to be unusual, deranged or distracted to pay attention.

                When I began to think about everything or everyone being in key, naturally, without having to do anything except be alive and present, it was tempting to make analogies to universal language, harmony (which connotes peace), and all those symbols that give hope to a chaotic existence. I wondered about the mechanics of it: if baby birds are born begging in key, what about human babies? If there is music at birth, is the child’s first cry in key with it?

The flip side suggests that where there is discord, perhaps we are then out of tune. In any range of the spectrum, from a simple argument to acts of aggression, will we still automatically be in key because we have no control over it, or in the alternative, will the friction render us out of key?

The next conclusion is that there must be some way to measure, on a cellular level, the effect music has on our well-being. If you’re skeptical about musical vibrations on a minute level, listen to a recording of the sounds made by yeast.  If exposure to noise rearranges our molecules enough to cause us harm, what of the opposite effect? There are plenty of proponents of music therapy. Can this be measured? Are there better ways to treat more illnesses with music than we know? Is the act of playing music or singing restorative? Music used to be a much bigger part of our lives than it is now, people participated more often than being passive recipients of music. On the bright side, due to enhanced methods of communication, we are now being exposed to other musics more often than those we consider our own, as “world music” becomes popular. Is there any way that sharing music can become a metaphor for peaceful coexistence?

I will return to this subject from time to time because it fascinates me, but I also tend to veer off in divergent directions. I cannot stay up all night so I will leave you with this thought: whether you realize it or not, music is all around us and within us, even in silence, as John Cage was so apt to point out.

Budgie Rap

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I like to call them The Blue Brothers

Ah Budgies. People call them “parakeets” in the U.S. but they’re actually descendants of Budgerigars, those little Australian psittacines. I read somewhere that “budgerigar” means “tasty morsel” in Aborigine. So their history with humans is long and precarious. I remember wondering what a budgie was ever since John Lennon wrote a poem about his.

Birds in the parrot family are better known for their ability to talk rather than sing, but I think budgies are more like rap singers. They can whistle and trill at breakneck speed and punctuate with chatter and percussive litte noises. The guys are much more vocal than the girls. Often they soliloquize, singing away to the end of the curtain rod, for instance.

I have not taught any of my budgies to talk. They wouldn’t bother with me anyway. They have plenty to discuss with each other. I am convinced they truly are having conversations, however one-sided they appear to be, and I wish I had a translator, it all goes by so fast. One will talk a blue streak and the intended listener sits rather attentive but still. You can tell when I boy budgie is trying to sing up a girl budgie by his body language, dancing around, hopping on one side or the other of her, nodding his beak toward hers. So when I see a guy budgie paying a lot of attention to an inanimate object I can only imagine he’s practicing for his next encounter.

Recording of Budgie singing with Prelude of Bach’s A Major English Suite

This little clip I’ve attached here of a budgie singing along with the Prelude to the Bach A Major English Suite is mind-blowing when you try to pay attention to it. I can’t think that fast.

Recording: Budgie with Bach C minor Prelude & Fugue from Book I, Well-Tempered Clavier

Also a little C minor Prelude and Fugue, a budgie is busy. When I grow weary of whatever I’m trying to learn, I revert to the Well-Tempered Clavier. Keep in mind this is probably only one bird, sounding like ten.

JoJo: Another Shady Crow Story in the Annals of Mind-Reading

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I met JoJo the Crow for the first time after a bird walk at Thatcher Woods in River Forest, Illinois years ago. She lived in a cage inside the adjacent Trailside Museum. JoJo’s claim to fame was that she talked. There was another crow in the same room with her and I think he talked a little too, but not as much. It must have been around the time I moved from the apartment to the house, because I missed my contact with Elvis and I hadn’t made connections with my new neighborhood crows yet. I craved a crow connection, even if it was with a caged bird. I went back to see JoJo sometime later. She was alone the second time.

JoJo’s main vocabulary consisted of “HUH-lo” and a phrase that sounded to me like, “What’s wrong?” although the people who cared for her insisted she was saying “What’s up?” Quite a while later I talked to someone who had been trying to find out JoJo’s story. Apparently she was originally cared for by a woman who spoke French to her, and she was saying “Bon soir.” That made more sense, seeing as how JoJo could not reproduce the consonants, only the vowel sounds.

JoJo liked women more than men, I suppose because she had been cared for by a woman. She didn’t care for kids at all and would start braying noisily – it wasn’t a caw but her own voice of disapproval – when there were kids in the museum. Those of us who got close to her found she liked to have her beak stroked. She would poke her beak through the rungs of the cage and sit patiently while you softly slid your index finger down it. Sometimes she practically fell asleep, she was so content, the nictitating membranes closing over her eyes. It amazed me how trusting she was.

After I had found a way to fit JoJo into my routine, I would visit her on the weekends as often as possible. We talked, and she tried to look into my eyes often with both of hers, facing me, her head bent down low. I scratched her head a little too. Then I started bringing her treats, knowing perfectly well that it was forbidden, but I couldn’t see too much harm in a peanut or two. So our little secret would not become too apparent if a caretaker came in to check up on her, I broke up the meat of the peanut with my fingernails and fed her little tidbits through her cage. She often drooled in anticipation, and then ever so gently took the tiny pieces of peanut from my fingers. I’m sure I was aware of how lethal her beak could be, but she taught me that it could also be a tool of love as well. Beaks are wonderful things–the equivalent of our hands to birds; beaks can do everything except, perhaps, play piano.

