It was a peculiar winter. Starting out with a good five-inch rain in November, it was almost completely dry in January and February. In March, the rain began again with two and a half inches, and April turned up as the wettest on record with nearly seven inches according to the Santa Barbara weather charts, eight and three-quarters inches according to our rain gauge — all of it in the first nine days of the month.
Rain or no rain, Trouper suffered a sudden attack of spring fever and off he went. Eight days passed — his longest period of absence so far — and Mrs. Kennedy called and asked me if I’d seen him. I hadn’t. Nor were any reports of him phoned in to the Museum of Natural History. News of his absence and a complete description of him were passed along the Rare Bird Alert and also published in our local Audubon monthly, El Tecohte. Every birder in town was on the lookout for him, but he was never seen again.
Perhaps he went back for a return engagement with the same cat and this time, weighted down by rain-soaked feathers, he’d lost more than a tail. I would like to think, instead, that the spring fever spread throughout his bloodstream and he had begun the long flight home to Maracaibo, following his heart.
Nearly every feeding station in southern California has had its share of escaped parakeets. At our place they usually flew in with a flock of other birds such as house finches, blackbirds, English sparrows or mourning doves. Some stayed only a few minutes, others were in the neighborhood for two or three days before disappearing. In July, 1962, a turquoise and white male remained for nine days, always arriving and departing with what seemed to be the same group of Brewer’s blackbirds. Escaped birds like parakeets usually manage fine during the daytime. It is the darkness that brings danger because they haven’t learned the necessity for adequate cover at night, and they become easy prey for owls.
The record stay at our feeding station was set by a blue parakeet with a chartreuse head who first appeared on the ledge in March of 1964. The flesh color of the cere, the horny area between bill and forehead, marked her as a female.
Her difference from our previous parakeets was noticeable immediately: she didn’t join up with other birds for companionship or security. She arrived on the ledge alone, scurrying back and forth and round and round on her short, stubby legs like a mechanical toy that had wound itself up. When she finished eating — she ate only seed, I never saw her even taste any of the cake crumbs or doughnuts or similar food available — she retired to the tea tree to clean and hone her beak on the rough bark. It would be fanciful to think she chose this particular spot because both the tree, Leptospermum laevigatum, and she herself, Melopsittacus undulatus, had their origin in Australia. Most likely she chose it because it offered a safe and convenient perch.
During the month that followed she appeared half a dozen times a day on the ledge and in the tea tree and we also saw her at various other places in the neighborhood. As it became obvious that she felt at home in our area and intended to stay, we gave her a name, Blue Betty, bought some special delicacies parakeets were supposed to like and put them in the tea tree. Egg cakes and salt licks and sprays of wild millet were attached with pipe cleaners, and from B.B.’s favorite perch we hung three compressed-seed balls with a wooden perch at each ball. These additions to the doughnuts, bunches of grapes and suet-filled pine cones already there made Leptospermum laevigatum look like a Christmas tree decorated in pop art style.
B.B. gave no sign of even noticing the delicacies purchased especially for her. The house finches went crazy over the millet sprays, and by day the pigeons and by night the opossums consumed the salt lick. The scrub jays hammered away at the egg cakes, which were considerably harder than their name suggested, and every evening the rats gave us an exhibition of wild and wonderful acrobatics as they maneuvered up and down the string that connected the seed balls.
Quite a few parakeets came and went that year, including an exquisite white male with a cornflower-blue rump and a hint of blue wash across his chest. (A parakeet expert I know tells me that birds bred for albinism, as this one probably was, are less robust and long-lived than ordinary birds, and that unpigmented feathers are more susceptible to wear and tear.) In each case I tried to contact the bird’s owner, by phoning the Humane Society, the Animal Shelter and the Museum of Natural History, and by checking the lost and found ads in the local newspaper. After we’d made all possible attempts we would sit back and watch the ex-prisoners enjoying their freedom, careening down the canyon like huge mad butterflies or bustling around the ledge like sanderlings around an ebbing wave. Sometimes, in the company of drab little house sparrows, they looked like jungle flowers blown by the wind. For a bird any cage is too small, and freedom is not an abstract word; it is Blue Betty and her transient kin moving across an open sky.
March rolled around once more and the wild birds began their songs of claiming and proclaiming, their nest building and incubating, and finally bringing their babies to the ledge and the porch railing. All this family activity made B.B.’s aloneness more apparent, and to me, more pathetic. Parakeets seem to form a stronger pair bond than most birds and I’d had in mind for some time a scene where a hearty young male would land on the ledge, take one look at B.B., and it would be instant love.
During that spring three parakeets came and went, all females. The season was nearly over when, on June 15, a green parakeet appeared whose larger size and bluish-grey cere marked him as a male. We named him Green Gus. Though Gus and B.B. both fed off the ledge several times a day, it was two weeks before their paths crossed, in the late afternoon of June 29. The scene began to unfold just as I’d imagined it — Gus took one look at B.B., and sure enough, it was instant love. He started chasing her madly around the ledge, dodging sparrows and blackbirds and hopping over bandtails.
Perhaps Gus’s approach was too importunate, or his timing was wrong — it was, after all, the supper hour and B.B. was undoubtedly hungry — or perhaps B.B. had been alone so long that she’d grown to prefer her own company. From ledge to tea tree, cotoneaster to eucalyptus, pine to porch railing, B.B. fled her suitor. When she had the chance she stopped to pick up a few seeds and swallow them with nervous haste before Gus caught up with her again. She could fly better than he could, probably because she’d spent more time in freedom, and by sunset he looked pretty tired and discouraged.
B.B. had given every indication that she considered the whole business extremely annoying, so I was taken by surprise the following morning when the two of them arrived for breakfast together. A couple of times during the meal Gus remembered his passion, but both his advances and B.B.’s retreats looked rather perfunctory. Anyway, some kind of amicable understanding seemed to have been reached.
It lasted three days. On the fourth, B.B. began to show signs of restiveness. She had, after all, been the number-one parakeet in the neighborhood for well over a year and it must have been difficult for her to share the billing — and the cooing. Her irritability increased daily. Twice I saw her peck Gus viciously on the back of the neck and send him plunging for cover into the thick foliage of the pittosporum.