Bartleby and Loki

The fall of 2006 was filled with schoolwork and bird work. Every weekend I would go to the aviary to help out with hand-feeding. It was here that I was properly introduced to budgies. One day, I noticed that there was some green in with all the grey and yellow cockatiels. This was John Deere, a little budgie who was rescued from abusive parents. The fact that he was half the size of all the cockatiels in the enclosure didn't seem to bother him, he just clamored over them to be the first to be fed.



I loved his outgoing personality. I wanted a budgie of my own.

So a couple weeks later, there was another pair of birds that were being abusive towards their chicks, so we pulled them and started hand-feeding them. There were three, Two sky blues and a pied. I begged my parents to let me have one, and they consented. Only, I got away with two.

I named them Bartleby and Loki after the fallen archangels in the lovely movie Dogma. Although it wasn't until a couple months later that I realized that they were both females. They really didn't like sharing a cage. They would fight over who would get to sit on the swing perch, and would often pull each others feathers out. I tried my best to socialize them, and had them out with me whenever I could. But they preferred each others company over mine, and that's saying a lot. They learned that biting was a great way to make me not handle them, and became highly aggressive birds. Not to mention their constant chattering. Mom was not pleased.

We had them for about a year, and then my meeting of another budgie, Leo brought their reign of our house to an end. Mom made a deal with me, I give back the two loud and aggressive females in exchange for this very outgoing little male. But there will be more on Leo later.

The two females got to return to the flock and rejoin their sibling in one of the flights. They are so much happier now. They really didn't want anything to do with people. I think that we can attribute this to their age when they were pulled from the nest; they weaned within a couple days of being pulled and thus were in no need of hand-feeding and bonding with humans.

That's all for now.

FG