Story Bird: Kippy
Number one: never assume your birds are
safe. Number two: if you have other pets in the house and they start
acting strangely, pay attention!
This afternoon I was eating a bite and my dachshund kept running back and forth
through the house. Since we figure we got the model that doesn't have a brain,
I didn't pay a lot of attention to him. When I went from the dining room to my
bedroom, I passed him and our house rooster, both of them digging at the bottom
of a wall in the living room that's between the kitchen and living room. I
figured they'd heard a mouse and went on. When I came back out, they were both
still there, still scratching at the wall, and the dachshund started whining and
jumping on the wall. Again, I didn't think too much of it. Then I heard
something flutter. Hmm. Normally walls don't flutter! I looked up on the
ceiling fan and there were only four cockatiels there! I did a quick
run-through of the area the tiels can be in and no fifth cockatiel! So I walked
over to the wall where the dog and rooster had been, and called Kippy's name and
he chirped! Oh, swell! I've got a cockatiel down inside a wall!
I couldn't get the panel off where he was, so I cut a hole in the wall (BIG dang
hole) and felt around, and sure enough, there he was. I got him out and he's
fine. Tired, but fine.
So now the search started for how on earth did he get down in the wall in the
first place!
That particular wall doesn't go clear to the ceiling, and the top of it is a
favorite place for my birds to hang out. The tops of the kitchen cabinets are
about 6" below the top of the wall and not only does that provide a fun place to
run around, it also allowed them access to a strip of paneling above the
cabinets that's about 4" high. They had chewed a big hole in the paneling back
in the corner just above the cabinets, and apparently Kippy fell down in that
hole. I couldn't see the hole from the floor so I had no idea they were doing
any damage up there at all.
So I gerri-rigged a patch over the
hole that they won't be able to chew through, and I still have to figure out how
I'm going to fix the hole in the living room wall where I sawed the piece out to
get to Kippy.
The moral of the story is, every once it a while it pays to check out conditions
where our birds hang out if they're free-flighted like my tiels are. Secondly,
if it hadn't been for Reinhold Dachshund and Carmen Americauna Rooster, I don't
know when I would have noticed that Kippy was missing, and I sure wouldn't have
known where to look for him. But bless their hearts, they did everything but
write it on a piece of paper for me, letting me know that Kip was in big trouble
down in that wall.
