The story of Kenny*
He came in from a jumble sale one Saturday morning, carried in a rusty old birdcage by my wife and son. No doubt some old dear had been separated from him, either by the Grim Reaper or the Social Services.
"Oh no you don't!"
"Don't worry, we'll look after it," they said.
"Well you better, because I'm not cleaning out the cage!"
"What will we call him?"
"Kenny," I said. It was clear that resistance was going to be futile. "Kenny the Canary."
As expected, I was the one who had to look after him: clean out his cage every week, replenish the water and birdseed every day. I used to seal up the room and let him fly round, at first, but the job of catching him again was such that he could not have enjoyed his excursions very much. Kenny never did trust me though. I got off on the wrong foot with him, and nothing in nature knows more about right and wrong feet than a caged bird. I couldn't wait to see him take a birdbath in his new little plastic cage-accessory. Several times I caught him and forced him into it. Naturally he was in terror of this experience. Then I always wanted him to eat out of my hand, but he never would come and take food unless I moved more than arm's length away from the cage. Eventually I learned that you have to earn the trust of someone like Kenny. So I played a waiting game. Every day I would change the water in the birdbath. Still he never used it. Instead, no matter what I tried, he would wash himself in the drinking water container, dipping down and fluttering the water all over.
The old cage was replaced with a bigger one. I still felt sorry for him and would have freed him, had it been possible for him to survive on his own. Then a friend wanted to get rid of a female canary and gave it to us. We put Hillary, the new arrival, into the same cage with Kenny. That was a big mistake; canaries do not like to share their space. They come together to mate and then split the scene. Hillary was bigger than Kenny, but she had a sore leg. As it got better she became more and more aggressive to Kenny. She would attack him ferociously and he would back off. One day, I saw him standing down the bottom of the cage in a corner panting - as much as a tiny bird can pant - while Hillary sat on the top perch. "She's going to kill him," I thought. So we had to give Hillary back to where she came from. We were not overly surprised to hear a short while later that she had escaped and was missing, presumed dead.
After that, Kenny was a new bird. He was chirpier than ever. I always made a point of hanging his cage out on the rotary clothesline in the garden whenever the sun came out. He would warble vigorously, hop from perch to perch and catch the odd fly that happened by. After putting him out there, I would watch him from the window for ages. He was so happy, he would loop the loop - flying off a perch, looping around in the air and back again. I fed him aniseed scented seed sprays from one of the shrubs in the garden. One time I thought I had killed him when he collapsed into a birdie coma on the floor of the cage after eating some elderberries that I gave him. But he came round again.
His biggest scare was still to come. One day, my son said "Dad, there's a big ugly bird standing on the shed, looking at Kenny." I went to the window to see. It was a sparrowhawk. I started out to the garden quickly to take Kenny's cage in. By the time I got down the steps, the sparrowhawk had launched itself at the cage and smashed into it. It continued to batter at the cage until I was nearly there, with a violence that I have never seen equaled, before giving up and disappearing. Kenny did not seem too bothered. He hopped around - but he had no tail whatsoever. The sparrowhawk had pulled his tail off. It grew back eventually.
The greatest thing was when I started to notice that the birdbath looked as if it had been used. (I was still setting it up for him in the hope that he might use it eventually.) There were a couple of yellow feathers in there and the water was dirty. So I spied on him now and then, until eventually I got to see him go into the birdbath, stand in the water, and toss it up over himself, fluttering and ending up soaking wet. Joy! Many times, after that, he would be so wet that he would miscalculate his flight, miss a perch and fall down. But he soon dried out. He even began to let me come closer, though he never did eat right out of my hand. I think he would have eventually, had time allowed. The key thing was for me not to bother him. The more I left him alone, the more he trusted me.
After a few years, it happened that he started to stay on the floor of his cage all the time. We wondered if he was ill, but thought that the trauma of a visit to the vet might finish him off altogether. I guess we just assumed that he was suffering from old age. I lowered all three perches and the cuttlefish bones that he used to stand on, so that they were all near the bottom of the cage. That helped. He would use the lowest one. But one day he would not even use the lowest perch. I was so worried about him, I moved him to the sunniest spot in the house - even though it was there, obstructing the hallway. He gave up preening himself and looked a sad figure. He no longer had any fear of me now and came right up to take food. But mostly he just stood alone, panting.
I came down one morning and he was lying on the floor of the cage. When I went to tell my wife, it came hard to say, "I think Kenny is dead." Half hoping he might revive, like the time after eating the elderberries, I left him there till the next day. Eventually he was buried in a little herbal tea box, under a tree at the bottom of the garden, and covered over with stones. I like to think that Kenny is somehow reincarnated into the wild songbirds that play in his tree and fly away.
Stephen Moran
* Book link: The London Silence
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