"What color is the sky in the world Bourke parakeets come from?"
Squiggles was the first chick his mother, Betty Bourke, had ever hatched. A fairly old female bird, she'd rarely laid eggs and never incubated them. For some reason, she didn't know what to do with Squiggles. The first look at the new hatchling revealed that the mother wasn't feeding it. Nancy removed Squiggles from the nest, fed it carefully with a tiny eyedropper, and put it back. But the mother's instincts wouldn't kick in, and after several tries at getting her to accept the baby, we decided to remove Squiggles from the nest.
Hand-feeding newly hatched lovebirds and budgies is an incredibly difficult task. Even with baby cockatiels, which are much larger, there's a high fatality rate. We have learned to make the formula thin and to mix feces from one of the parents into the food to provide bacteria. Slowly, our success rate has been improving, but it's not something we like to do.
Squiggles, smaller than the tip of my pinky, was failing under hand-feeding. Whatever we were doing with the hourly feedings, we could see it wasn't enough. Squiggles was dying.
Tragedy gave us a way to save Squiggles. A budgie mother had a baby that died during hatching. We've had cross-species egg fostering in the past, but never with a budgie. As a last-ditch effort to save Squiggles, we put Squiggles in with that budgie mother. Would the mother accept Squiggles as her chick? We watched through the nestbox hole as she used her beak to scoot Squiggles under her. Checking a few hours later, she moved aside just long enough for us to see Squiggles' crop was full of food from his adoptive mother. Success!
The days went on, and Squiggles continued to thrive with his mother. Some of the budgie mother's other eggs had hatched, and we hoped to pull Squiggles at the same time as the other chicks. Having a nest-mate in the incubator seems to work better for the baby birds. But one day, we looked in and saw that the mother had ripped out the feathers on Squiggles' back. Squiggle's father was a rosy Bourke, and we could tell by the remaining feathers that Squiggles was also rosy — a female. The budgie mother apparently decided pink feathers were "wrong" and tried to remove them.
Squiggles went into an incubator by herself. She wound up getting a lot of attention from us humans to make up for the lack of incubator mates. Nancy would sit and cuddle Squiggles in her hands while we'd watch TV. She'd pass the little bird on to me and I'd hold and talk to the little bird. There's a trick where you "bob" a baby bird by putting it's beak between your index finger and thumb. The bird thinks you're feeding it, and it does the "bobbing" motion to try to get food from you. Bobbing seems to help with digestion, and so we did it.
Squiggles got her name at this time, for the way she squiggled around in your hands.
Eventually, Squiggle's budgie clutch mates were pulled and placed in the incubator. Squiggles was glad to have the babies in with her, although she still got a bit more human attention than the budgies.
As the budgie babies grew, though, one of them saw pink and salmon feathers on Squiggles and decided this was "wrong." Because the baby had trouble plucking Squiggles, we didn't notice the damage at first. We had to separate Squiggles again. Squiggles got a lot of our attention as a result.
When it was time to go into the flying room, Squiggles flew to the floor. She didn't like the other budgies, for some reason. Her parents, back in the flying room themselves, were afraid of her. To them, Squiggles was just a new Bourke, and a clumsy immature one. Squiggles tried to follow her biological parents around, and they ran from her!
Squiggles had one clutch mate budgie that she got along with. When that bird wound up in the flying room, the two hung out. Squiggles, while still a ground-feeder with the strange reactions of any Bourke parakeet, took on a few budgie traits as well.
In the morning, Nancy would sit on a chair in the flying room and Squiggles would come to her. Squiggles liked "hair baths" where she'd "bathe" in Nancy's hair where it cascaded over her neck. Squiggles wouldn't "thumb wrestle" like the budgies. She'd tolerate being snuggled, but mostly she liked to perch on humans and try to preen us. When I grew my beard this past Autumnal Equinox, she loved to preen it.
We thought of selling Squiggles. She would have made someone a lovely tame Bourke parakeet, but we loved her. We decided to keep her.
