Our babybird Mango can’t fly properly. She’s not paralysed, it’s not a birth defect (like little Nemo’s flapping flipper), we did it to her… We clipped one wing.*
She must know by now that she can’t fly. She has tried and crashed a hundred times by now. But she is or stupid or really stubborn, cause she tries. Really hard. Most of the times, we place her on the floor, and after walking around for a bit, she’ll start running and flapping her wings really fast. She’ll take off alright, but crashes normally after reaching a height of 20 cms… Sometimes we place her on the wicker roller blind, with the others: Porgy and Ober. She happily climbs up and down with them, helps with deconstructing the blinds in order to get pieces of reed for Ober’s nest, tsjilps to the others, they tsjilp back and after a while, Porgy and Ober will fly away. Uh-oh. Nine seven out of ten times we can reach her in time, but sometimes we are to late to catch her. She’ll try to follow the bunch. She flaps her wings fiercely. She takes off. She flies!… for about a second and then she crashes. One meter down onto the slippery laminated flooring, so she’ll often slide under the cupboard after her crash. We try not to laugh, but it is so funny! After we pick up the slightly disoriented bird we cuddle and comfort her and tell her – again – she can’t fly. Then, we place her back with the bunch and pray we’re on time for to prevent the next crash… Hopefully her feathers will grow back very soon!
*(Before anyone accuses me of cruelty towards animals: a crash course (LOL) in taming a Lovebird. If they are very shy, like Mango was in the beginning, its better to clip the wing, so she won’t fly away from your hands every time you try to pick them up. Now she can get used to hands. Anyway, the wing itself isn’t clipped, the inside feathers of her left wing are clipped unevenly. This way, she is unable to fly distance or great heights. By the time her feathers are grown back – yes, they grow back – she will be a tame Lovebird that we can pick up without frightening her).
