A Sad Start to 2008

On New Years Day we lost our oldest feathered friend, Tiki. It was very sad and sudden (like most bird deaths) but I don't think that she suffered very long. After talking with our vet, we think that she had a heart-attack, which is common in older cockatiels that eat fatty seed diets. Tiki did like fresh veggies once in awhile, but she was already an adult bird hopelessly addicted to seeds by the time she came into our lives in 2000.


Tiki and Andy had a very strong bond (which is probably why Tiki didn't like me very much) - we have no idea what her past owners were like but she decided on Andy as soon as she saw him and would allow only Andy to scratch under her chin and pet her back. She could sit motionless for hours on Andy's knee or shoulder, barely opening an eye when he shouted in disbelief at bad calls against the Giants or Red Sox. She'd just whistle a little and go back to grinding her beak contentedly. After we had had Tiki about 5 years, she started laying eggs- I guess this was Andy's first foray into dealing with expectant mothers, because he worried for days that Tiki would become egg-bound or lose too much calcium. Her eggs never hatched, of course, but she was a doting egg-mother and loved to make cozy nests in her bedding to incubate her "babies." One time when we had to go on a road trip with the birds, we even hard-boiled her eggs and put them back so they wouldn't break during the trip.

An interesting thing I'll always remember about Tiki is that she was suddenly (and shockingly- she would not let me come anywhere near her for years before this) very nice to me when I became pregnant. I don't know what to attribute this to except that she must have somehow sensed that I was pregnant-maybe I was giving off some crazy phermones, I don't know. During my whole pregnancy she allowed me to scratch her head while she sat on my belly, but as soon as Aiden was born, I was back to persona-non-grata. Since I didn't have a moment to sit still any more anyway, I didn't hold it against her :)

We'll miss Tiki a lot in the coming years- the birds' room already seems so much emptier without her. We'll miss her cheerful greeting whistle every time we come home - she always had the best hearing of the flock and was the first to recognize the sound of the key in the door. Although it's an unhappy start to 2008 for us, we are happy that we were able to give Tiki a good, loving home for the latter half of her life, and we are pretty sure she enjoyed herself with us. Or, at least, with Andy :)