I Know Why the Caged Bird Bites

I'll get back to the title in a moment. I'm going to start with a different bird.




Mom finished crocheting this a couple of days ago. This is Kate Alvis's  Funky Little Owl Potholder, made with dishcloth cotton.






Then she got on a roll and started looking online for more crochet patterns. This time she found Doni Speigle's Flower Coaster pattern. I think she's planning to make more. They may be gifts.






I lent Mom some dishcloth cotton for for the flowers. She picked some out when I went to storage to get more yarn for the Epic Adult Surprise Jacket. The different yarns looked so pretty together that I had to take a picture.






The Epic Adult Surprise Jacket is coming along nicely. I'm glad I found these colors. There's a lot of blue and green, and a big red and orange section. I think these pinks and purples will balance those colors out.






This jacket is going to look a little crazy, but I think I can pull it off.






I'm ending with something sad. I don't think I've ever mentioned Dewi, the family parakeet, on this blog. Our family had her for 11 years. Last Saturday she quit eating. By Sunday morning, she was gone. The video above was filmed just four days earlier.

We knew she had been having some problems. We took her to a bird expert at Tomlinson's back in May after she started pulling out the feathers under her wings. He contributed the itchiness to old age, and he said she was thin. We knew her time was short, but we didn't think she'd be gone so soon.

I've debated whether the title I used for this entry is mean. Since we found the other bird, which Katie and Aaron have named Pico, I've wanted to write about Dewi. This was the title I had in my head.

We wanted a male bird, since we've always read that male parakeets are friendlier and more likely to talk. We've had several parakeets over the years, and all but Dewi have been male. Dewi surprised us.

Dewi was always angry and easily frightened. It was a long time before she showed any interest in interacting with us or even leaving her cage. And she was a biter.  These are traits I've always attributed to her sex.

After we had Pico in the house, I thought maybe we had been too hard on Dewi. Pico is sweet and didn't seem afraid of us, very different than Dewi. Maybe it wasn't fair of us to expect Dewi to conform to a role created by humans. The qualities that make a good pet bird aren't the qualities that make a good mama bird. Perhaps she was programmed to be more concerned with protecting her "nest" than sitting on our fingers.

I started to wonder what other birds would have thought of Dewi. What would have her role been if she lived with a flock of birds?

I had planned to expound on this further before we lost her. Now that's she gone, I can see that we accepted her, even if she wasn't what we were expecting, and in return she accepted us. Over time she began to come out of cage and sit on our shoulders while she picked at our shirts and our hair. She would get on our plates and try to eat our food, and we would let her. We were friends, and that's what mattered.