Chippy and Chet

The two parquets  were moved into the small cage from the larger one where all the birds were kept.  I paid the vendor the price she asked and took the two small birds home as a gift to the cutest four-year old in the world, definitely in my life.  She named them on sight.  The green one is Chippy and the yellow Chet.  The happiness and joy she felt were pronounced throughout the house for a few days.  I took Chet out of the cage and let her pet its fine soft feathers on the top of its head.  While holding it, it bit into my flesh and induced an abnormal amount of pain for such a small creature.  Chet sunk its beak into the flesh between my thumb and index fingers and was trying to get out of the palm of my hand that surrounded it but I was not about to let go before my grandbaby had a chance to feel the softness of its feathers.  When she did, I stuck my hand back into the cage and happily let go of the little yellow devil.  It jumped to its perk and seemed stunned at the experience.

A few days later, I am told that Chippy, the green bird, was trying to open the door to its cage as if trying to escape.  I would assume that as normal behavior for creatures meant to be free.  Life in a cage, regardless of how pretty the cage is made, is no substitute for a life of freedom.  At least that is what we, humans, believed in our conscious level.  We, I believed, were rational beings who displayed a preference for freedom over imprisonment.  We valued choice over authority and, in my mind, I believed that no human being will tolerate being in a cage.  Certainly, a bird is a creature that must fly to be alive, it must be free and instinctively, if not rationally, they should prefer freedom to imprisonment.

A day later, I come home from work and Chippy was no longer in the cage.  The bird had determinately opened the door to the cage and escaped.  I looked in all the rooms of the house but could not find him.  When my grandbaby got home and found the single occupant in the cage she was at a loss.  Why would the bird escape, she asked.  How does one make a four-year old understand the value of freedom? I was convinced that Chippy escaped because he detested the bars he had to look through to see the blue sky and the trees in the yard, unable to fly, unable to see the world around him beyond the window where the cage rested.  So he studied the cage and discovered the mechanism that allowed him to open the door to its flight.  Chet was probably undergoing the same desire but she was too stupid to understand the mechanism of cage doors and hence was doomed to a life of imprisonment.

A few days later, I opened the door and entered the house and to my surprise, Chippy is standing by the door to the cage singing to Chet.  As I came closer, he did not attempt to fly away.  He simply stepped around to the other side of the cage.  I called to him but, apparently, he did not realize his own name and did not come around to me.  I opened the door to the cage, took a few steps back and watched as Chippy walked around the cage and went inside.  He did not go to Chet, he went to the food tray and started to peck at the fresh seeds inside.