Ridiculous Bravery

Budgie tiger stripes and healing hearts

BMO, 2026, Pencil and watercolor on plant printed watercolor paper

For decades I had three parrots, a red-bellied, Senegal and an African grey parrots. Thirty years is a long time for the little poicephalus parrots and eventually Bali and Loki left us for the sky and it was just Ty, my African grey and me.

There’s been a few rescue parrots in between but, I’ve been a one parrot household for 3 years. Mostly I’m in a place where the parrots are going to outlive me and I know I shouldn’t take in another large parrot, but a budgerigar could fill a big space and maybe 15 years. So, when one of my best friends offered me a budgie she had bred and raised said “yes.” I thought Ty would enjoy the company and I would enjoy a new friend.

We called them parakeets instead of using their Australian name when I was little and everyone had parakeets. They were in my classrooms in elementary school and the sound of every pet store. The grandparents who raised me had two, but one day my grandfather told me to take their cage outside and clean it. I took them outside more out of glee than obedience, lifted the top of their cage to reach the newspaper at the bottom and promptly set them free. This happens when you let a seven-year-old clean a birdcage without careful instructions, but I was bereft. I still remember exactly how I felt watching them fly off into the tangelo tree. My grandfather, however, thought it was hysterically funny.

We never replaced them and it occurs to me that I spent the rest of my life learning how to train birds to come back to me. Budgies may very well have been the beginning of a life chasing birds.

I named the budgie BMO after the character in Adventure Time and was utterly delighted by him. This was in October and the weather was lovely. So, BMO and I spent time together on my screened in porch. My bestie hand-raised him, so while I let him fly free and tried to write, he spent most of his time tangled in my hair or perching on my writing pen. And I was delighted. He sounded like the best moments of my childhood and when he was let out of the cage, he flew straight to me. I had two fabulous weeks with him.

I’m not sure what happened. I took him out on the porch and almost immediately noticed that he didn’t look right. He was too fluffy and eyes squinted like he wasn’t feeling well. And then he began regurgitating. My friend talked me through his symptoms, eliminating every possible cause. (No plants near the cage, food was recently eaten in the bowl, poop in the cage looked good. No toys that were chewed on and might be toxic) Then we dismissed every diagnosis we could come up with, moved on to triage, and then to my sad admission that whatever happened was too late to fix. It happened fast. I knew I was saying goodbye and there wasn’t enough time for an emergency veterinarian to try to help. I am intimately familiar with “too late.” So, mostly I just sat with BMO.

I had to walk myself through how the person who wrote two of the most popular parrot training books, A Parrot for Life, and The Perfectly Trained Parrot couldn’t keep a budgie alive. I had to deal with the fact that my strategic brain investigated every possibility for BMO’s demise and could not find one. I had to come to terms with the fact that one of my best friends in the world raised and loved this tiny fluff and he died on my watch, leaving us grieving and confounded together.

As a falconer, sometimes I forget that falconry at its core is the heartbeat of nature and nature is life, not just in the field, but also day-to-day. Falconry is full of loss because nature doesn’t hand out passes for raptors you make the deepest bond with or love. Nature takes life when it is time and is cryptic about its deadlines. You learn to be present and not count on tomorrow. You learn to love fiercely in the face of inevitable loss for as long as you are brave enough to believe the joy is worth the pain.

Yet, BMO was just one blow in a series of blows that kept coming. I had lost a friend unexpectedly a few weeks before I lost my budgie. And a few weeks after, I lost another friend. I was struggling and in a spiral of blaming myself for not being strong enough to rise above. So, I let myself slide below and kept sliding. It didn’t feel like I would ever claw my way back up, but the first thing I did when I started to feel the sun on my face again was tell my friend that I was ready to try again.

You can’t replace one pet with another to alleviate pain. It doesn’t work that way. You can start over though. You can be brave enough to not know why you lost love and joy, and therefore the reality that you may lose it again but open yourself to it anyway.

What I had learned though was that sound of budgies soothed my anxiety and coaxed out the kind of laughter that belonged to the little girl that still lives inside of me. It seems ridiculous that budgies are a piece of my journey through sobriety and a tool for managing my mental well-being, but then, budgies are ridiculous in the very best way.

And sometimes, maybe, you have to be brave enough to be ridiculous. My new budgies, Beavis and Butthead, two brothers from the same clutch, are well, ridiculous. And they are the best thing that has happened to me this spring.