Friday birdblogging: Celery and Snowbird

Birds and cats? You bet. I’ve always loved birds and would love someday to own a parrot or a cockatoo or another really big, really smart bird, but they require more attention and devotion than I am able to give right now. So I started with training wheels: parakeets. That’s Celery on the left and Snowbird on the right. These cute little guys were on sale at Petco -- which is one of the more pathetic concepts I’ve ever encountered: animals on sale -- and even though they aren’t hand-raised and so won’t sit on my shoulder and are most unhappy when I reach into their cage to change their water or feed them a lovely salad (even though they then gobble up the salad), they still give me a lot of amusement. They love everything they’re supposed to be terrified of, like loud noises and such. My bird book told me, Don’t put them near the TV: sudden sharp noises will make their little hearts give out.

Ha. The louder and rowdier a movie, the more these little creatures love it: they go wild when trolls pound battle drums and orcs howl with rage. They recognize particular voices on the tube, too -- the first time I put on the Season 1 DVDs of MacGyver, they started chirping up a storm at the sound of Richard Dean Anderson’s voice: they thought we were watching Stargate SG-1, perhaps. It’s their favorite show, and they go nuts for the big whooshing sound of the Chappa'ai.

It’s a good thing my birds turned out to be geeks, cuz they would have been pretty miserable with our viewing choices otherwise.