Free Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte Page B

triumphantly at the same height as his other perch. But Stanley made a mockery of my success by treating the new piece of cage furniture as if it simply did not exist. Not only did he refuse to step on the perch for months, but he also stretched and contorted himself to avoid any accidental contact with the interloper.
    Two parrots were, we realized, exponentially more work than owning one, giving us our first taste of the multiple-pet complexity to come. Like Ollie, Stanley insisted on eating dinner with us. In other words, we shared our table food in order to avoid ear-splitting disturbances. African gray parrots are prone to vitamin deficiencies that can lead to health problems if the bird is restricted to a seed diet, so we were only too happy to provide the pasta, tofu, and Jell-O that a wild bird would have scavenged from the forest. But he didn’t make it easy.
    Ollie’s small cage sat on the counter behind my chair at mealtime. Serving him involved depositing scraps into a small food dish tied securely to the top of his cage. Not counting the food morsels that occasionally rained upon my head and the frequent squawking fits, that was the extent of the fuss with him. Stanley, however, would not tolerate a dish of any description on his cage. He shrank from the seed containers, plastic jar lids, quarter-cup measuring cups, and pudding bowls we auditioned as if they were cleverly disguised pythons with their own dinner plans in mind. Yet he would happily take nourishment from an ordinary spoon—as long as the spoon remained in my hand. If I gradually lowered the spoon until it rested on the bars on top of his cage, ever so gently uncurled my fingers, and crept three paces back to my chair, before my fanny touched wood, the spoon would hit the floor, scatteringfood in all directions. Clamping the spoon to his cage bars with a clothespin only served to divert his attention from eating to prying open the clothespin and flinging down the spoon.
    He was also unpredictable about what he might decide to eat. The corn he enjoyed one night was resoundingly snubbed the next. But it wasn’t necessarily a matter of his liking or disliking for a particular vegetable or tuber, we learned. The key was serving them in the proper order, but the constantly changing preferred sequence was a secret so impenetrable it would have pleased cryptography experts at the CIA. Thus, the helping of peas Stanley disdained with dramatic throat puffs that mimicked gagging gained quick acceptance after he had made a few lunges at a spoonful of broccoli. Stanley’s behavior transformed our dinner table into a merry-go-round that sent me bobbing up and down, in and out of my chair, rounding the table, then circling back again.
    B IRD EXPERTS AGREE that the first step in gaining control over a parrot is convincing it to “step up” on your hand upon command. Bird experts are easily identified by their scarred hands, and I realized that the road to a better bond with Stanley wouldn’t necessarily be painless. Hoping that Lynn might have taught him the appropriate verbals, I tried calling “Step up, Stanley,” from across the room and waited vainly for a raised foot to wave at me. Repeating the experiment a few inches from him resulted in the expected lowered head and threat to bite. And bite he did when I slid my hand closer. After examining my flesh for punctures and finding only a minor indentation, I shelved my usual cowardice and braved a second attempt. Stanley nipped me again, but when I refused to withdraw he seemed to sigh with his whole body as he graciously stepped onto my hand. Lifting him to chest level, my exhilaration soured when I realized I had no idea what to do withhim now. To make Stanley think my command had been part of a grand plan instead of mere grandstanding, I took him on a short tour of the living room, pointing out such landmarks as the couch, TV, and coat rack.
    Once I became skilled at picking up our parrot, I needed