Mello (9/01 - 9/09)
Mello's story is also the story of how I got into birds. It was my sister's 9th birthday, and my parents decided to drive us out to a local bird-breeder's aviary to pick out a bird as her new pet and birthday present. She had a choice between a cockatiel and a green-cheek conure. She picked out Mello, a cinnamon-pearl-pied cockatiel. We brought her home with us, the next month, as they were still being weaned. My sister liked the bird, but soon grew tired of the daily chores required to keep a bird. So the duties fell to me.
From the moment I first held Mello, the magic of birds and my growing addiction to them had already started to burrow into my mind. Mello went with me everywhere on my shoulder. The breeder had erroneously told us that Mello was male, but we discovered this only about two years later when she laid her first eggs. She definitely was living the spoiled sweet life of the only bird.
My sister and I would play "hide the bird" with Mello where she was hidden, often in plain view and the searcher had to find her. We would often let Mello join us for her baths in the shower. She loved taking baths. The only problem was trying to warm her up afterwards. The solution was often curling up with the bird under a couple blankets and letting our body heat warm her back up. Thus we discovered her love to cuddle up to our necks and take naps with us.
But as we got older, school consumed more and more of our time. Mello would know when we came home, and would call in a loud greeting that we could hear from the garage. I filled my time at home by doing homework either in the bird room (sunroom) or in my room with Mello sitting nearby. When I wasn't doing homework, I would read anything about the care of birds and parrots that I could get my hands on.
Because of this growing interest in birds, I started looking at birds outside. Mello and I would sit by the window and look out at the bird feeder and watch as the birds came and go. She didn't care much for them and usually preened as I watched the outdoor bird's activity. The seven year long passion for birding started soon after I realized how many species of bird there were in America. And like the typical teen, it became my all-consuming hobby.
But I have grown since then, and my passion for birds has returned to where it started; to my companion birds. When I was in high school I started to work with my dear friends Naomi and Glen. They owned a small acreage, in fact it was the same one that we had gotten Mello from. The previous owner and Mello's breeder had to sell most of her birds to be able to move to town to help take care of her hospitalized husband. Naomi, a friend of my mother, had a deep love of parrots and had married Glen, a South African Native who bred cockatiels. Their move to the acreage helped to accommodate their growing flock of birds. My work with them included cleaning, feeding, and helping to hand-raise the baby cockatiels. It was one of the most rewarding jobs I could ever ask for. I learned how to handle all sorts of parrots from tiny Budgies to their Greater Sulphur-crested Cockatoo.
But those are stories for another time. I felt sorry for poor Mello to be home alone and bored all day while we were at school. I asked permission to get another bird, and my parents reluctantly said yes. I had fallen in love with budgies while working at the aviary, so I got two budgies to keep her company. After then it was like I was unable to turn down the possibility to keep adding birds to my flock. Mello didn't care for the budgies, so we got her a cockatiel companion, Alex. Alex loved Mello and would sing to her in hopes of wooing her. But she preferred human companionship to his, and mostly ignored him that first year. By the time I was a sophomore in college, my flock had grown to include six birds. My parents had had enough and kicked them out of the house. So they relocated to Naomi and Glen's.
Mello was stressed by the move and a mysterious phosphorus and calcium deficiency. We had treated her by giving her calcium and phosphorus in her drinking water and made sure she had access to cuttle bones. But She didn't improve much. One day in late September, I came in to see them and to work and I noticed that she was unresponsive to my voice. She was puffed up on a perch and was disoriented when I reached in to have her step up. She seemed to have waken from a daze and was extremely thirsty. She drank the water in her bowl desperately, only to gag and vomit it back out. We called the vet, but they didn't understand the problem or how serious it was. She was dying. I held her and comforted her for several hours before she passed. Naomi helped me to bury her under a walnut tree on their acreage.
Although her life was brief, she had such an important impact on my life. She is sorely missed by both myself, and her companion Alex.
