Writing the recent post about our mockingbird jiggled loose some memories that had become crusted over with the dusts of time. Memories of another bird that I found to be very entertaining; Glitch, the African Grey Tierney parrot. Please forgive the quality of these photos, these are scans of old photograph prints.
Meet Glitch. In this photo he is fully grown and had become a well educated and sassy bird indeed. He had a vocabulary of over 100 words and phrases and what was amazing was the way he would use them to converse. For example; we also had two cats, Ratso and Bear. Bear liked to stretch up the base of Glitch’s platform like we has going to climb it. Glitch would lean over the edge of his platform and yell, “Get down, Bear, get down.” Of course he learned this from hearing me scold the cat in these situations. But he rarely used that phrase except when Bear was teasing him.
I hand tamed the bird. When I got him he was just a little squirt. The book I bought along with him said that these parrots, even the young ones, can inflict painful bites and I should wear heavy leather gloves while attempting to tame and train the bird. The problem was that every time I extended my gloved hand toward Glitch to encourage him to step off his perch and onto my finger, he went nuts. A little more research turned up the fact that fledglings gathered from the wild are snatched from their nests by men in heavy leather gloves and stuffed into a box or cage. This, as you can imagine, is fairly traumatic to the birds.
So I abandoned the gloves and tried hand taming with bare hands. On my first two attempts I presented my finger and Glitch leaned down, opened his beak and went for the finger. I hung tough and braced for a bite. He took my finger gently in his beak and just sort of tongued it, like he was tasting me. Then sat back up and looked me in the eye. We were communicating something, I just wasn’t sure what. So I withdrew the finger and just spoke to him for a while as he watched and listened intently.
The third attempt resulted in a repeat of the mouthing, he stood up, looked me over then stepped out onto my finger. Success! I had won his trust. It was easy once I eliminated the gloves.For the record, on many occasions, Glitch would “mouth” my hand, a cheek or my ear as he stood on my shoulder, but he never once bit me.
Glitch used to enjoy luring Ratso into the cage so he could sit above and tease the “dumb cat”. What can I say; Ratso wasn’t the brightest beast on the Earth.
Among the other unusual pets I’ve enjoyed were a raccoon named Tulip that my family raised from a kit and a nest of three tiny baby squirrels that I found bedded out in my boat one spring. The momma ran off and left her nearly-newborn babies; so I bottle-fed them. But that is a story for another time.
