O.k, this is weird.
My parakeet is normally very feisty (feisty here meaning: Put fingers into her cage, don’t have fingers anymore.) But these past few weeks she’s been even nastier. Yesterday, I found the reason.
I was sitting on the front steps with my bird, and she was screaming at me, as usual. All of a sudden, she goes down to the bottom of her cage and starts tapping around under the shredded newspaper toy that we put into her cage. She lifted her head back up and dragged away some of the newspaper, as if to say, “Look what I did!” Lo and behold, an egg, sitting there so innocently!
I couldn’t catch my breath for a minute. It was tiny (although it looked too big to have come from her) and round and pinkish-white. I ran inside and grabbed the phone to call my best friend who owns 3 birds that she and her mom raised from eggs.
“Angelina!” I cried. “My bird laid an egg!” I proceeded to tell her what I had seen. (Note: My bird had not mated with any male birds.)
“Yeah, that sometimes happens. If a bird wants an egg badly enough, they can lay one, but it will be empty. She knows it’s empty, that’s why she isn’t sitting on it.”
I was freaking out. It’s so sad, though. It’s like someone called you up and said there had been a miscarriage. MD and I feel sorry for the poor bird, because her bottom is all red and swollen. So the reason that my bird is being even more nasty than usual is because she was guarding her egg (No, Kevin, I don’t want your bird extermination services).
Ciao for now!
Tease….
Birds have biological clocks? You learn something new every day. I have never heard that birds can lay eggs through sheer willpower. Amazing. I don’t want to ask how you know the bird has a red and swollen butt, that’s your business.
Where are the pictures? This might not be as much fun as cockatiels making whoopee, but an immaculate conception in the bird world isn’t half bad.
KD- It’s not like she tries to hide herself, that is, if she is going into the tunnel between the pillow and the arm of the couch, her little butt sticks out. Kind of gross, really.