Pancho and Mae

I didn't realize until Ticturd died, just how attached I was to him. I missed having a bird to wake me with singing in the mornings so much. I put Ticturd's picture in his cage and continued to cover/uncover it- like he was still there. That's kinda weird, I know, but it was part of my grieving process. I left Thistle's bowls/etc. out for weeks after she died- I just wasn't ready to get rid of them.

Anyway, about a week after Ticturd died, I got a call from my (then) bird vet. I had called his office and told them that I wanted another bird, and if they knew of anyone who needed a home for one to let me know. I also said that a "special needs" bird was fine.

He had a client with a pair of birds, six years old, who were becoming "too much" for them to keep up with. The girl bird had been allowed to breed so many times that she had bad "female" problems because of it. Her little bird uterus would prolapse every time she laid another egg- and the eggs themselves didn't help, they were soft/malformed because she was malnourished/over-bred, and that made it much more difficult/painful/physically traumatic for her to lay them.

I said that I would take them. We put Mae on "birdie depo provera" to prevent her from laying eggs, but you couldn't keep her on it for more than a month or so at a time. As soon as she stopped taking it, she would lay an egg, have to have surgery to reposition her cloaca (uterus) and the whole problem would start all over again.

Well, Mae was not with us for long after I got her. She had just had surgery when I brought her home, we did the birdie depo for awhile, and soon laid another egg with complications and therefore more surgery. I brought her home on a Saturday morning and when I came home from work that night she was gone.

Pancho almost broke my heart. He sang and sang, trying to get her to get up off the floor of the cage. I hate to think of how many hours he may have tried to do this while I was gone. We both cried for days. I slept on the couch so I could be with him and comfort him during the night when he would cry. For quite a few days, I thought I was going to lose him too, as he was obviously heart broken. They had been together since they were babies. If you took one to the vet you had to take them both, as they could not bear to be apart. Pancho and Mae were very much in love. They groomed each other, and little Pancho was quite henpecked. He was bald for YEARS because Mae would pull all his head feathers out. I don't know why she did it or why he let her. But, their relationship was very sweet to witness.

Luckily, though? I had a friend who bird sat for people who bred birds, and they were looking for a good home for all of theirs, as they were going to be moving and couldn't take the birds with them. But that's a story for another day- about Clarabelle.