The other night after a lovely weekend I was slogging around a bit (on this cursed but better than nothing dialup) to visit a few of my bloggy friends before sleep.

Do you ever read or see something that has you suddenly feeling all up-in-arms and defensive?  Sometimes I’m terrible about reacting to stuff.  I go all psychotic- off on an emotional response before I even figure out exactly how and which of my buttons are being pushed and why!  When this happens I tend to be even worse than usual with my somewhat stream-of-consciousness writing, and I end up feeling foolish for the often seemingly unrelated tangent I’ve gone off on.

Hehe.  I did this; or started to, that night over at Forks off the Moment in response to this post, with a video of this dumb ass woman getting her ticket punched by an alligator.  Well, actually my buttons didn’t get pushed by the post.  In fact, I’m in perfect agreement with Di and her comment authors regarding the video of the woman who gets her ass kicked by a ‘gator because she wants the bragging rights for having wrestled one.  As far as I’m concerned people like that deserve what they get and sometimes deserve worse.   Like maybe the Darwin Award (given posthumously, of course).

So I was trippin’ on my defensive response, especially toward the negative comments about my Steve-O.  Oh my freakin FSM!!  They were baggin’ on my Steve-O!!!  It’s true.  I love the late great Crocodile Hunter!!!

Hahaha.  How silly is that?  My heart went from Steve-O to my own experiences rescuing companion parrots and cockatoos as I read the comment authors’ vehement comparisons of this stupid ‘gator wrestling bitch to Steve and others like him and somehow it translated to a very personal defensiveness in my heart.

I have to laugh at myself for starting on a rant over there (that I hope Di will forgive me for).  The good news is that I bailed before I had worked up a full head of steam, deciding to give some thought to exactly what had me so hot under the collar. This is it. Me n Steve-O.

And what, you may ask, do you and The Crocodile Hunter have in common that would push your buttons so hard?

Love and Cockatoos.

That’s right.  Simply… love and cockatoos.  Of all of the animal shows and even the so-called extreme animal shows that I used to watch for the pure joy of vicariously experiencing the animals up close and personal, Steve-O’s show was my absolute favorite because of all of the various animal handlers and wranglers; of all of the show hosts- I never doubted for a second the deep love and respect that Steve had for critters.

He took every injury that he received at tooth or nail as the perfect right of the animal in its self defense, and usually blamed himself for his own carelessness or mishandling of the situation.  I have no doubt that he went to his death thinking something along the lines of

“Crikey, I should have been more careful.

I must have startled the ol’ girl”

Okay, so that’s the love part.  Here’s the Cockatoo part.

Some of you may remember that I rescue and occasionally place neglected, abused, and other  companion parrots and cockatoos in need of a home.  If you read Love at First Bite you are already familiar with my interspecies love affair with Hildy, my rescued African Grey parrot, pictured above the fold.

Kisses, my Sulfur Crested  Cockatoo, was my third rescue.  He was actually the healthiest and most well cared for of my rescues.  He’s in my Birdy Protection Program- his name has been changed to protect the innocent.  Suffice it to say that well cared for or not, I didn’t want his previous owner to hunt us down if he ever got out of prison.

Anyway, Kisses was my first Cockatoo and I really had no idea what I was getting into. Having a Cockatoo is like having a toddler in their terrible two’s for 60 years.  They require as much attention and care, and with a few birdy exceptions their social habits are much the same, as well.  They want mama’s undivided attention most the time, and seem to squawk the loudest when you’re on the phone.  hehe.

He was young when I got him, only four or five years old, at most, by the avian vet’s best guess.  After I had him about a year he entered a pretty rough adolescence.  His hormones were raging and I was the object of his affections (as I still am).  When those hormones get going in a male parrot or cockatoo, especially one raised in captivity, they kinda freak and beak!!

They often become aggressive in what is in birdy body language a very possessive and protective of their “partner” way.  What this translates
into is that big ass beak taking chunks of bloody flesh out of me whenever someone else (especially any male human) got anywhere near me, or if he felt in his birdy way that I was threatened or in danger.

Here’s the deal.  If I were a female cockatoo, his beak would close on either feathers or the hard horny material of my own beak in a birdy signal for me to fly away from the danger.  When his beak instead closed on soft flesh he had no instinctive understanding that he had hurt me.  He had to learn, as I like to say, to get a governor on his biter.  During this process, I had a stitch in my right cheek, and other gashes and slashes on my hands too numerous to count.