Once I got careless. JoJo was on the bottom of her cage poking around her food, which often consisted of hard-boiled egg, unshelled peanuts, and raw hamburger meat. I stuck my little finger through the opening in the cage bottom and after a few seconds, she grabbed it, hard. I tried not to take it too personally, although my feelings were hurt as much as my surprised finger. I tried to pretend it was a joke on her part when I finally got my finger back, but she had reminded me of two things: never to take her beak for granted, and never to take her welcome for granted either. The bottom of the cage was her space and she wasn’t sharing it. When she hopped up onto her branch perch, only then she was ready to receive company.

But perhaps the most instructive thing about this lesson was how she reacted every time I told people about it when they stopped in to visit the museum and noticed me talking to her. JoJo would listen intently as I recounted the story and she almost seemed to smile with satisfaction when I got to the part where she grabbed my pinky. I thought later that her experience of hearing me tell the story was probably like mine years earlier when I was in Italy with my friend Linda who was fluent in Italian, and I listened as she told her Italian friends about something that we had done earlier. I knew what she was talking about but I could not understand the words.

As she got older, JoJo had trouble with her feet from being stuck in a cage all her life. From time to time her keepers would medicate her feet and wrap them up in colorful gauze dressings. I knew JoJo was mortified by this. Look at my feet with this stupid red, green or purple stuff on them. I stayed longer during those visits, I talked to her and tried to calm her down while she tugged and fidgeted at her dressings. I also felt bad for her because no crows were coming by to visit her anymore outside the museum window; West Nile virus had taken its toll. Crows are social creatures and I knew JoJo looked forward to my visits because I spent time with her. Once I had a wild, random thought because we had bonded so well. I asked her if she was my mother, who had died years earlier. JoJo looked deeply into my eyes, and if I believed such things occur, she could have been saying “Yes I am.”

One day as I was driving to visit JoJo, I was thinking I had never heard her caw like a regular crow. I wondered if perhaps she had forgotten how to caw, or there was no one to caw to, or both. I parked, got out of my car, walked up the path to the museum, and opened the door to the little reception area. The moment I stepped inside, I heard a loud “Caw, caw, caw.” It was JoJo. Telling me, of course she could caw, she knew perfectly well how to caw. I laughed and went up the steps into her room. She regained her composure, dipped her head in customary fashion and said, “HUH-lo.” “Bon soir.”

I saw JoJo for the last time perhaps a week or so before she was no longer “on display.” Her feet had been getting worse and I knew it was only a matter of time before she would be gone. I missed her terribly, but I knew the interspecies friendship we shared gave us both good memories. And I am sure my experience with JoJo laid the groundwork for my friendship with the Grant Park crows. I’ll write about my mind-reading adventures with them next.

Mind-Readers: Interspecies Communication Part 2

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The leap from wondering how to relate to creatures with dot-like eyes on the sides of their heads to starting to see birds as thinking, feeling beings who were not only paying attention to my every move but were reading my thoughts as well was probably a gradual process. Certain examples come to mind.

Back in the apartment, a mourning dove started coming to the window often, and he was different from the rest. Doves are usually silent, but he made little kvetching noises as he fed. In retrospect I realize he was not well. Around this time, the windows were wide open and when something startled the doves, they would all fly into the room, turn around at the wall and fly back out with acute precision. On one of these flights, the little dove in question did not make it; instead, he landed on the floor and crawled under the radiator. I realized with a bit of panic that I would have to pick him up and put him out, and I had never held a bird before. Not knowing what to expect, I got down on my knees and reached for him. He edged away but really didn’t put up much resistance and soon I was holding a soft, fluffy beating heart that weighed barely a few ounces.

I put him on the window sill and he sat there, undoubtedly terrified. The standard mourning dove defense is to sit so still to blend into the background and you won’t notice them. But that wasn’t going to work; he had to leave. I sort of shoed him off the ledge, he flew home, and I named him Fidel.

The weather turned colder and one day Fidel came inside and started walking around across the floor. I asked him where he was going but he pretty much ignored me as if he knew all along what he was up to. Soon he had wandered out into the hallway. I thought to myself, I can’t have a wild bird walking around in my apartment! I sat still for a while, calling him. until I finally got up and found him sitting in the bathroom by the radiator where it was quite warm. When I tried to get him to come out, he flew up to the shower curtain rod and looked down at me. I did not have a net and I was not going to chase him around the apartment. I went back into the room and sat down at the piano, thinking if I started playing, he might come back out on his own. I played a while, nothing happened. I started calling him, Fidel, Fidel, come back out, you can’t stay in there. After a while, Fidel came walking back into the room. I kept telling him he had to leave. I hated to kick him out, but I had no capacity to care for wild birds. And one thing I liked about entertaining the wild birds was that they always went home at night. Somehow I convinced Fidel it was time to go home and he left. I know he didn’t understand my words, but he heard my thoughts.

