How To Spot A Psychopath

I originally thought this blue-eyed cockatoo was, in another triumph of creative bird naming, called a Blue-eyed Cockatoo, but as commenters below point out, it’s actually a Little Corella.

It showed up all by itself at the feeding table, and grumpily snapped at the sulphur-crested cockatoos when they tried to get some of the seed. The newcomer is significantly smaller than a sulphur-crested, with a much less impressive crest, but it’s bigger - and apparently more bad-tempered - than a galah.

The newcomer was very successful at keeping the usually-boisterous mob of bigger birds away for a few minutes, while it filled up on the mound of sunflower seeds. (I am, as regular readers know, engaged in an ongoing experiment to determine whether wild cockatoos can become obese.) Then it flew away.

It took me a few tries to identify this bird [and then, as I’ve mentioned, I got it wrong…], because I couldn’t find anything resembling it in Birds in Backyards‘ excellent Bird Finder. The Finder usually leads you quite easily to the right Australian bird - it’s my first stop whenever I see a new feathered beastie here in Katoomba. But it didn’t work this time.

I thought that meant this wasn’t an Australian bird; if it actually had been a Blue-eyed Cockatoo, it would have been a slightly endangered native of the Bismarck Archipelago of New Guinea. That’s about 3100 kilometres (1926 miles, 558 leagues, 15,410 furlongs) from this house. As the crow, or cockatoo, flies.

So I figured this one was probably an escaped pet. But since it’s actually a Little Corella - the bags under the eyes are quite distinctive, if the crest isn’t up - the only odd thing is that I’ve never seen one at the feeder before. I don’t know why I didn’t find this bird’s page on Birds In Backyards. Perhaps someone forgot to tick the “blue” box in the “colours” part of that database entry, or perhaps I insisted it was finch-shaped, or something.

If you like watching large decorative birds eating seed, flapping around and squabbling with each other, this is the blog post for you.

As regular readers know, I shovel ever-increasing quantities of seed down the throats of whatever birds deign to visit the table on our deck. Most of the freeloaders that show up are Sulphur-crested Cockatoos (they even outnumber the pigeons!), and I’ve shot video of them before. But it only now occured to me that I could clamp the camera onto the table and go away.

So that’s what I did.

This is before the full afternoon mob showed up, so it’s relatively civilised.

Same table, most of the same cockatoos, a little further away.

And now, the afternoon rush!

It gets a bit samey toward the end, there, but I laughed every time another huge beak filled the screen, so I let it roll.

(I swear one of ‘em tries to say “cock a doodle doo” at 5:44.)

I just put out some more bird seed, because I noticed that this morning’s supply had been depleted by the usual mob of colourful creatures, but also because one of the birds still picking at the few seeds left clearly needs all the help it can get.

It’s a cockatoo with a fairly advanced case of “psittacine beak and feather disease“. I could have taken a picture of it, but it always makes me so sad to even look at a cockatoo with this disease that I just couldn’t stand it.

It also makes me sort of aimlessly angry, wishing God existed so I could ask Him what the bloody hell He thought He was playing at.

Psittacine beak and feather disease is, in brief, a virus which takes one of the most beautiful creatures in the world, and makes it uglier and uglier until it is so ugly that it can no longer eat, whereupon it dies. If opportunistic infections of the bird’s devastated feathers and tumorous, necrotic beak and claws haven’t killed it already, that is.

There is no cure, or even specific treatment, for psittacine beak and feather disease.

There are hundreds of diseases of humans and animals that’re just as horrible. But few are as purely and plainly awful as this one. It’s like a metaphor for the unfairness of life.

Right - I’m off to Cute Overload for a while.

We have not yet completed the full successive approximation needed to accurately measure Charley’s volume, and this irregularly-shaped tub may or may not allow for more precise computation.

He sat in there perfectly happily for some time, though.

Yep, that’s a cat on an air conditioner all right.

