Risking Flight

We have a lovebird with unclipped wings, though they were clipped when we got him. Letting the flight feathers grow back was a conscious choice. It was nice when he stayed where we put him, perched on a finger or riding around on a shoulder, and he didn't seem to much mind it. But as the feathers began taking form again, he tried harder and harder to fly and soon made short flights to the floor and beyond. It seemed he missed flying but could adapt to the clipping.

Clipped wings are certainly safer. No risk of flying into a ceiling fan or being perched on a door that someone closes. And of course there is always the risk of him flying out an open door into a Midwestern world he isn't designed for, not the least of which being freezing winters. No place for a bird bred for a warm sub-Saharan African climate.

And yet.

Clipped birds are more susceptible to pneumonia because they don't exercise enough. Less fit generally, too,

But the real reason we let the wings grow back was psychological, for him and us. It's so powerful to watch him climb out of his cage when the door is open and fly across the room to his perch. He sits there a moment, fluffing his feathers and gazing sort of regally around. He then darts to the hallway and toward the bedrooms and office, or toward the family and living rooms, hoping to find members of his "flock." I hear his searching call, then the almost loving soft chirping when he finds someone to settle on. Almost inevitably I will hear the call of "come get Billie." So I walk over and extend my finger to him, and and rides with me back to the kitchen where we keep his cage. When I'm home alone, writing, he often sits quietly on my shoulder; sometimes he takes flight and searches the empty house. I often forget he's out until I hear a sudden rush of wind and he darts around the corner and settles on my shoulder or the laptop screen. After an hour or so I put him back in his cage, rewarding his cooperation with a peanut.

We risk losing him earlier than if we clipped his wings again and left him more in his cage, but I don't see any true upside in that. I don't want to measure his life in length of years and neither I think does he. There's risk of catastrophe or lingering injury, but -- and this may be my projecting -- sense an air of confidence, dare I say happiness, perhaps contentedness in him when he takes flight.

We, he and I, will measure his life in adventures and flights of daring, in his being fully what he was meant to be.

I hope I remember to do the same for myself.