An intense dread flooded my body at the sight of the birds, followed quickly by burning, all-consuming anxiety, an anxiety I still have, all these years later. Birds? They were and still are my obsession but in those days I only imagined birding not bird cages.
MY BIRDS BY MARY KATE WILCOX 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 78
I am a bird owner and a birder.When I go birding, walking through foggy wetlands at the crack of dawn, or bright forest paths with the wind whistling past me, the songs or honks of the birds envelop me, permeating my entire being. Those glorious creatures fly with graceful and occasionally awkward wing beats, comfortable in their freedom. I am lost in the world of birds around me. My mind fixates blessedly on the chorus of sweet songs and flashes of movement.
When I get home, I go to the guest room, the birds’ room now. I open the cage doors and greet them. The soft pink walls and childish wallpaper is their whole world.
We have a happy routine. Ollie and Sylvia, the babies, scurry over the maze of ropes zig zagging across the room and chew on the arsenal of home-made toys. They fly through their artificial jungle, never knowing everything it lacks.
Whit sits on my shoulder puffy and content, scooching subtly closer to my face in tiny shuffles of his hot scaly feet. I touch my nose to his hard, yellow beak. He preens my eyelashes or combs through my curls.
Gilbert sits like a queen atop her purple chair attacking the macramé web of beads and a mountain of toilet paper rolls, as if punishing the them for daring to exist in her sight.
This goes on hour by hour, day by day.
It is easy to be happy in a fantasy that my birds are guests, here willingly. Then a robin chirps outside the window. My birds’ perk up, their bodies revert from a puffy state of relaxed contentment to the slick, slender forms of alertness. Sylvia squawks an imitation of the robin, a startled “chirrup”, and I am suddenly surrounded by a symphony of lovebirds singing their haunting odes to freedom. They sing in unison with the robin, the harbinger of all things beyond their reach.