ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I’m caring for a friend’s cockatiels while she is in India for 5 weeks and I’ve been learning a lot about birds. Mostly they seem on the unintelligent side, but don’t appear to have bad personalities or anything, and are probably smarter than the dog. The male bird is five years old and is pretty nice and calm. He makes this bird sound occasionally but doesn’t do anything cool like imitating other animals or talking. The female is about four months and likes to bite my hands. She makes bird sounds a lot and is very afraid of this ball point pen on my dresser top. When I move the pen close to the two birds, the older bird ignores it but the younger one interprets it as the terrible threat of death and moves away as quickly as possible.

I have decided to make it my personal mission to cure the little cockatiel of her terrible pen phobia. Every day when I let them out to climb around a little, I show her the pen for a little bit to let her see that nothing terrible will happen to her when it appears. Hey, I’m doing her a favor. This bird is going to see some other pens in her life. Gradually over the last week her freakouts over the pen have decreased in intensity, so I think it’s working. These cockatiels are pretty nice but I don’t really relate to them very well. Their main purpose seems to be eating seeds and shitting in their water dish. Every day I empty their water dish into the toilet and it is mainly bird poo. I hope they feel welcome here because I can’t really tell how they feel from just watching them.