Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I hadn’t been feeling well all that Saturday morning. I sat sullen as a vulture and shivering because my nearly naked breast, where golden feathers once grew, was now covered with only sparse gray down. When the doorbell rang, I swiveled a bit, just enough to see a red-haired woman bounce into the house, rolling a suitcase behind her. The cockatoo was ecstatic. He loves company. He bobbed up and down, flipping his crest. It looked like a white glove waving hello.
Cherry, the woman who lives here and feeds us nuts, sat down at the kitchen table and told the red-haired woman all about my problem.
“In the wild, birds fly six to ten miles a day, searching for food, housing, and mates,” Michelle told my mistress. “You want to incorporate some exercises into their routine. They get bored and a lot of the time they start feather picking out of boredom.
So this means more trips to the vet, more medication. I just haven’t been able to break my plucking habit. I never saw a bald bird when I was a fledgling, before the hunters nabbed me. Nobody plucks in the jungle. They’re too busy looking for nuts. When I beat this thing, I’m going to peck out a book about us bored, frustrated indoor birds. And I’m going to include something Michelle said: “Birds never should have been taken out of the wild. They should have been left alone. If I could roll back time and say, ‘Don’t import these birds,’ I would. The fact is, I wasn’t around back then, so there’s nothing I can do but make these birds happier.”
