Dummy Bird - Part 3

In Dummy Bird - Part 1 my dad I and killed a bunch of crows and inherited their babies. In Dummy Bird - Part 2 I raised the little guys on the dresser in my bedroom. I learned a lot about baby birds and gave three of the four birds away to good homes, leaving me the obnoxious and adorable Dummy Bird. It's time to wrap things up.
Other than waking me up at the crack of dawn every damn day, Dummy Bird was a really cool pet. He was very social and always wanted to be out playing with me. Having him out it the house was always a danger because evolution has not given birds the ability to control when they poop. I always had to try and guess how long you had before something stinky happened, sometimes I was right, sometimes I had to clean up. I'd put a towel down on the back of the couch and he'd hop along and mess with my hair and squawk at the cats and have a jolly good time. His real joy was going outside. He loved hopping around on the grass and messing with stuff. Grass, sticks, bugs, flowers, it was all fascinating to him. He was sort of trying to learn how to fly but he mostly hopped and he got around pretty good. When I wanted to go somewhere faster than he hopped, I'd try to get him to sit on my shoulder. In case you're wondering, yes, he pooped on me, I considered it just part of having a crow. He liked my shoulder, but he LOVED to ride on my head. He could see better and it really was his favorite spot. Yes, he pooped on my head too. I washed my hair a lot for a teenage boy. You had to be careful with him during the middle of the day. Being black he absorbed a lot of heat from the sun and could overheat quite quickly, panting crows look weird and he never did figure out how to find shade by himself. He was intelligent, but maybe not smart. I really wanted to take him out and use him to try and pick up girls. If girls liked puppies, they would certainly fall for a crow, right? That idea never came to pass due to the fact that I could never be sure that he'd stay safe. He was always jumping off my head whenever he felt like it and I was sure he'd get hurt. It's probably best that it never happened, even though I thought I'd be the super cool guy with the crow, really I would have been the weird kid covered in bird poop. I didn't think things all the way through.
Click thorough the jump for the ending.



Spring moved on to summer, and with summer came the real difficulties of owning a pet. If I had been younger, I would have been home more and things would have been easier. I was old enough to drive though, and I was out and about as much as I could be, and it's hard to be responsible when you're not home. On top of that, I had bought a dirt bike without my parent's knowledge or permission that spring. I think the only reason they didn't make me take it back was that I bought it from a friend who's parents they liked. We also had family friends up north a few hours away, and they had a son who also had a dirt bike. There was a series of public trails around his house and I hatched a scheme to borrow my mom's van and haul my dirt bike up to ride on the weekends while my mom drove around my crappy car and watched Dummy Bird for me. I can't believe I just wrote that. I took my mom's van to transport a dirt bike she didn't want me to have while she drove my piece of junk car and took care of my crow. Holy cow. Thanks mom, I don't think I really appreciated that enough back then. By about the third weekend that I was gone, my dad decided that Dummy Bird would probably be happier out in the barn for the night. He spent most of the day outside and didn't like to go into his cage in the evening. We had a separate part of the barn with two old horse stalls where he could sleep, and then be let out in the morning. Except in the morning, he was gone. Horrifically, not in the 'escaped gone' way, but in the 'all that's left of him is his wing tips gone' way. Something found him, probably a rat or a small raccoon, and he had no idea about things hunting him in the night. My dad called me and told me and I was pretty upset. For a while I blamed him, because if he had put him in his cage like I'd asked, then Dummy Bird wouldn't have been eaten. Really though, my dad just tried to do what was best. I was running around riding dirt bikes all weekend and he was just being a good dad and giving me the freedom from responsibility to do that. He liked Dummy Bird as much as I did, and would never have put him somewhere that he thought was dangerous. It was one of those things that happen.
Finding, raising, and losing Dummy Bird was a great experience for me. The whole thing was the stuff that long lasting family stories are made of, and it has indeed become part of our family lore. I still don't think that anyone should try to have a crow as a pet, but when unexpected things happen in life and you just roll with them, you can have some pretty great adventures.