The Lord God Made It All

Everyone who follows this blog should be familiar with our resident cockatiels…

Taralee…

…and Tango.

For the first ten weeks of their lives, these birds lived in the same cage and, after they were separated, were allowed to interact frequently.  Then I had surgery and it was simply too hard, especially for the first five weeks, to even think about giving the cockatiels some one on one birdie time.  Even after I recovered to the point of normalcy, we still never brought the cockatiels to each other to play.  We had grown out of that habit, and the birds were by this time so attached to their respective owners, that doing so seemed rather pointless.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I was busy hanging up laundry with Taralee on my shoulder when I ran out of hangers.  Well, when you’re out of something, you go see if your sister has it, so I waltzed into Kathy’s room to see if she had any.  While I rummaged through her closet, I placed Taralee on Kathy’s bird tree, even though Tango and Darcy were already perched there greedily devouring popcorn.  That’s when IT happened.  I suppose it never occurred to either Kathy or me that not only had these birds not seen each other close up for ages, but that they had reached adulthood as of two months ago.  Tango took one look at Taralee and was instantly smitten.  He acted like he had never seen such a beautiful bird before and immediately began all sorts of posturing that in the wild a male bird would do to attract a female as a mate. To sum it up, Kathy’s bird was courting mine!  To our immense glee, Taralee ignored him and began nibbling on the popcorn.  When Tango moved closer, she spooked and flew off the tree.  I replaced her higher on the perch and Tango decided to use a different approach.  I’ve been trying to teach him a fancy version of Frere Jacques and he began whistling it off-tune in a desperate attempt to serenade Taralee.  It sounded awful, and believe me, Taralee wasn’t impressed.  No matter how he bobbed his head, fluffed up the feathers on his wings, whistled or anything else, she would oscillate between studiously ignoring him and hissing angrily when he came too close.  Poor befuddled Tango!

Anyway, it’s times like these that make me immensely grateful for my camera.  Click this link to watch Tango in action!

Six years ago, I hid the truth about the gender of our cat because I was afraid that Mom and Dad might give him away since we traditionally only kept females.  (I do not endorse deceiving parents.)  Fortunately for me, my parents thought the incident was funny since it was my mother who sexed the cat incorrectly at birth, and they liked Cloud so much that we kept him anyway.  To this day, however, Mom teases me about the summer of ’02 and the infamous secret that I kept.

It’s interesting how the past can haunt you.

We have just discovered that my cockatiel, which I thought was a male, is actually a female.  Naturally, everyone thinks this is hilarious, and I have undergone some good natured ribbing.  This didn’t present a problem as to how I handled the bird, but it does cause some difficulty with the name.  I can’t name a female bird Johann.  We tried Johanna for a while, but it was too long and hard to spit out and everyone was getting confused.  Names were flung around for almost a week before my mother came up with the perfect one.  Taralee.  Pronounced with an ah as in father – “tah-rah-lee” as opposed to “tare-rah-lee.”  Sometimes, I just refer to her as Tara, but when you pronounced the name with the ah sound it’s actually easier to say Taralee.  For those who are interested in knowing, my name is pronounced the same way – “Kah-ren” as opposed to “Kare-en.”  No one in Texas gets that right because it’s a Yankee pronunciation.  I do prefer to have my name said that way but defer because it seems to be incomprehensible to southerners.  I will insist that my bird’s name is spoken that way, though.

Anyway, here is little lady Taralee.

She’s an absolute smooch.

Click here to see a short video clip.