It was a difficult time for both of us.  The bites were so painful that I began to fear them, which complicated the matter.  In fact, one of the worse bites was delivered because I was fearful and had let him out on his boing and cage top but wouldn’t step him up.  He tired of his cage-top and wanted to hang out with me.  He launched himself through the air about 10 feet (with clipped flight feathers) and didn’t quite make the shoulder that I’m sure he was aiming for.  Instead, he grabbed at my collar bone with that razor sharp can-opener of a beak and delivered a chomp that was exquisitely excruciating! I think it was the most painful and bloody bite of our abusive birdy boyfriend phase, (although the shower incident was actually worse; but that’s another story) and probably should have had a couple of stitches.  As it healed it was kinda amazing.  It left a perfectly round hole  that looked like a 45 slug had punched me there, with a  bulls eye of bruising encircling it in bright shades of red, purple, blue and green.

Okay, so this is the part where I feel such a connection to Steve Irwin.  Some time not too long after Kisses and I had made it through his hormonal insanity, and I had struggled not so much with loving him, as with continuing the important physical interaction despite my fear of those terrible bites, Steve-O did a segment on Sulfur Crested ‘Toos down under.  They are considered a pest over there.  They are slaughtered by the thousands to protect crops, or were then- I haven’t had the heart to look at the situation lately.

Anyway, as Steve-O stood in their flight at his Zoo, surrounded by these beautiful and intelligent beings, he spoke of his fear of them, having been bitten pretty severely when he was young, and of his simultaneous love  for them, and I saw myself in his eyes.

I had to chuckle at the mighty crocodile hunter who was more frightened of a comparatively small beak than of an humongous mouthful of razor sharp, 2 inch teeth, but I understood, perfectly.

See, those crocs can physically handle a little wrestling. He could control the situation without fear of injuring them.  But these sweet things are fragile.  Birdy bones snap like twigs.  Steve knew, as I do, that if one of these beauties bites, you just have to take it.  Because if you strike out or even reflexively try to shake them off of a hand (or toe), you’ll crush them.  Literally crush them.  You just have to suck it up and gently and carefully disengage.

That’s love, in Thornesworld.  Sometime I’ll tell you about my Shower Scene with Kisses… it was hilarious and right up there with Hitchcock’s famous shower scene in Psycho for bloodiness, (but I recall it in vivid color, not in that washed out black and white of that one), and thanks to my skill in making a butterfly bandage, my left ear has only a small scar instead of… well.  Hehe

If you’ve made it this far, Let me take a sec to show off my other babies.

This is Sammy.  He’s the old man of the flock.

He was about 25-35 when I got him and so crippled up with arthritis that he couldn’t perch, and so overweight that he dropped like a stone.  He’s a healthy, happy boy now.

This is my Flute.  He was a wild caught Molluccan Cockatoo. It’s been since 2004 that we lost him in a horrible freak accident that I still can’t bear to think about let alone write about.  I’ll tell you about his life with me another time.

This is my very first large tattoo, which I got in tribute to Flute and my love for him and to neglected and abused companion birds everywhere.

Tattoo by Judy Parker of Pacific Tattoo

 
This is my Swee’Pea.  She’s the “baby” of my flock at 10 years old.  She’s the only “rescue” I’ve paid money for directly.  I would have bought her siblings too, could I have afforded to at the time.  Her owner was one of the responsible ones.  When she realized she couldn’t care for her 4 hand raised Military Macaws, she brought them 1000 miles to sell them super cheap at a bird mart!

And finally, we have Hoolio and Hooliette.  These two are a bonded pair of retired breeders.  They are Double Yellow Headed Amazons.

Hoolio and Hooliette

Her bare breast is from years of plucking it to feather her nest.

Hooliette

She had destroyed the feather follicles long before I got her, now she doesn’t even get a spec of down there.  Her beak is deformed from too many years of egg production with no nutrition left for her.

Hoolio is, of course, fat and happy and healthy as any male who has nothing to do but fuck, eat, and protect his lover from imagined threat. These two are funny.  As a bonded pair, they are not really “pets”.  They have each other and as true soul mates, have no real interest in others.  Still, it’s sweet the way Hoolio tries to flirt with me until Hooliette comes over and shoos him away from me, laying claim to her man.  Hoolio does the same thing to Hooliette when she flirts with the GirlyBoi.  He obviously recognizes my lil butch as a masculine energy that he needs to protect his lover from!

That’s it for now, from Thorne’s Flock!

Peace, out!