Later on, I was gone for a weekend and came up the back stairs to find a dove, dead, outside on top of the back door frame. I knew it had to be Fidel. Poor bird was probably trying to come back in where it was warm. He had decided my apartment was a safe place. I felt terrible to lose him.

Not feeling quite like Dr. Doolittle, I began to accept that the birds at least paid attention when I talked to them, even if I wasn’t sure we were exactly conversing. It still seemed to be a one-way conversation.

Then I wanted to get to know Elvis the Crow better. He had sat in the elm tree out on the street facing the window for at least half a year, watching birds come and go, before that one day when he finally came to the window and hovered for a peanut. Crows are very cautious creatures, but once they make decisions, they stick. I told my friend Robin about the crow and she said her sister had a crow named Ernie she fed all the time, and that she had seen crows take pancakes and stack them up in neat little piles before taking off with them. She also talked of scrambled eggs and pizza and I said I’m not going to put all that food out for a crow. She thought a minute and said, they love hot dogs.

Hot dogs? Really. Well, I supposed I could buy a pound of hot dogs and cut them up and see what happened. The day I came home from the store with the hot dogs, I looked out my kitchen window and Elvis was sitting on the roof peak directly across, staring at me. Maybe a crow’s stares are special because they have larger, rounder eyes that look more like a mammalian eye that I can relate to. But somehow I knew immediately that Elvis was telling me, I know you have hot dogs. The communication now was going both ways. I was getting this information from him, and he was telling me he knew what I was up to. The question then was, where to put hot dogs. I didn’t want to put them on the window sill. I thought smelly, messy, and what if the other birds knock them down to the ground? My neighbors were pretty tolerant but this would never fly.

So I thought to put a few hot dogs, cut up, on the back porch steps leading up to my apartment. Within minutes, Elvis showed up. Eventually he was bringing his mate, Elvira, too. The starlings caught wind of it as well, but they were messy eaters, unfortunately. The crows quickly removed their booty to stash elsewhere, so the hot dogs were gone and no longer my problem!

Elvis and I became fast friends. Some time after Elvira started showing up with him, one morning, about 100 crows flew over my roof. I had the feeling Elvis had invited them to check out his neighborhood. He had carved out his territory, and one of the highlights was the lady who played music in the window and put hot dogs out on the porch. About a year later Elvis and Elvira showed up with Elfin, their first offspring. That was pretty exciting stuff. I had my own crow family. And I have been fascinated by crows ever since. More crow stories to come.

Bird love and interspecies communication, Part 1

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The birds were always there but I never noticed them before music brought us together. In those early days when I was trying so hard to figure out who was in the chorus it seemed impossible to ever know them. When they started coming to the window every morning for a snack and to hear me practice–I referred to this later as “The Breakfast Club”–I was astounded to see them flying toward me. There was one Disney/Snow White moment when several House Sparrows all came to greet me as I stood by the open window. I had never noticed before how beautiful their variegated shades of brown could be.

When the doves landed on the window and I made eye contact with them I wondered how one relates to a creature that has flat button-like eyes that have an almost pasted-on appearance. Rock Pigeons in the park downtown were even worse, they had bright orange eyes. And they were always staring at me with one eye or the other. And they grumbled.

As I started to get used to birds flying around me, I began to realize that flight in itself could be a form of communication. I was feeding birds in the city for a while because I wanted to see what they were like in a more natural setting than landing on my window sill. I’ll never forget the first House Sparrow who whisked by my ear after the birds started to recognize me and looked forward to my visits. I realized this was a greeting, a bird hello. The pigeons would all wait for me in the cold weather and when I showed up, they would fly to the ground around me and form a procession, as we all walked slowly up the hill to the bench where I would sit, sometimes one pigeon riding on my shoulder and another on my hat. The human-pigeon relationship has gone on for so long, making pigeons easy to observe. I learned a lot about flock behavior from those birds, and I began to look forward to seeing certain individuals as they revealed their personalities.

Meanwhile back at the ranch I started making friends with Elvis the American Crow, but the first time he made a beeline toward the open window I almost bolted from the room. I held my ground and marveled at the velvet whisper of his wings as he hovered by the window sill to snatch a peanut off the ledge, thinking to myself “crows don’t hover, do they?” In any event I was cured thereafter of infrequent but strange nightmares where foreign creatures were buzzing around my head. I began to welcome flying beings.

It was never enough for me to simply observe birds; I wanted to get to know them. I wanted intimacy, but on their own terms. I would sit back and wait to see what they did, never forcing them to be tame. But with the pigeons, I finally decided to see what would happen if I put something in my hand. It was funny to watch the dominant bird walk over timidly and then bat like hell at my hand with his wing, as if to fight it, although I think he was just trying to get me to drop the loot. Weeks or months later, it may have been the same bird who was sitting on my hand shoeing away the competition, or starting a panic flight and coming back down to feed while the others were still fleeing an imaginary predator.

Years later, Red-Winged Blackbirds fly toward me, red epaulets flashing, whistling, displaying at my feet, begging me for a peanut.