Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte

practicing his limited English vocabulary, he shoehorns the words into a stream of parrot invective. It’s not surprising that “Do you hear me?” and “Now, listen!” are two of his most accomplished phrases. He’s heard these often enough from us to work them to a fine polish.
    “A great many people in Peru keep Brotogeris parakeets as pets,” Harris writes, “because many are tame and sweet, learn to talk, and become quite attached to their owners.” Attached by their mandibles, I might add to the author’s generous description. Ollie literally bites the hand that feeds him. When Linda offers him a corner of a windmill cookie, he’ll lunge at her and let the treat fall to the floor. He bites out of imperious impatience that the cookie wasn’t his the instant he first glimpsed it in Linda’s fingers. He bites in anger that access to his favorite cookie should ever have been denied him at all. He bites for the simple pleasure of biting human flesh. Many are the times that one of us foolishly forgets to carry his cage by the top handle, picking it up between our hands instead. The succulent folds of our palms protruding through the bars comprise too much of a temptation for Ollie to resist. He’s smart enough to recognize a cookie while it’s still in the package. He should be smart enough to understand that biting us while his cage is in transit threatens his personal safety. But the instinct to bite, like his urge to squawk, transcends mundane concepts of reason.
    As loud as Ollie is, he’s surprisingly sensitive to sounds. Removing a handful of kibbles from a bag of cat food invites a fusillade of offended squawks. So does scraping a knife against a plate, shaking a pill out of a bottle, running water in the sink, emptying or loading the dishwasher, rustling a plastic trash bag, cutting paper with scissors, pouring coffee beans into the coffee grinder, or dumping cornflakes into a bowl. He’s a jackhammer complaining that a cricket is too loud.
    If any instincts bind Ollie to the natural world, they are well concealed. We placed his cage near a window so he could watch the chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, titmice, goldfinches, and other birds making the circuit to our feeder, but he expressed no recognition of them. He did seem to enjoy it when we’d hang his cage outdoors on sunny days, so we started taking him on walks. As we wandered the wooded trails of a county park a few miles from our house, he showed little interest in anything except the attention of the person who carried him. When he began biting Linda, Linda would pass him to her friend Deanne. When he began biting Deanne, Deanne would pass him to me. Whenever I carried him, the lovely hulking tree stumps, darting insects, splashes of wild asters, and incursions of creek meanders faded away as I was forced to shift my focus to Ollie.
    “Isn’t this nice?” I’d cajole him with a steady stream of encouragement, hoping to keep his beak at bay. “Pretty boy, Ollie. Oh, there’s a good boy. We’ll be back home soon.”
    Because Ollie’s wings were clipped, we had not thought we were endangering him by letting him ride through the park on our shoulders. We were wrong. We read an article in
Bird Talk
magazine that described how a bird with trimmed flight feathers could still catch a gust of air just right and soar to the top of a tree. We kept him indoors exclusively from then on. But one afternoon he still managed to find his way outside and lose himself in the woodsbehind our house. While Linda was working in the living room and I napped obliviously upstairs, something scared Ollie off his cage top in the kitchen. It may have been Linda carrying newspapers past the kitchen door, or it could have been a breeze rustling the pages of a notepad on the table.
    With the distinctive, rolling squawk he produces whenever he takes flight, Ollie abandoned his cage top and launched himself down the basement stairs. And then, because his hatred of