Murder Most Fowl

It’s not until the second day of Christmas that you’re supposed to get two turtle doves, at least according to the traditional Christmas carol that starts on Christmas day with a partridge in a pear tree and ends twelve days later on Epiphany with twelve lords “a leaping.” Still, my daughter surprised me with two parakeets. Granted, they weren’t turtle doves and it’s not the second day of Christmas, but apparently during a recent stroll through an antique shop I mentioned that I like bird cages. Or was interested in bird cages. Or told a story about how my grandmother had one. Or that I had seen La Cage aux Folles. My daughter interpreted this as a subtle message that I wanted birds for Christmas.

There were two of them; one, a blue male (“Happy”), the other a white female (“Whitey”). My daughter gave me a large cage, bags of bird seed, parakeet “treats,” plastic paraphernalia to attach inside the cage for them to eat from and sharpen their beaks, and several toys hanging from the top of the cage that looked like piñatas. In other words, it was like the parakeet version of a weekend in Vegas but without the vomiting. I couldn’t imagine how anything could go wrong, especially since the birds had each other and seemed to get along quite well, sharing a perch and tweeting along to the classical music station I put on for them to nurture their inner Mozart.

Au contraire. I went out the next day and returned to find Whitey stuffed into a corner of the cage on the floor with Happy sitting on top of her. Naively, I thought I had made things so comfortable for them that they took to mating the minute I left them alone. Not being the type to stand there and watch, I went about my business just as they went about theirs. I thought about switching the station to Seriously Sinatra but decided that might be too much. Besides, I could tell people afterward that I went back and found Happy lying on his back, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. The joke would be much funnier that way.

Turns out the joke was on me. When I went back to check on the love birds, Whitey was dead. They hadn’t been mating at all but were engaged in some sort of parakeet blood sport, and Happy had trapped Whitey in an arm bar (feather bar?), killing her. I was stunned. What I found just as unsettling was that Happy continued to sit on top of his opponent’s head and wouldn’t move until I forced him off.

If you’re a regular reader or subscriber to this blog, you know that I am working on a murder mystery novel and so am in forensic mode just about all the time. So, I applied the same investigative analysis to this case in which there is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence suggesting “fowl play.” To wit, there were two healthy birds in the cage and now there is only one. The survivor was found smothering the victim (yes, I would go that far). And I found out from my daughter that Whitey had been pecking at Happy’s feet when she first brought the birds home, which is a sign of hostility.

So, Happy had opportunity, motive, and means, being bigger than Whitey. I concluded that Happy, contrary to his name, had snapped and murdered his fine feathered friend as soon as I turned my back. I would have left it at that, a simple case of murder in the first, except that now Happy is behaving strangely. He no longer chirps, puffs out his feathers as if cold, and sits in the same corner of the cage in which the dirty deed was done. To complicate things, I caught him crying the other day with his head twisted around 180 degrees and buried in his feathers.

I’m not an animal behavioral psychologist (do they have psyches?), but I did find out that this behavior can point to illness or grief. Could it be that Happy is grieving over the loss of his friend and now regrets smothering her to death in a corner of the cage? Or is it possible that Whitey died from something else? I’ll never know unless I assemble a defense team on Happy’s behalf. It will have to have at least one crow, since they’re pretty clever.

The problem is that–you know, trying to make things better–I left the cage open last night in an attempt to cheer Happy up and get him to fly around the room. Now, I can’t find him. He has flown the coop–literally. That may not necessarily prove his guilt, but it isn’t looking good for him. This is getting to be quite a case, and we haven’t entered the Christmas season yet. There’s no way I’m telling my daughter.

Image credits: feature by Hugo WAI; white parakeet by Christine Brun. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”