Poppy's Story

Hello, I'm Poppy! We've already met in my introduction. Mummy calls me Head Bird because I was the first cockatiel she ever shared her life with though now there are quite a few of us. Sometimes when she is putting out the millet for us in the evenings she comes up to me and says: "Poppy, it's all your fault that I've got so many birds." But I know she's only joking, I mean I didn't exactly just beam myself up out of that petshop and into this aviary, now did I? Mummy came into the shop one Friday, several years ago. I saw her looking at me and she said "You look so sad". Well I can tell you, I was not just sad, I was absolutely and utterly megadepressed. I couldn't even be bothered to stand on my perch. I was being kept in solitary confinement for some inexplicable reason. It was terrible, having no one to talk to all day long. I often wished I'd never been hatched.

Mummy didn't buy me that day, but she came back for me the following Monday, and the shopkeeper put me in a cardboard box and Mummy took me home in a metal box on wheels. I nearly freaked out being put into so many boxes, but Mummy whistled and chatted to me all the way home and I could tell she was making efforts to make me feel better. She told me that in buying me she had defied Daddy who had expressly told her no, no, no, cats and birds don't go. But Mummy is always doing things that Daddy expressly tells her not to do, so when he saw me he rolled his eyes to heaven and said: "I knew it!" Mummy said, "I just couldn't leave her there, she was sitting with her face pressed against the bars and I couldn't bear it…" They decided to let me live in their living room (these were pre-aviary days) and so the living room was designated a cat-free zone. Mummy put net curtains up at the windows and even over the mirror in case I knocked myself out and she removed all the pot plants so I wouldn't poison myself (I mean how am I supposed to distinguish a spinach leaf from a Sansevieria?) She put nice snacks in my cage like seed, millet, grit, cuttlefish, a mineral block, water and also for brunch a pot of eggfood, sweetcorn, carrot, apple, broccoli, spring greens and so forth, so I could pop indoors anytime if I fancied a bite to eat. And at night she would say: "Come on Poppy, time for bed!" and make me hop onto a stick to transport me to my cage. I soon got the message though and in the end I just used to put myself to bed.

One day, Mummy said to Daddy, "Poppy's lonely, we should get her a mate…" Daddy just said: "I knew it!" Mummy went out to buy me a mate, and came back with a little cardboard box with scrabbling noises coming from it. That was Herbie. Mummy called her Herbie because she was such a noisy Herbert, besides which Mummy thought she was a boy at first. She told Daddy: "I chose Herbie because she was sitting with her face pressed up against the bars…" "Hmm," said Daddy, knitting his brows, "I think I've heard that somewhere before." Herbie was a little bundle of yellow feathers, indeed she still is. We had a whale of a time in that living room. Herbie would shout: "Ready, steady, GOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!" and off we would fly whooping in huge circles around the room and then land on the bookshelf to get our breath back before taking off again. Once Mummy came in to watch us with a bowl of cornflakes in her hand and Herbie landed right in the middle of it with a huge splosh. Mummy laughed a lot at that.

But after a time we got bored. We would pace up and down the windowsill morosely, looking out at the garden. Then we even got bored doing that, so to pass the time we began to nibble the window frame. And the odd book on the bookshelf. And a bit of wallpaper here and there.  Daddy complained to Mummy. Mummy went out to buy us a boyfriend each, thinking that they might take our minds off the destruction of her living room. We did fall in love with them, Bridie and Pickle, but that didn't help matters. The boys were even worse than we were. They refused to go into their cages at night and hung on to the curtains in protest when Mummy tried to transport them to bed on a stick, so things gradually became chaotic. One day in desperation Mummy said, "I think we had better buy an aviary for them to fly in, in the garden." I expect you can guess what Daddy said. 

But the aviary is another story…

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