We’ve been dreading this day since we first met Humphrey, our parakeet. She hates being touched more than anything else and yelps if you even go near her with your hand.
Of course, when she feels like it, she’ll land, climb, and fall asleep on us and does so all the time. But it has to be on her terms.
So we knew, at some point, we’d have to grab her and put her into her disgustingly small flight cage. That time is here and neither of us have slept much over the past few nights.
Catching her was as bad as I imagined. She knew something was up and wasn’t interested in taking part. She kept looking up at me with her wide glassy eyes as if to try and dissuade me from whatever it was I was about to do. But, loving her dearly, and essentially being a coward I made a complete nause-up of getting her in the box. She yelps you see, and it really jars me. So I released the grip and she was off. It took three attempts to get her and by then she was a little feathery bag of adrenaline.Now I’m sitting here by the light of this LCD, with 5mg of valium slowly kicking in, listening to bird-calming music and the horrible sound of an adrenal bird in a small wooden box scrabbling about.
That’s it. The cab turned up and Michele is now with her on the way to the airport. Cowardice again preventing me from traveling with her in the car.
