Beaudin Goodfellow, aka Beaudin de la Bec Noir, died today shortly after 4am. I was holding him cupped in my hands on my chest, knowing he was fading. He had been unconscious for twenty minutes, and I was sure he would not wake again, but he suddenly lunged forward, spreading his wings, and collapsed. For a moment I hoped he had rallied, but then I saw the light leave his eyes, and knew that he was gone.
Beau came into our lives in 2006. Trish and I made a practice of not having more than four birds at a time, reasoning that two apiece were the most to which we could pay adequate attention, and the death of Jabberwock the year before had reduced the birds to three, leaving Ram outnumbered by the mated pair of Ning and Sophie.
We wanted a rescue bird, so we adopted him through Greyhaven, the local bird rescue charity. It might have been easier to adopt a human child, considering how we were vetted and interviewed, but since the whole point was to compensate for neglect, Trish and I entirely approved of the process. We were told he had had a mate and lost her, and that he had spent several years locked in his cage in a dimly lit laundry room, and was about seventeen, but all this information was tentative. He might have spent time with cockatiels, since he sounded like a deeper pitched one, but nobody really knew.
What was obvious, though, was that he was high-strung. He could be quiet enough while he was on a shoulder, but getting him to step up left my right index finger a bloody mess of scars for over a year before he became calm enough to step up without drawing blood.
Still, we managed to enjoy him from afar, watching him bathe in his water dish while chortling happily, and watching him open the latch on his cage until we had to thwart him by tying the cage shut – a parrot who gets loose when you are not around is a danger to themselves. We even had to tie the barred floor of his cage to the frame, because he soon learned to bounce it loose and slip out the bottom of the bars.
After several years, though, he became a glutton for affection. He would slip under my finger on the keyboard, chuckling and demanding that I scratch his neck, and grooming my fingernails gently. At other times, he would roll over on his back on the sideboard beside my work station,squeaking and nipping playfully at my fingers. Increasingly, he would fly to me wherever I was, leaving me terrified that he might land just as I opened the oven and tumble into it. He even learned to tolerate sitting twenty centimeters from Ram on the futon by the window, just so he could nestle in the crook of my elbow.
Perhaps Beau tolerated Ram because Ram is a cripple who never learned to make an adult squawk and seemed no threat (although, as often as not, Ram would win their dominance games). Or perhaps Ram was the enemy of his enemy Ning. Beau never did take to Ning, the mated cock on the other side of the living room. They fought territorial skirmishes until I felt like a UN observer, and Ning would torment Beau by crawling under the table to beneath Beau’s cage, where the angle was too steep to dive bomb him. Beau would always be furious – and totally clueless about how to respond. I could almost see him thinking that he was young and tall and should be dominant, yet somehow he never managed to give Ning a bad moment.
In recent years, with the flock down to Beau and Ram, Beau blossomed. It always touched me to see him showing affection, considering how violent he had been when we first brought him home.
I had spent the last couple of days trying to decide if Beau was ill. But like many parrots, Beau was good at hiding his illness. Besides, he remained a hearty eater up to his final few hours, raiding my dinner plate then retreating with a bit of corn or potato as he had always done, and emptying his seed dish.
Still, I detected some unsteadiness, and decided to take him to the vet this morning, just to have him checked. I prepared a travel cage, and placed it in him for the night so I could wake and leave as soon as it was late enough. Just to be sure, I placed the travel cage on a chest by my bed, and slept with the lights on so I could check him easily. Once, I woke to see him sleeping in the corner of the cage nearest me.
The next time I woke, his posture seemed unnatural, so I took him from the cage, scratching his ears and stroking his wings, talking and singing to him. I knew by then he would never survive to arrive at the vet’s, and that the most I could do was soothe him in his final moments – and perhaps not even that much.
I was out the door before 8am today to take his body for cremation. When I returned, it would be hard to say if Ram or I were more aware of the Beau-shaped hole in our daily routines. So Ram and I are sitting together, neither of us wanting to go far from the other.
Off the Wall 