bogeyandruby

We picked up our cockatiel, Earl Grey, a re-home, on June 9th, 2024.

Here is a facebook post from May of this year when I would finally introduce him.

This is Earl Grey. The person who rehomed him said he was two but they made the mistake of leaving his birthdate engraved on his anklet that said he was actually fourteen. It’s better this way since we have at least one toe on each foot in the grave and birds can live a long, long time. 

Earl Grey loves himself, or rather his reflection, more than anything else in the world and will spend all day gazing at himself in the toaster or kettle with a few breaks for snacks or to poop. Indeed we could have named him Narcissus. 

He also enjoys when we approach him with kissy faces, whistles complex tunes we have never heard of before and violently rings his bell in a tantrum when he is having a bad crest day. 

He hates hands and any word or gesture that has to do with hands like handle or hands-on or scratch here at your own peril. 

If he wore teeshirts I would get him one that said « You can look but don’t touch. » 

We accept him for who he is, a birdy in captivity, being himself. We are his parronts, his forever home.

Yesterday evening around 5 pm Earl Grey started sneezing, a succession of rapid fire sneezes over a minute or two. Alarmed, I also noticed that he was short of breath, not a good sign in a bird.

I called the local avian vet right away, not sure they would be open on Boxing Day but luckily they were. The receptionist gave me an appointment for 9:20 am this morning. I hoped he would make it through the night. By the time birds show symptoms of an illness, they have already been hiding it a long time.

We were seen promptly and to my relief, my favourite vet, Dr. Brieger was on.

He started the exam but at some point, Earl’s breathing worsened and Dr. Brieger whisked him off to the oxygen chamber. He returned to discuss a plan and we agreed on X-rays and blood work to verify his white blood cell count.

We sat in the reception area, waiting for news of Earl.

Dr. Brieger soon appeared and called us back into the examining room. He did not have Earl Grey with him.

“It’s not good, is it?”, I asked him.

“No, it isn’t good.” He told us Earl Grey had died of a sudden cardiac arrest as they were taking him for an x-ray.

We were stunned. Even Dr. Brieger seemed shocked. He had tried compressions to no avail. He assured me it was a quick death, that there was no suffering. He wanted to do an x-ray post mortem, at no charge, to determine what may have happened.

Once it was done, he brought us our sweet boy, wrapped in a towel, so we could say a proper goodbye. He looked so peaceful.

Apparently, the x-ray showed an enlarged heart, probably due to some chronic heart pathology. His deterioration had been rapid, only sixteen hours after the onset of symptoms, but it had likely been developing for a while. The stress of the examination was the final blow.

We didn’t know much about Earl Grey when we got him except that he was on an all seed diet, high in fat and one that lacks vitamins and minerals. We had worked on changing his diet over the eighteen months he was with us, introducing pellets and birdy salad. He got plenty of flight time as long as we were around to supervise. Lately we had noticed him hanging around his cage more, even when we left the door open. He was sleeping more too in the last few weeks.

We are heartbroken right now. Even though he did not like to be handled, he was a great little companion with his cage right next to my reading chair. He entertained us regularly with his happy songs and whistles and got a real kick out of our two bonded parrotlets who liked to hang out on top of his cage.

A good friend with rescue birds of her own said Earl hid his illness from us until it was too late, as he meant to, and that he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. It’s what birds do in the wild, in order not to show their weaknesses to predators. She said he found a good life here and kept it good until the end. I find great comfort in that.

Birds are not meant to be caged. They will always be wild at heart, even if they cannot live in the wild. Cockatiels are native to Australia, far from this frigid hemisphere. We’ve done a terrible thing breeding them in captivity for greed and selfish need. The least we can do is stop buying them from pet shops and breeders. We learned that the hard way. For that reason, we only take in rescues.

RIP Earl Grey.