Budgies are supposed to be boring, manageable pets. I have no doubt that when my extremely busy parents took me to the pet shop and let me pick out a bird for my seventh birthday, they imagined they were swerving the time commitment of looking after a cat, or a dog, or even a rabbit when I lost interest.
But the neon-yellow lutino budgerigar that I took home with me was not your average featherball. Brighton Yellow, as I named him with typical seven-year-old sophistication, was an absolute riot who would not be confined to his cage. He was proof that you often get more than you bargain for when you adopt a pet.
Brighton was unusually intelligent and eternally desperate for novelty and stimulation. Once my patient father had tamed him, getting him comfortable with sitting on our hands and letting us boop his feathered head with a finger, he would ride around on my shoulder like a miniature parrot. After I got home from school, he would shout at me until I let him out of his cage – and then he would hang around the house with me, chattering in my ear.
He talked constantly. He would imitate my mum yelling at my brother and me to get our shoes on. He would interrupt my parents’ dinner parties with: “Right! That’s enough!” Whenever you tried to put his cover on his cage for the night, he would go: “Good morning! Good morning!” with increasing desperation until he accepted, eventually, that it was time to sleep.
I spent countless hours teaching this little bird how to do stuff. My parents worked hard and the bird and I would fill the hours between the end of school and dinner time with gossip and play; I would tell him my troubles and he would tilt his head and reply: “Oh dear” – or, more often, some incongruous phrase that he had learned.
I also taught him to play football with a little ball with a bell in it. He would chase it with his beak and I would flick it with my fingers; I taught him to yell: “Gooooal!” when he got it through the tiny goal I made for him. (If you are sceptical, behold all these birds learning to play basketball.)
I never did teach him how to fly, however. Tragically, for a bird, he was a catastrophically incompetent flyer, flapping wildly in random directions. Once, I had to rescue him swiftly after he plopped into a (thankfully cold) soup pot on the stove. Another time, my dad caught him out of the air like a feathery baseball as he careered towards the lit fireplace. Despite these kamikaze incidents, he lived much longer than most budgies, becoming a senile little dude who muttered to himself and wore one of his cage toys like a hat over his eyes.
Shortly after his 10th birthday, just before I turned 17, I left home. Brighton died a week later – from a broken heart, I believe. Naturally, I was devastated. I never got another bird – not just because I have cats now, but because I don’t think any other budgie would live up to his legend.