This is Rosie Modelo, aged 7 mos and some odd days, who has been residing in the cabin for two months since M calls me one day on my way home from work that he's an hour away driving home with a conure on his shoulder. 
He is a bird aficionado, I myself have never cared for a perching pet before but fell in love the moment she clamped onto my finger. She knows some basic commands: "up" to perch on a finger, and "down" to go back into her cage (that one she's not as good at). She also knows "unko" to poop (in Japanese) when we tell her to - useful for when she wants to cuddle in M's beard but has just had an entire blackberry....
Rosie loves cuddling in bed with us, tumbling over on her back on the couch and kicking her legs up in the air, bananas, sunflower seeds (junk food), The Who, The Beach Boys, and especially sitting on my head while I wash the dishes. Some busy days we put her cage outside in the shady part of the cabin porch and she watches the other birds play all day - unfortunate to keep her caged but there are so many hawks and owls in the trees on our property that she would get snatched up in a second with her bright feathers.
Since January of this year I have been living with Matt in a small cabin made entirely of wood, lacking insulation and proper drainage. My life has taken on a sort of mysticism that I don't recognize until I examine my daily experiences from a bird's eye view.
Like clockwork, nearly every two hours a Tokay gecko that lives in the rafters between our porch light and tin roof makes a noise that sounds like uuuuh-ooooooh. Our landlord has a long history of taking care of animals, including a stint raising these South American foot-long dinosaurs in the cabin prior to renting it out. According to myth, they escaped one day and have now become an integral part of the ecosystem of the property, feeding on June bugs and the giant moths that swarm our outside lights. Unfortunately, Colonel Popcorn lost his mate in Winter when she tried to warm herself on a lightbulb. Ouch.
On a rafter above our hom
e-made wooden bed you can see white deposits that once clung to gecko eggs.
Our conure Rosie Modelo turns a curious ear to the kitchen corner each time the gecko crows but has yet to imitate his calls.
