We Need to Talk About Zubin

By Violet Brownlow

An amusing and affectionate account of the joys and perils of buying and caring for a pet budgerigar and loving it to distraction!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326476656

Book preview

We Need to Talk About Zubin

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ZUBIN

Violet Brownlow

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ZUBIN

A singular creature – very much his own man (bird)!

Violet Brownlow

Copyright © 2015 Violet Brownlow

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the

express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-1-326-47665-6

Lulu Press, Inc

3101 Hillsborough Street

Raleigh NC27606

www.lulu.com

INTRODUCTION

As I write this, accompanied by loud, rousing music from the radio, I glance up and note that my/our* budgie – Zubin – is sitting on his swing, gently swaying backwards and forwards.  I smile.  This is just one of the very endearing, characteristic poses - head down, small body at a rakish angle, draped casually around the metal uprights of the swing - that we (him indoors and myself) have come to know and love in the last six and a half years.  Six-plus years in which we have marvelled, wondered, despaired, worried, and – endlessly – talked about Zubin. 

I make no apology for my near-obsession with my feathered companion.  Everybody knows that some people who don’t have children – and some of those who do(!) – substitute an absence of small humans with four-legged (or in Zubin’s case, two) varieties of creatures to love.   This short book records some of our adventures.

In order to be as honest as possible about the whole venture, a mea culpa about the mistakes I feel I have made in keeping the said bird is added at the end.  If I place it here at the beginning of the book, it may spoil the stories.  

It is fair to say at this early stage, that Zubin is a singular creature.  He simply doesn’t appear to follow protocols.  In preparation for his acquisition, I read the books.  The only problem is that clearly Zubin hasn’t read the books.  He makes his own rules. For example experts suggest that toys, perches and other cage furniture are regularly moved around and changed, so that a bird won’t get bored.  No!  Anything which is newly introduced into the cage is viewed by Z with abject fear, demonstrated by his attempts to get as far away as possible from any such new item (see chapter about the swing!)  I’ve learned to leave everything pretty much in the same place all the time. 

I don’t think that he is bored.  He is quiet sometimes.  But his great strength is his apparent ability to be happy in his own company, notwithstanding his little plastic bird-friend (?gender) and his much-loved mirror.  His greatest companion is himself.  I can identify with that! He seems very self -contained, and has the uncanny ability to find his own entertainment in games he makes up. One such is the rapid, rhythmic, bashing alternately of his little friend (poor little battered thing) and his swing – an activity which he can maintain at high speed for considerable time. He will also sit singing happily to himself or chunter and chatter away sometimes almost imperceptibly, or sit quietly daydreaming on his seed-pot, in his own little world.  Then there is, of course, the endless preening that birds have to do.  This is almost a full-time job in itself.

He has never been unwell, and never pulled at his own feathers in the destructive way which I understand could be a sign of distress or boredom.  He seems reasonably content.  And still I worry…

*I bought him and he lived firstly with me; later with us both – so I interchange the possessive pronoun!  (I also use a lot of exclamation marks!)

ARRIVAL

Arrival in his new home was unceremonious, to say the least.  A sort of slide/scrabble along the inside of the cardboard box and he landed with a plop on the sand-sheet.  Poor little feathered mite.  Abruptly plucked from the perch in – admittedly – very cramped conditions in the pet-shop cage.  At least he had had company there.  After being tucked in the tiny box, he was carted across part of south London to his new home.  Every bump of the car along the terrible roads made my heart lurch. I shouldn’t have worried – it turned out that he loved the car.  But more of that later! 

Suddenly he was confronted by a nervous, excited human who called him Zubin* (not exactly a conventional budgie-sounding name like Bluey, or Joey, or some-such.)   He looked terrified. He scrambled off the bottom of the cage and onto the perch.  He was silent, looking around in a worried way. I cooed to him and tried to reassure.  It didn’t seem to be working.  He backed off from my eager entreaties and hopped along the perch to the point furthest away from what to him must have seemed like a huge face.  Thus started a succession of days of a slightly over-enthusiastic woman leaning hopefully into his cage.

I had decided that I wasn’t going to love him too much.  I would have with him a sort of semi-detached-attachment.  I had loved the last one to distraction.  Then he had died after a year and broken my heart. 

Not this time!

Six years down the line – who was I kidding?  Heart well and truly engaged with this beautiful, endearing, and exasperating feathered creature.

*later abbreviated variously to Z, Zed, Zeddy, Zubie, Zuboid, Zu (and occasionally incorrectly designated as Lubin!)

EARLY HOPES DASHED

It is clearly a mistake to assume one’s experience with one pet can be replicated with another.  It never occurred to me (duurh!) that Zubin might have a personality that was totally different from my first budgie which sat happily on my finger, loved to spend hours out of the cage, and most importantly liked being kissed!

My excited expectations of a warm, reciprocal, new (albeit semi-detached!) love affair with my beautiful, sleek, feathered companion were dashed fairly early on.  The second day of his sojourn in south