Bird-brained

It’s another December Friday, and as usual, traffic has made it highly unlikely that I’ll make it home in time for dinner. So here I am again, at a gas station, not my usual one, but this will have to do.

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Kermit, has been bitten by some sort of electrical bug early this week. Fluctuations in electrical charges has gotten me worried so much so that I’ve brought it to the shop for repairs last Tuesday. It went well, or so I thought. Last night it recurred, and I suspect that maybe something came loose again the past couple of days. This has made me wary of impending troubles that I may encounter should I try to brave 2-3 hour traffic along the SLEX so I made this particular pit stop just when traffic began to rear its ugly head.

Tomorrow, I’ve promised to wake up pretty early to bring Kermit back to the same shop and try to see if indeed whatever they did to fix the problem earlier had come loose. That’s the easy bit, because if nothing did, then they probably had a wrong diagnosis and the necessary repairs might be a tad more expensive. Considering the complex electronics that Kermit is equipped with, I hope that this is not the case.

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Have you ever seen an owl flying free in the fields, hunting for mice? Well, I have. A couple of years ago, when I was still living in Sta. Rosa, Laguna, a grey owl flew overhead and landed in a field behind my house. Watched as it then flew once again with a rodent of some sort in its talons. Wow, a discovery channel moment right there.

A few days after that incident, I watched the news and on the lighter side, they featured a grey owl caught by a farmer in a field not so far away from where I sighted the bird. Given the rarity of these large bird of preys in the vicinity, I concluded that this owl was the same one that I saw. Too bad, it would have been nice to see such birds flying free.

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Then my thoughts went back to a Myna bird that we once kept as a pet at my parent’s house. My dad bought it for me when I was in grade school, I think, after long hours of begging and crying. It was cool at first, then reality set in, and I soon enough realized that feeding, cleaning and caring for the bird was more of a chore that I’d rather not do. So I neglected it and left it up to my dad to take care of the black fowl. We kept it for close to a decade before it finally died.

One time, when I was tasked to clean its cage, the bird managed to struggle free and hopped out of the opened cage. I was in a panic as the bird hopped all over the place. My first thoughts were that it might fly away, meriting a big helping of pain from my dad, I’m sure. But no, it didn’t fly despite all that violent flapping. Turns out, all those years in captivity somehow negated its instinct as well as its flying muscles. Too bad little bird! But then, a more sinister plot was brewing, as our cat and about 5 dogs circled the hapless bird. Were it to become a light afternoon snack for any one of them, the pain would be much more than I could bear, I could imagine.

Fortunately, the dumb bird was caught by my awkwardly flailing arms and caged once again. I can’t recall another time that I cleaned that cage again.

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Did I tell you about our other feathered pets at home? Let’s see, there were about 500 quails, 2 turkeys, that Myna, a couple of lovebirds, a couple of chickens and another couple of bantam chickens. Of course, we didn’t keep them all at the same time, mind you. They came and went either as food or dead pets.

There was also the time when my dad maintained a birdhouse in the yard for the mayas to perch in. He figured that would stop these critters from building nests underneath the roof. Well, it didn’t stop them, and all it did was increase the population of mayas that called our house its private toilet.

One day, I “accidentally” destroyed the birdhouse. For months, I got irritated at the constant chirping that these wild birds made. The birdhouse was placed right outside my window, so imagine how irritating it was trying to sleep off the morning’s hangover with a dozen birds seemingly chirping into your ear. One day, I got so irritated that somehow, the pick-axe suddenly developed a mind of its own and poked a rather large gaping hole underneath the birdhouse. The nest inside fell (no eggs, no guilt) to the ground and that was the last I heard of the awful chirping. Bye bye, birdie!

Well, it would seem that those birds still got the last laugh. As the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, it’s certain that a flock of birds will use my car as target practice each and every time that I got it cleaned. Makes me a bit thankful that ostriches and turkeys can’t fly.