Right up next to the ceiling.

Joey’s not just the Amazing Fetching Cat, he’s also the Amazing Exploring Cat. A preposition isn’t just anything a rabbit can do to a hill; it’s anything Joey can do to a cardboard box, curtain rail, wardrobe…

Twice, now, Joey’s managed to end up stuck at the bottom of the square vertical well created by two bookcases I’ve screwed together for stability in a corner. I’ve stuffed a cushion in the top of the hole now, to reduce the chance that I’ll have to shift furniture to rescue a small miaowing thing again.

(It usually seems to take him a few hours to start miaowing. If Joey finds himself stuck somewhere, he usually just goes to sleep for a while.)

[UPDATE: As of September 2009, he’s done this three times. He got past the cushion.]

My office air conditioner was a new Joey-perch, though. He’d gotten there from the curtain rail.

(I’ll say one thing for adventurous cats: They do a great job of removing cobwebs from hard-to-dust places.)

Despite the slipperiness and downward curve of the top of the unit, he seemed quite happy there for a little while. But then he wanted to get back down.

So far, so good…

“Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea!”

This little bookshelf speaker is suspended from an ordinary picture-hook.

I’m glad I stuck rubber feet on the back of the speaker to stop it wobbling.

The speaker turned out to be of limited interest.

I’d been helpfully tapping the top of the printer to alert Joey to its usefulness as a landing pad. He looked, he thought about it… and then he decided to just hurl himself onto my shoulder, for a 100% successful claw-arrestor-hook landing.

You might think that’d be painful, but I’m pretty much numb, these days.

I’d completely forgotten about this.

Anne (un-updated blog here; note the post from when we got Joey) shot this video less than two months before Mickey died, with the intention that I could put it on a loop on my second monitor, as a sort of relaxing furry mental wallpaper.

I didn’t, at the time, think it entirely necessary to subject my blog readers to five straight minutes of Mickey and Joey sitting in a box licking each other, even if it was in their usual could-turn-into-a-wrestling-match-at-any-moment way.

But now that Mickey’s gone, I feel the self-indulgence is justified.

(Joey appears to be quite ready to bond with the new cats in exactly this way, but they’re still growling at him. They’re becoming more mellow every day, though.)

Update:

The aftermath.

Clearly, this box was not large enough to effectively measure the volume of two cats.

(See also.)

Nothing helps you get over the death of a pet like getting a new one. So right after we buried Mickey, we found ourselves a new cat in need of a home.

I know this looks like two cats, but they’re so closely connected that they probably actually qualify as one. Tentative names: Charley and Susie.

The little soft house technically belongs to Joey, but he doesn’t seem to be missing it. He’s engaged in some perfunctory dominance behaviours in the direction of the new ginger twins, but I imagine he’ll be using them as a heated mattress…

…just as he used Mickey, soon enough.

Mickey the cat - the subject of the famous kitten review - is dead. He was about five and a half.

I found him like this. He looks as if he’s just asleep - only the little bit of purple tongue sticking out gives it away.

He was stone cold and stiff as a board, though. So I dug a hole in the garden and put him in it. Then we sprinkled some flower seeds on top and watered them in.

This isn’t the way it’s meant to happen. Mickey was a big strong healthy boy. Really big; he was quite lean, but very long and tall, for a cat. He weighed seven and a half kilos just a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps that was it; perhaps he didn’t have a strong enough heart for a body that size. I’m at a loss as to what else it could have been. Cats that know they’re sick hide themselves away somewhere, but Mickey just curled up on the spare bed as normal. And there was no vomit, no signs of distress; I don’t think he’d even been off his food, though I might not have noticed.

Perhaps the last time he went out, for only about ten minutes before he decided it was too cold and came back in, he ate a poisonous mushroom along with some grass. Those are famous for killing people half a day after they eat them. Or perhaps he picked up a tick, though it’s freezing cold here in Katoomba right now, so there shouldn’t be any ticks around. I don’t think it was rat poison or slug bait or something like that. But who knows.

