Free Pickles The Parrot Returns: My Continued Adventures with a Bird Brain by Georgi Abbott

when I got there, I realized I
hadn’t drained the water. Corn doesn’t float, if it did then
Pickles might have made a nice game of bobbing for corn out if it
but he wasn’t about to stick his face into the water to fetch corn
from the bottom. I apologized, of course, and drained the bowl so
he could eat his breakfast.
    At lunch time, I forgot to give him the
mashed potato I’d been promising him and didn’t realize it until
supper time when I noticed it still sitting on the counter and I
hadn’t clued in when he kept asking for it – I just figured he
wanted more. In the afternoon, I tried to hand him the last piece
of Sesame Snap that we had in the house and dropped it on the
floor, much to Neeka’s delight, so he snagged it. And then, when I
tried to make up for it and offered him banana, it was too green
and he wouldn’t eat it.
    I had tortured him all day, but I wasn’t
through. As he was eating his almond, I reached above him to turn
off his UV light and somehow managed to knock it over and on to the
cage with a bang. Pickles was startled off his perch and landed
with a hard thud on the bottom of his cage, losing his almond in
the process. He climbed back up to his perch, sat there looking all
put-out and refused to take his almond in any matter. I dropped it
in the dish beside him and he promptly tossed it out and climbed
into his tent to pout.
    I’m not done. After he climbed into his tent,
I covered the cage with his sheet and locked the cage door. A few
minutes later, I realized his water bowl was still on the kitchen
counter so I walked back into the livingroom and flipped the sheet
off to open the door. He hadn’t expected that and he shot out of
his tent like a missile out of cannon, landing and clinging to the
bars on the far side of the cage. Just like that. He was here, now
he was there. He gave me a look as if to say, are
you quite finished now mom? Because I can’t take much more of
this .
    I wasn’t. A little later, I started to wonder
if I’d picked up his little maraca off the bottom of his cage and
put it back in his toy bucket. I was determined not to upset him
again so I tip toed close enough to the cage to inspect the floor
and there it was, his favorite talon toy in the world and the toy
he would eventually get up to play with sometime during the night,
laying there taunting me. Pickles has a hard time carrying it up
the cage bars so he was probably going to have this reminder of
what a cruel mom I am, to stare at all night from his perch
above.]
    The other causes could very well be
behavioral. Perhaps we’re missing something but we are pretty good
at giving Pickles lots of attention, toys, foraging, enrichment and
new scenery. Other than the plucking, he is a very well-balanced,
happy bird. But, I will save all the above for other chapters.
    We believe that water will be the answer but
I think, in the meantime, what has happened is that something
caused the plucking in the beginning and now it’s become a habit.
One, or a combination of the above things may help in the end but I
think we are now fighting a habit, which in my opinion, means
concentrating even more on enrichment. Again, I’ll speak of that in
other chapters.

Chapter 6
Toys R Us

    “If you're being chased by
your new musical ball and then you notice you're also being chased
by a spider, it doesn't really change anything - just keep
going!”
    “ I have a SS toy bucket
that's attached next to a perch in my cage.  Sometimes I
go inside & play with my talon toys one at a time then
toss them to the ground when they start to annoy me.  Half way
thru the bucket I came across this little pink thing mom had
hidden.  "What's THIS?!" I asked mom.  She told me it was
a little piggy and I thought, cool.  I was waving it around
and all of a sudden it caught on fire!  I dropped it, screamed
and ran out of my cage as fast as I could.  Mom picked it up
and it wasn't on fire after all.  Was I hallucinating? 
Then she