Squiggles wanted to see more of the world. She would try to sneak out from the flying room into the rest of the house — the rest of the house with large parrots who would look at her as a surprise snack or threat or both. When we'd leave the flying room, we'd have to stand at the door, wave a hand, and go "Boogie boogie boogie!" to keep Squiggles in. In the past month, a new addition to the flying room, a friendly green budgie, had learned from Squiggles about sneaking out of the room. The two would double team us. One would distract us while the other tried to escape. After a few rounds of this, we saw what they were doing and didn't fall for it. Still, the intelligent and coordinated behavior impressed us.
Many things make Squiggles' death difficult. She was a bird we knew well and loved. She was young. And in a number of ways, her death was the result of things that we did, some of which were designed to keep her safe.
All the flying room birds go cage at night. They feel secure being in something that a predator cannot get into. They don't understand that the entire room and the entire house are "cages" that predators cannot get into. If not caged at night, the birds will occasionally become frightened and fly about at high speed, slamming into walls or cages or windows. We put them in the cages for their own safety and leave on a night-light so they can see there are no predators.
The Bourkes are very mild birds, and so they go into the cage where the gentler birds go. There's a cockatiel who is crippled who goes in that cage, and some of the budgies go in there, too. The "female" cage is one where the rough-and-tumble females go. Devoid of males to fight over, and with far too many birds for anyone to think of trying to nest, the cage is fairly calm.
For many of the rest of the birds decide which cage they go into. Some want Nancy to put them away. Some want me to put them away. A few require us to cheer them on as they climb over and then into the cage. Rarely do we need to catch them. They may not like going cage, but they know it's better than being exposed to all the "predators" that roam the bird room at night.
The bird room also contains a scientific experiment. Nancy has been selecting the tamest and most intelligent budgies to breed. There are some third and fourth generation birds from this breeding program now. Some are self-taming, others remain far tamer than their non-tame counterparts. Eventually, Nancy has been aiming for birds that do not have to be hand-raised to be human-friendly and tame.
Along the way, though, a strange phenomenon has emerged. Some of the birds in the breeding program have lost their fear response. We've jokingly named them "piranhakeets." When thumb-wrestling with a human, they will start biting hard. Since they're small birds, there's not much danger to the humans. The bitey-ness was an annoyance, something we hoped would go away with the breeding program. Dogs lost much of their testosterone levels as they were bred — hence the floppy ears and curved tails. We expected the budgies to do the same (although we did not expect them to get floppy ears and curved tails). Dogs and their wolf ancestors, though, are apex predators. Birds aren't — they're prey, and it's possible the search for tameness has resulted in increased aggressiveness. We hadn't seen any significant problems, and so we didn't worry about it.
Many of the female budgies have decided it's breeding time. Why, we don't know. They obviously don't realize there's snow outside! Perhaps it's the sprouts the birds have been given lately as their fresh nightly food. Female budgerigars (actually, most parrots) become far more aggressive when they are in breeding mode.
Somehow, a female piranhakeet wound up in the mild cage. Did she think the pink feathers were "wrong"? Did she see Squiggles as a "threat"? Or, with her increased intelligence and aggressiveness, was the attack something she simply enjoyed? We heard nothing that night, but in the morning when we went to release the birds for the day, Squiggles was hunkered in one corner, obviously mauled. Only the female piranhakeet had blood on her.
We set up a heated incubator for Squiggles. I tried to feed her some baby formula, as I had months ago. A call to the vet, a warmed up car and a warm cooler, and we attempted to get her to help. Squiggles died a mile from our house.
Of all the mistakes we made with Squiggles, the last was whether she would have done better staying in the incubator. She lost enough blood that she needed more medical care than I could have given her; she needed antibiotics and perhaps a subcutaneous injection of fluids (the only way fluids can be replaced in a bird of her size). Would Squiggles still be alive if we'd kept her at home? I don't know. I did the best I could.
I miss my Squiggles coming to me every time I enter the flying room. She had a hard life she didn't deserve.
