Birds

My apologies to anyone who reads this that owns birds, but maybe you'll be the perfect person to tell me why people, do, in fact, own birds. Part of my house-sitting duties include making sure Sonny and Cher, the two birds owned by the family, have food and water. (No, I don't know what kind of birds they are, but thanks for asking. They are normal bird size, yellow all over with some orange on their necks and heads. I hope that helps.) I'm already detecting a negative undertone to this blog post and I do apologize, but it may be because I have for the 4th time in a week and a half, had to pick up their feeders from the floor. Let me explain. Their feeders sit on the side of their cage and are filled with little tiny pellets of bird food. The first time I noticed one of them on the floor, I thought, "oh shoot, it fell and now their food is all over the floor. That's a bummer." The second time they fell I thought it was a bit weird. The third time both of them fell off and I started to wonder (that was yesterday) and then today I came in and they were both on the floor again and I'm convinced they are doing it on purpose. In the meantime, not only wasting a good bit of bird food, but also making me get out the vacuum each time to sweep up the bird food on the floor. Not cool. Now, I'm not a rocket scientist, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I did determine a lovely way to keep the feeders from falling anymore, either inadvertantly or on purpose; enter twisty ties. Magic.

Aside from this strange knocking down of feeders, these birds also like to talk to me when I'm talking to other people on skype. I complained about it one day to my mom and she told me I complain about birds more than anyone else she knows. I kindly explained that birds chirping sweetly outside my window in the morning is one thing. High-pitched screeching while I'm chillin on the couch is quite another. I'm just sayin.

Thirdly, these birds do some really weird things. I was in the kitchen today and my roommate who was over for a visit yelled into me that she thought one of the birds had just died. I didn't exactly drop everything and come running, but I sauntered over and asked why she'd say that. The bird literally just takes a leap off the top rung and falls all the way to the bottom of the cage. I don't know why, I guess living in a cage needs some livening up a bit sometimes. They do other weird stuff as well like flap their wings violently while sitting in one place, really just making it look like they are booty-dancing or something and they climb all over the place using their beaks for leverage. I'm not sure, I don't get it, but I guess that's the life of a caged bird.