Bye-bye Tweety 1990-2010

My pet bird died today. Tweety was a rainbow lorikeet that my uncle gave us on Easter 1990 after we had played with him a few times at their house. We came home late at night from either my cousins’ place or the Easter Mass and found his cage at our door step. I was four and my sister was three, and we named him Tweety after the cartoon character.




Tweety had an emerald green coat, a fire-y red collar, and a green and yellow bum. He had a blue head and chest, an orange beak and bright red/orange eyes that would light up whenever he was excited. He was very affectionate and fiercely protective – he would rank us in order of preference and bark and nip if anyone tried to get between him and his favourite. He liked me the most when we were growing up, and then my sister when we became older. He liked to play with hair and would nest on the top of your head. He used to scratch and tug at the locks with his feet and rub your hair with his bum. He liked to sing and dance on his perch, bobbing his head and playing a call-and-response game with you. The enthusiastic whistles he would sing are etched in everyone’s memories. He liked to have his neck scratched and to lick and nibble your hands – he used to purr and make a ‘shush’ noise whenever you would play with him like this. And sometimes he would cock his head back and forth then dribble a bit of milky liquid on your hand.

Even though he never learned to talk, Tweety was very good at copying noises – he learned to bark from listening to the neighbour’s dog Snowy and to chirp like the sparrows outside. And when we would make burping noises he would copy us, whenever we sneezed he would sneeze back at us, and when we would make kissing noises and he would make them back to us and we would know that it was love because he would do them without us prompting him. Sometimes we would be in the other room and we would hear him laughing, which made us laugh, which made him laugh even more. In later years he would beep in response to the car alarm being set because he knew that we were home. Whenever we got home and he heard the front gate open, he would call out excitedly. When we woke up in the mornings, he would get angry and impatient if we didn’t come to say ‘hello’ to him. Some mornings I would wake up and hear Tweety calling for me, as if he knew that I had just woken up. At night he would listen to our footsteps and purr so we would stick our hands under his cover.

Tweety liked to sleep underneath his newspaper lining and he liked to play inside boxes. At one point, we were looking after my cousin's bird as well, and he would make delicate little strips of newspaper like a shredder, and for a little while Tweety would tear his newspaper into inch-wide strips. Around about the time when we were living in our Regents Park flat in 1993, he crawled inside an old pair of pants that we were using as a rug and scratched around, singing and dancing and playing. When my sister would sleep in on weekends and my mum told me to wake her up, I would bring Tweety into her room and let him climb onto her face and play with her hair. I remember when I would pull a blanket or doona over my head and Tweety would have lots of fun scrambling around. I remember when he used to climb up the inside of my shirt and nuzzle against my chest. I remember the first time my dad took him out of his cage to play with us properly – we were watching cartoons on a Saturday morning, drinking microwaved Milo and eating Nutella sandwiches. We were so surprised that he was allowed out and my sister was a little bit scared of him. She started crying when he climbed onto her mug and started drinking her Milo and my folks had to make her a new one. Tweety ate honey and bread, which he used to dunk in his water and suck the juice out of. We also used to give him fruit and vegetables and blades of grass, but he loved to eat whatever we were having so we had to give him rice and noodles and chips, and anything else we were eating while he was out of his cage – orange juice, Milo, corn, milk and cereal (which made his poo a bit funny), ice cream, and even chicken until I decided that cannibalism was a poor lifestyle choice. I remember that we would have to let the chips cool before we fed them to him because we were concerned that he would burn his mouth, even though his tongue was built for sucking up sweet liquids. And I remember when my cousin told me that the syrup from orchids was edible, and when he would lick the syrup from my mum’s pot plants. I remember when he would be afraid of bottle brushes and other flowers that the rainbow lorikeets in Regents Park next to the library would eat because he didn’t recognise what they were and he was afraid of them.

Tweety always loved to play with water, and it was always so endearing when he did. He would make these gurgling sounds whenever he heard water, and he would splash/flick his water when he wanted a bath. When he was having a bath, he would make a noise that told you he was having the most fun ever, and he would flap his wings and jump in because he absolutely loved it. There were days when he would ask for a bath and you would have to refuse because he had just had a bath or it was too cold. And then when he was done he would shake himself and sprinkle you with water, then he would ask you to scratch his neck and he would rub up against your finger and close his eyes and open his beak. And sometimes when he would finish bathing he would escape from the laundry and find you, or crawl under the washing machine and scratch around on the tiles.

We were never able to take a photo of Tweety that captured his true essence because he would always try to attack the camera if he saw one. He never liked to pose - if my parents tried to take his photo with us, he would hide behind us or in our clothes. If he was doing something funny and we left him alone to get a camera, he would become unhappy because we weren't with him or he would get irritated because he thought we weren't paying enough attention to him. When my sister started to get into photography and tried to take a picture of him, he would rush up to her and tickle her neck so she couldn't get a good angle.

I remember when we were little and he chased us into a room and we didn’t want him to play with us (probably because we had food that we didn’t want to share with him) and I closed the sliding door behind me and his head was trapped and he kept calling out to us to play with him. I remember another time when I tried to prove that my swiss army knife was blunt by running it along his neck, and then when Pam told me off, I ran it along my hand and I bled. I always worry that I hurt him and that I cut him, even though there was no blood and parrots are supposed to have tough skin and he still loved me. I remember when he got older and a bubble appeared in his neck and we weren’t sure what it was and I was really worried but nothing happened and he was still the same old Tweety. I remember when we would get excited because he would give us one of his black and gold and green feathers from his tail or even one of the little gold and green feathers from his bum after scratching himself with his beak.

