Exploration

In addition to Friend's regular meals of black-oil sunflower seed and chopped raisins, I had begun adding a little vitamin-enhanced cockatiel feed to his diet. He took to it readily. We had also made one foray out into the yard, box and all, in the hopes of stimulating his instinct to rejoin his flock even further. My heart ached with the thought of letting him go, and I knew that if I never saw him again, I'd always wonder whether I'd released him too soon.

You might wonder how I would recognize him among the dozens of other Grosbeak males who frequented the feeders. From the time I first found him, one leg bore a large mass of something which appeared to be dried feces. I had made some nominal attempts to remove it, but even a warm water soak failed to achieve the desired result. During his captivity, the mass neither decreased nor increased, so I expected it to remain on the leg once he was released, serving as an identifying "band."

He was certainly enjoying his outings in the bedroom, flying loops at ceiling level from the launching pad of the music stand. He was curious about the Christmas cacti in the window, about the shiny things on top of a multi-drawer cabinet, about things under the guest bed or on the book shelves. It was getting harder to talk him back into the box.