All My Children

They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I doubt if our eightyear-old daughter Kendall would agree with that particular piece of traditional wisdom.

This is because, when it comes to the care and feeding — and keeping — of pet cage birds, our middle daughter is about as successful as her mother used to be when she was a child.

You may recall previous accounts of my wife’s youthful experiences with pets: most notably cage birds and fish. She had dozens of them at varying stages of her childhood. And all of them went the same way — slain in their millions by my wife. Not through malice, I hasten to add, but simply through too much kindess, too much handling and far too much food. At one stage, my wife’s kill-rate of aquarium fish was so great she was supporting the country’s fishing industry all by herself.

Kendall, it seems, has inherited not only her mother’s love of domestic wildlife, but also her mum’s propensity for having the things perish all around her. As follows …

Kendall’s first cage bird was a cockatiel called Kojak. He was named thus because his unseemly habit of plucking out his own feathers left him looking like an avian version of the baldly belligerent TV detective of the same name.

When Kojak moved in, our daughter was delighted with her new pal. Kendall is the gentlest of our three children and she clearly has the St Francis of Assisi touch when it comes to animals. Whereas the bird would hiss and spit and bite the hand of any other member of the family who dared to get too close, it would happily perch on Kendall’s fingers or crawl up her arm and on to her head, where it would usually leave a sticky little calling-card before hopping off and crawling down the other side.

One day, however, Kendall decided her feathered friend wasn’t getting enough fresh greens and she fed Kojak a leaf of lettuce. The silly bird’s eventual response to this magnanimous morsel was to croak feebly and fall off its perch with a dull thud.

Victim Number One.

It was only later that we learnt you aren’t supposed to feed lettuce to cage birds in general and cockatiels in particular, as lettuce tends to clog up their plumbing.

Other tweetie-pies followed in due course. And all came to some untimely end or another. Half were discovered stiff and lifeless on the cage floor in the morning, cause of death unknown; the rest simply broke out of their cages and fled for the nearest tree line.

Someone, clearly, had warned them about Kendall.

Apart from a succession of surly and truculent cockatiels acquired by my wife over the intervening years, Kendall’s interest in animals has more recently been taken up full time with her rapturous and undying passion for horses and the riding lessons she goes to three times a week.

About a month ago, however, both Kendall and elder sister Alexandra came into some money, given to them by an uncle out here on a visit from England. Happily, said uncle gave the cash directly to the girls and not to their mother, whose normal trick in such cases is to take the money and spend it on such frivolous luxuries as bread and milk.

With the money safely hidden from mother, the girls now set about a concerted campaign to persuade her to let them buy themselves a pet each. Alex wanted a hamster (to replace the last one that had been discovered toes up among its sawdust some months previously), while Kendall, of course, wanted to buy a bird to replace the 750 000 she had helped shuffle off this mortal coil over the preceding years.

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