So, one morning in January 2015, I woke up to find that my boyfriend and girlfriend were both gone and there were little rustling and twitterings coming from underneath a wicker basket on the boyfriend’s bed. When they got back, they had bird seed, because there was a tiny budgie under the basket. In hindsight, maybe there should have been a note on the desk. “Looks like we have a budgie.”
It was a bit of a stormy day, as is fairly normal for January in Sydney. Not cold as such, but unpleasant. So when the boyfriend and girlfriend found a tiny white-and-blue budgie fluttering around the front garden, looking exhausted and unable to fly far, they brought it inside. It was obviously a pet breed - you don’t get those colours in the wild population - and we figured it was pretty young, since it couldn’t fly well and it was small for a budgie. We put up some posters and figured we’d look after it until we heard back, and it seemed happy enough perching in a cardboard box for a while. The cats were more afraid of it than it was of them.
Young? Nope. The vet’s best estimate (and the girlfriend’s sister’s best estimate, since the sister has worked with budgies for ages) is that she’s two or three, and was probably being used as a breeding budgie, because she can’t fly well and she does not like being out of her cage. She loves her cage, though. She climbs around it like spider-bird and sliiiiiides down the bars to get to her food dish, something that she obviously does on purpose because it’s fun, because there are easier ways to get to her food. She has a jingler and a mirror and a swinging perch that she likes to climb to the very top of to sleep on. She propels herself in flight with sheer rage, it seems; when she’s flying, she’s constantly shrieking at the top of her lungs.
We’re pretty sure she escaped from (or was released from) one of the breeders on the highway a few blocks away. It took all of three days for us to go “our bird now”. At first we thought she was a he and named her Magellan, because she’d got so far, but she’s a bird of many nicknames now. Maggie is the most common one, but I call her all sorts of things. Mags, Maglet, Maggaboo, Magoola Garoola.
She’s a weird little thing. She’s a tiny ball of rage and defiance, and she will peck anything that comes close to her cage. At the same time, she sits reasonably comfortably on people’s shoulders for a few minutes before flying back to her cage, and she’s aware that we’re the source of millet and broccoli. She’s more sociable than she was a year ago, but she generally prefers to keep to herself, when she’s not having screaming matches with the birds outside or the bird in the mirror.
She’s very obviously happy, from the sounds she makes. She sings a lot, that loud, strident chirping that only budgies can make, and she chatters away to herself or the Mirror Bird all day. She’s a lovely colour, but she’s pretty obviously been inbred a fair bit to get that lovely colour; she’s a lot smaller than most budgies her age. She has trouble with her feet, and from her behaviour and the way she has so much difficulty flying, we’re almost certain she came from a breeder who kept her in a breeding box most of the time. We’re cross with that breeder.
Our bird now. You can’t have her back.
(Rescue story for @pepperandpals because they are awesome)