I remember that he would sometimes get nervous if there was a noise outside and he would chirp and there was nothing you could do to calm him down. And when he was nervous and he would climb on your finger, and you weren’t sure what he was doing so you were afraid he would bite. When you would leave the room and he would cry because he was lonely and he wanted you to come back. I remember how he used to fluff himself up when he was happy, and make himself small and shiver when he was sad. How sometimes he would tuck his head under his wing so it looked like he had no head.

I remember when we gave him a little plastic ball to play with and he would kick it around and play soccer. I remember when we would let him out of the cage and he would nibble on my eyebrows and glasses. I remember when we were little and we thought that all birds ate bird seed, but then when we put some in his cage, he would hardly touch them and he would just scatter the sunflower seeds across the room. Because he didn't like sunflower seeds, that was the reason that we decided to plant sunflowers in our front yard this one time. They were so tall, and I remember standing on a chair to look at them, and gazing at the blue sky and watching the floaties dance across my eyes.

Tweety used to be able to figure out how to open his cage door by himself, and my father always had to work on newer and more difficult ways to keep his door closed. There were a number of times when me and my sister would get home from school and we would find Tweety sitting at the front door waiting for us to arrive and play with him.

I remember when we used to keep him outside of our house in about 1993 and someone stole him and tried to sell him at Lidcombe station and my cousin saw him and stayed with him and got him back for us. I love the extra years that we got to spend with him because he was so lovable and one of a kind that my cousins recognised him and saved him for us. I shudder to wonder what kind of life he would have lived without us – as happy-go-lucky as he is, the sentimental side of me can only believe that he would have only been happy with us. I know that our lives would not have been the same without him. Even though I think we could have treated him better, I can’t help but think that he loved us so much that any other life would not have been worthy of him.

I remember that we tried to give him a full life by picking him up and lobbing him to make sure that he knew how to fly, but he would never fly as much as he tried his best. And then when we were convinced that he had forgotten how to fly, we decided that it would be nice if he could play outside in the lawn and clover but then he flew across the road to Nancy’s place and was sitting on the roof and we were trying to convince him to come down and then he eventually flew down to me. And then how happy we were because we got to spend those extra years with him and because he was so delighted that everyone was paying him so much attention...

I remember that when my nephew Cooper was born we bought him a puppet rainbow lorikeet to make sure that he would get to know Tweety as well as we had and because we were convinced that Tweety would show him as much love as he had shown us. And when Cooper did get to see him, how happy the two of them were because we thought that Tweety would get to relive his “Wonder Years”, so to speak.

I remember that my cousin once told me that parrots could live for 50 years and that we had a friend for life in Tweety. I remember reading once that dogs could recognise their owner’s scent and that if you went on holidays you could send them a tissue that you had rubbed on yourself as a kind of postcard. Given how much Tweety liked to play in our clothes, we tried to see if this would work on him, but he disliked tissues more than he liked our smell and he tore it to shreds. This made it difficult to wipe up after him when he pooed on the couch or the floor or on us. He would also playfully fight with pens and combs, holding one end down with his foot, biting the other with his beak and jumping up and down. For some reason he liked to play on the scales even if his weight didn’t register – if you tapped on it or ran your nail along the uneven surface, he would run over and jump on the scale, running his beak along the top to copy the noise you had just made. Then he would get really over-stimulated and make his happiest noises, but be a bit bitey as well. He would hop about and attack feet – he really didn’t like thongs at all.

It was at times like these that my mum would take charge – she was also the only one that he properly obeyed, because she was the only one who wasn’t afraid of him and was happy to boss him around. My mum used to get really cranky at Tweety for chewing on the furniture and window sills. But whenever they were alone, Tweety was always happy to play with her and she always loved him.

As we got older, we started to spend less time with him because of the time pressures put on us. We studied hard which meant that we didn’t spend as much time with Tweety as we should have because of the over-riding school and uni priorities. I remember that I would watch cartoons with him when I got home, but it seemed like he didn't enjoy it anymore. At some point I decided that we were obliged to play with him and I would always try to make sure that he regularly got out of his cage. After I moved to Canberra, I tried to let him out at least once during the weekends when I came back to visit. My concern is that, as good as the times we had with him were, we didn’t honour our obligation to entertain him. I worry that he deserved better. I worry because my emotions were not sufficient to get this post in on time.

I guess that we had been expecting it to happen for a while now, but I'm still surprised at how much it has affected me. He had been with us for so long that we knew that it would eventually have to end - we just weren't sure when it would happen. I suppose I thought that when it did happen, I would be able to deal with it, knowing that it was his time and that he had given us everything he could. I suppose I always imagined that there would always be something of him that we could remember him by, but now I'm worried that we didn't treat him well enough and that we need to treat him properly now.

The only solace that I have is that a couple of weeks ago, I got to play with him, and despite his old age and weary body, he still managed to surprise me with his enthusiastic playfulness. He rolled on his back and grabbed the pen and fought with it like the vigour and stakes were just the same as 20 years ago. Apparently he would roll on his back and play with the cork in his cage like a naive and enthusiastic child. Furthermore, he hung around until my sister returned from overseas, because his heart was in it. As sentimental and unlikely as it sounds, he was as endearing and heartfelt as his story deserves to be. He made it through the “however number of months required for my sister to return to the country”. He loved us enough to wait until everyone he loved was near him. The last time I saw Tweety on Sunday afternoon, he didn't make a noise and I was afraid to put my hand in the cage, but when I scratched his newspaper, he closed his eyes like it reminded him of the times that we had together. I’ll tidy this post up when the scotch wears off, but Tweety deserves everything he has coming to him. We love him beyond comprehension. He represents 20 bloody years of our life and he represents every bloody bit of it.