Reggie is our parrot – African Grey by species but don’t get any romantic notions that he traveled to Canada by ocean liner to join the family. He was born in Okotoks, Alberta, 20 minutes south of Calgary, in 1997 and we suspect he was the one brown egg in the nest.
He is mostly grey with a nice red tail. I’m not sure why his tail is red. He doesn’t know either.
His story has some shady beginnings; although we picked him up in a reputable pet store, it was only after I won the jackpot at bingo; alas, he comes from scurvy gambling money. He was cute, I liked his beak and his profile reminds me of a little lamb. It was a done deal.
At the time we already had another parrot named Zekey-D. He wasn’t much of a talker and Reggie was young when we got him, so he didn’t say anything either. In the world of talking parrots, it seemed like a bit of a rip-off but things got better.
Zekey had a loud squawk and Bruce had little patience for it if he kept it going for any length of time. One weekend I had to leave town for a funeral and when I got home three days later, I came into the house and flopped onto the couch after the long drive.
I hadn’t even had a chance to start complaining about my relatives when Zekey let out a loud squawk followed up immediately and quite firmly by my little lamb Reggie yelling SHUT THE FUCK UP.
I looked over at Bru, blinked and said something like Que Pasa, Hombre?
He muttered something about cable TV, lack of parental controls, the world is spinning out of control, blah, blah, blah, and we were on our way with Reggie.
So now we knew how parrots learned to talk. They. Hear. Stuff.
Hmmm. Oh well. That didn’t change anything around our place. We had no kids. We both worked for the police. We talked, swore and laughed a lot and before long, Reggie was swinging from the chandelier, literally and I have a photo to prove it, yelling out all kinds of foulness and good stuff too. It was awesome. Still is.
Reggie’s talents are pretty good. Every now and again he yells SCRAM when one of the cats walks under his cage. When he is absolutely certain that the day is done and no more excitement can be squeezed out of anyone, he will starting calling for bed. He says, “Gotta go bedtime”, and he focuses on this one phrase like some kind of savant, saying it over and over until one of us breaks and covers his cage.
As his cage is being covered he announces one of two things; “See you in the morning” or “Cover you up, make you nice and warm.” Once he has his privacy, he’s pretty quiet but now and again he laughs and giggles from behind that cover. I urge you to try that sometime when you’re walking past the cage at 3 am, the kitchen is dark and you have forgotten you even have a bird. Who needs Metamucil?
Reggie calls me ‘Scooter’ and he calls Bruce ‘Daddy’. When I’m leaving the house, he sees me getting my things, puts two and two together and he says ‘Scooter and Daddy have to go out’. I will foolishly respond by telling him that just ‘Scooter is going out’. He counters with ‘Scooter and Daddy have to go out’. Savant. This will actually go back and forth a couple of times. I am an intelligent adult but then it will inevitably dawn on me that I am arguing with poultry. That’s an awakening you don’t want to have. It’s humbling.
Bru has made the same mistake. One night, years ago while he was still mobile, Bru was wheeling Reggie’s cage down the hall to the spare room. Reggie likes quiet, don’t you know, so at that time his cage was put away every night for maximum pleasure on his part. As the cage was moving from the flooring to the carpet, it caught for a second, and Bru pushed it kind of hard to loosen the wheel. From inside the cage we heard “FOR FUCK’S SAKE”. Yup. Then Bru responded “Shut your pie-hole.” I was down the hall and I called out, “Arguing – poultry.” Bru, “Oh, yeah.” And he wheeled the foul little fowl into bed for the night.
Reggie has his moments of extreme intelligence but he’s not exactly sitting at the computer tapping out emails with his beak or anything. The reason for this is because he keeps forgetting his password. See, he’s just like everyone else. But there was this one time…
This little non-SPCA sponsored event took place in 2016. Bruce was sitting at the dining room table, I was sitting in the home-office and Bruce’s nurse was standing in the hallway between the two. We were talking. It was evening and the house pets were quiet and off of our radar. Reggie hadn’t been put to bed yet and he was sitting quietly on top of his cage, just a few feet from the dining room table. Bella happened to slowly walk by into the area where we were talking and out of the corner of my eye I caught the flash of a little red tail. It was Reggie climbing down off of his cage. He can come down the side head first like a greasy little snake and when he gets to the bottom he hangs by his beak and drops about an inch, landing on his big feet, and then he’s mobile. We discourage this because he can’t fly and his beak can destroy stuff.
So we’re talking, Reggie has hit the floor, Bella is standing in the group and out of nowhere, Reggie decides to satisfy some half-assed vendetta and he makes an alarmingly fast move towards Bella. She gets wind of the hit, and rather than run in the 109 directions she could have, she huddles up against the dining room table leg. We are all just watching this unfold in complete disbelief because I did not know that Reggie harbored any ill-will toward Bella, and second to that, he is frigging skiing with those feet, and he’s really moving. Who knew? Then Reggie yells, yes, yells at the top of his lungs, “JE-SUHS CHRIST, FUCK.”
So now we have three adults staring down at the floor while this little 403 gram bird is moving at breakneck speed toward a rotund black cat clutching a table leg, all the while the bird is screaming obscenities and getting closer.
It dawns on me. It’s me. I have to save the day. I’m the one who has to rescue the cat. Bru can’t get up. The nurse doesn’t know our pets and she’s inching toward the nearest exit anyway, I can see her. I must be the Hero in this story. How’s my hair? Did I shave my legs, because my pajamas are capris. I shake my head for a second and get out of my chair, scoop up the little feathered hit-man and put him back on his cage. Bella sees that the offender is gone and she takes off. The three of us all start talking at once and Reggie is laughing and squawking from his cage.
We all finally calmed down, the nurse left, I found Bella on the bed, asked some questions but she wasn’t talking. It would appear that she knew nothing and did not know why Reggie would want to kill her. Hah. Right. This isn’t over. They are welcome to duke it out themselves, settle it and move on, but who has to clean up the carcasses? Me. Who has to buy new shoes to get a reasonable box to fit that carcass? Me. Hmmm. New shoes. And Bella is pretty big. Might have to buy boots to get a good sized box. I’ll circle back to that later.
So in retrospect I thought Reggie had put together a pretty good plan to take Bella out, but it was flawed from the get-go. First of all, too many witnesses. Secondly, Bella is always more alert in the evening when she is campaigning for treats. He needed to lockdown the Hit in the afternoon when she was passed out in the sun. Third, and most important, who can hide a body at that hour without some assistance? He was going to need me and he hadn’t even given me a courtesy heads-up. Nope. This was an epic-fail on his part and now he had tipped his hand. Bella knew!
Crap. This wasn’t over.