Fate and a Small Green Bird

By Andrea Hall-Olanyk

I went to the pet shop in my town to buy bird food for my cockatiel. While there I noticed this small green bird in a cage and asked about it. It turns out it was a maroon-bellied conure. A conure? Oh they are too noisy, I could never have one of those, I said to myself.

When I got home I grabbed the bird magazine and started reading about this type. It turned out that they are not noisy and make great apartment birds. So I went back to check it out again. This bird was hysterically funny, he would leap onto my shoulder and swing Tarzan-style off my earrings. Then without warning he would cuddle up and go to sleep in my hand. I was in love!

As a broke college student I needed to set up a payment plan. The bird was still being hand-fed so it was no big deal. I named him Scooter because he would drop his beak to the table and scoot along. I went to see him every day, and fell more and more in love with him. One Sunday I was not able to go see him, due to another commitment. This is the day that Fate stepped in.

On Monday morning the store called to tell me that Scooter had been stolen from the store in broad daylight, during store hours. I was mortified. I lost two days of work, because I could not stop crying. I could not eat, I barely slept and I was a wreck. I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper, which got printed, but no one found the bird. The police could not have cared less, and did nothing about it.

I was devastated. I moped for a month, not laughing, not smiling, not being myself at all. My boyfriend, Dan, finally reached his limit. He told me to call every aviary in New England and find a bird. He did not care how many hours we had to drive, we were finding another one. So I started to call around, but being that it was October, no one had green cheeks or maroon bellies, except older ones. I wanted a baby.

I finally made plans to go on a Saturday to Boston (2 hours away) to look at a one year old. I told some “bird” friends about our upcoming trip. They suggested I call a woman about 40 minutes away to see if she had any. They liked and trusted her. So I called. She said she had a 7-month old maroon-belly, but that someone already had a deposit on it. I asked her to call me if anything changed.

Two days later she called me. It turns out that the woman who had a deposit on the bird had not been in to the store in a month, had not sent money and was not returning calls. The store owner had called and left a message telling her she had 24 hours to call, otherwise she was taking the bird off deposit. There was no call, so she called me.

Dan and I were in the car within 5 minutes. The whole ride there he kept reminding me that in two days we were going to Boston to look at another bird, so if this one was not what I wanted, that I did not have to take it. I could barely hear him over the pounding of my heart.

So we got to the store, I introduced myself and she brought me into the bird room. She plopped this little green bird onto my finger and told me the bird had not been handled much, since the woman had stopped coming in. She was a DNA sexed female, 7 months old.

My Scooter had been a wild thing, up and down and round and round. This bird just sat there, looking at me. It hardly moved, barely breathed and sat there, staring at me like a feathered lump. My heart sank. This was not the type of bird I wanted at all.

I decided to give her a few minutes to see if she would warm up. So we walked around the store. I kept talking to her, showing her toys and telling how pretty she was. She sat there, watching me, not moving a muscle. I did all the things you are supposed to do. Looked at her feathers, looked at her eyes, looked at the skin on her feet, tested her grip. She looked good, but still did not move. After 20 minutes I brought her closer to my face, looked into her brown eye and said “so little bird, what do you think? What’s going on in that little feathered head of yours? Hmmmmm?”

She leaned forward slightly, gave me one more solid looking-over and then slowly lifted her head, gently stroked my hand with her beak, snuggled in closer to my thumb and closed her sweet little eyes in a gesture of complete trust.

I burst into tears. I was absolutely in love. Dan put a deposit down as I assured Edna that I would be back next week with more money. I was waiting for a check from school that I could use to pick her up in about 2 to 3 weeks.

When I got home, I called my friends and told them all about her. Then called back a few minutes later, to tell me that they had a check for me. They wanted me to go get the bird tomorrow, and pay them when my check came!

The next day Zoe came home. The day after that, she took over my life completely. The rest is history!

Surprisingly Edna did not hear from the other woman for 3 months. When she did call, she was told that bird went to a loving home, and that she could have part of her deposit back.

That is the story of how fate intervened and brought me the biggest source of joy I have ever had!