The time I was a parrot owner

I remember the day I got my first pair of parrots. It was independence day in 2015 and I was at the beach with my family. I saw an elderly man walking around with parrots in cages and I got excited. I had seen a parrot only one time before and that was at my cousin’s neighbor’s place when I was roughly 7 years old. It kept saying hello and I found that truly fascinating. Back to my story.

My dad notices that I’m staring at the parrots and waves the man over. He gets to us and sets the cages down. We ask him if the parrots can speak, and he says yes. My dad then asks me if I want them and I immediately nod. This is how I began my parrot parenting journey. He pays and then the parrot seller hands me a bag of millet along with the cage and bids us farewell. I should point out that the parrots didn’t say a word the whole time, but I wasn’t worried about that. I figured that after settling in, they would start picking up some phrases we say around the house. I was wrong.

I named the birds George and Lucy because they were the first names to pop in my head that had no connection to human beings I related with at the time. Everything was going fine with the birds until we went on a trip and left them in the care of our tenant for 3 days. We returned to find a messy cage, an empty food bowl and a visibly ill Lucy. The thing about birds is that just like babies, they cannot tell you what is wrong with them. But my mother believed she had a solution; give the bird paracetamol for babies. She figured it was mild enough to fix her without causing further damage, so she had Lucy drink a quarter cup. She was gone in 2 minutes. I was so stunned at how quickly we took out George’s only family member.

Mind you, these birds were actually senegalese parrots which just squawk very loudly and unprovoked. At this point, I should confess that I didn’t do the best job at taking care of these little guys. It was a somewhat decent job to me, but George in particular would heavily disagree. This is because I ran out of millet and only went hunting for more after two days. When I realized that I didn’t have a single seed of millet left, I trekked down to the market to get more. But no one knew what millet was. I went up to roughly 5 people and not a single one of them had ever heard of millet. I get to the sixth person, and he finally knows what I’m talking about. But he tells me they don’t sell it in that market, I would have to go a market that was roughly 20 minutes by foot. It was getting late so I had to turn back home.

I got back home and went straight to George’s cage. Looking him straight in the eye I said “I’ve found your millet and will get it tomorrow. Please be okay.” Ladies and gentlemen, I found George lying beak first on the floor of the cage, stiff as a board. And with that, my first round of parrot parenting came to a screeching halt. In my defense, parrots were nothing like dogs, which is where all my animal expertise stemmed from.

Two weeks later, my dad came home with 4 more parrots. That’s a story for another day.