When you own a pet, you expect - or should expect - that at some point you’ll have to pay quite a lot of money to buy that pet several, or at least a few, more years of happy life. Look at Tom, with his arthritis and diabetes and a bout of hyperthyrodism, too. It cost a bloody fortune to get him repaired, and he still needs injecting twice a day. But Tom’s happy as a clam, settling peacefully into the prolonged geriatric period that’s normal for elderly housecats.

Mickey, on the other hand, was the picture of health, as far as I could see. But he was there last night, and gone this morning.

He was a very good boy.

A couple of irretrievably soft-hearted readers have asked if there’s any particular animal charity to which I’d like donations to be made in memory of Mickey.

Mickey came from one of the Cat Protection Society “aquariums” full of kittens that you can see in the window in some Australian vets.

(Yes, they do let the kittens out regularly to run about. But it’s amazing how many of them will be perfectly happy in a thousand-litre Perspex box for hours on end - though at least one bright spark does always seem to end up sleeping in the litter tray.)

The Cat Protection Society would, of course, be very pleased to receive your tax-deductible donation or volunteer time. And then there’s the RSPCA in Australia, the UK and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and their equivalents the ASPCA in the States.

These sorts of organisations always run shops. The “op shop” type with low-priced used stuff can be fun but, given the prices, can’t actually add much money to the bottom line of the charity. I highly recommend you patronise the other kind of shop, like the RSPCA Shops here in Australia. Those shops sell the usual sorts of “pet shop” animal supplies - toys, food, tennis ball chuckers, noisome dried pieces of pig or bull (not, for very good reason, cow…) of which dogs cannot get enough - at the usual rip-off pet-shop prices. You can get all of these things much cheaper if you shop more carefully - but the profit from the charity-shop rip-off pricing all goes to the charity, so when I’m there, I specifically seek out products which seem to be the worst value.

If you can’t afford to donate, buy overpriced catnip mousies or spend a lot of time having your heart rended by the predicament of abandoned animals, but you live near an animal shelter or veterinarian that has a Room Full O’ Kittens, be advised that they may be very happy to have you just visit and play with the kittens for an hour, provided you don’t seem too likely to eat any of them.

Kittens need to get used to being picked up and patted and played with, and veterinary and animal-shelter staff are likely to be pretty busy. So the terrible responsibility of being covered with kittens for an hour a week may, I fear, fall to you.

Tom’s Web page will be ten years old this year, and Tom himself is fifteen.

He’s still quite chirpy. Only about 6.5 kilograms, versus almost ten in his prime, as depicted in the famous kitten review. But that’s just as well, since Tom’s had arthritis and diabetes for a while now.

Neither complaint actually seems to have bothered him much. He’s always considered movement to be highly overrated.

Tom has a great enthusiasm for the tuft of lemongrass in my mother’s back yard. He’s never really figured out how to eat it without help, and all he ever does after eating it is throw up - sometimes practically immediately. But he seems to enjoy the whole experience enormously.

Here in Australia, we’re famous for giving things, places and creatures goofy names.

I mean, just pick one letter. Wagga Wagga. Wallabies. The Wollemi Pine. Wollongong.

(And when Monty Python did their sketch about the Bruces from the University of Woolloomooloo, Australia, the silly-named place they chose was actually not some tiny town in the boondocks, but a spot in the middle of Sydney.)

So, when a rather rotund bird I’d not previously seen showed up at our feeding table, I was optimistic.

Surely, this plump creature with its habit of thrusting out its neck comically would have a ridiculous name.

Could it, perhaps, be a Wonga Pigeon?

Wait - perhaps it was a Wompoo Fruit-Dove!

But then I found out that this white-headed pigeon is actually… a White-headed Pigeon.

Oh well. Can’t win ‘em all.