Budgerigar has a minion!

Sparky the Budgie

Decisions, decisions.... do I pick the dark green budgie, or the more interestingly coloured pale green one with grey wings & a grey tail? I admit I like the unusual coloured budgies, so of course I picked the pale green one with grey wings. Sparky came home on February 18th 2017 from a local breeder, although it was a couple of weeks before we settled on a name for him.


We'd owned budgies before, but this was the first English budgie we'd had. I'd researched English budgies before we got Sparky, and noted that they are more relaxed & chilled out than the smaller American budgies, and aren't meant to be quite so active - this tends to make them ideal as show budgies, as they don't get freaked out by a busy show hall. I wasn't planning on showing him, but a more laid back bird sounded like a suitable difference from our previous budgie.


First impressions? He's huge!! I knew English budgies were bigger, but I hadn't anticipated how much bigger he would be! For the first couple of weeks, he would sit perfectly still when anyone put their hand in the cage to clean it out, almost like he was playing a game of musical statues. Our previous budgie would come over and check out what was going on, so this was a big difference to have a budgie just sitting there almost as if he felt he was invisible if he didn't move. Once he got more used to us, he'd come over and start investigating a little more, although he'd view anything new in the cage - even a different coloured ladder - with immediate suspicion.


They day he arrived, I noticed a couple of feathers around his eye looked like they were sticking out, but I thought maybe that was just where he'd been in a travel box for the journey to get here. But they didn't improve over time and when they were moulted, the feathers looked more like a clump of feathers than individual ones, so I sent a couple of photos to a vet friend. She said it looked like he had polyfollicles, where multiple feather shafts grow from one single follicle. Sparky did find these feathers itchy at times, but thankfully they were only in that one location near his eye, so he couldn't pluck the feathers out and make it sore. Most of the photos I took of Sparky are of him facing the opposite direction, as he didn't like to sit and pose with his "odd feather" side facing me!




Despite coming from an urban environment, it took him a while to settle to being in his new living accommodation and all the noises associated with living in a house on a steep hill. One windy night the recycling boxes were blown down the road, which woke him up in the early hours of the morning and he ended up flying onto the side of the cage, taking a while to calm down before getting back onto the perch to fall asleep again. I think the lack of other budgies chirping around him, made the other noises appear more intense and scary.



However, for a budgie that seemed so skittish to start with, he adored some unusual sounds... I thought he'd be terrified of fireworks but he would sit and chirp to the bangs & crashes, and while I was taking photos of the lightning on a particularly intense thunderstorm, Sparky was busy chirping and whistling to the massive boom of the thunder.


Sparky also learnt the routine of cleaning the cage. When the cage door was open, he invariably wanted to get from the perch on the left of the door, to the one on the right. After several times where he'd almost landed on the space where the door would be if it was closed, he would climb onto the inside cage bars, climb up to the top of the cage, go over the top of the door then climb down the bars on the other side of the door to get to the perch.


He seemed to take ages to learn to say words, but he picked up some phrases I hadn't realised we'd even said near him. My Mum would come down the stairs towards his cage and say "hello trouble" and Sparky would repeat it straight back to her like a parrot would. I think if he hadn't been suffering from polyfollicles he would've picked up more words, as before those affected feathers had regrown after being moulted, he would be a lot more chatty.




Sparky's favourite thing though was whistling. Ever since I was a child, we've always taught our budgies to wolf whistle, and also a particular whistle that I tend to use to get someone's attention in another part of the house (to me, that's better than just yelling that person's name!). To make it more interesting for Sparky, we taught him to whistle the first lines of some seasonal songs like jingle bells, drip drip drop little April showers and we plough the fields and scatter, which he picked up surprisingly quickly. Of course he also did his own variations of those songs, so sometimes we ended up with "drip drip drop little Jingle bells", just to make it his own little song.


Despite other family members claiming that Sparky didn't really pay attention to our day, he learnt a lot about our routine. I tend to make a mug of tea on a regular basis throughout the day, and if I hadn't put the kettle on by my usual time, Sparky would whistle. If I still didn't put the kettle on, he'd whistle louder! I have no idea how Sparky knew what the time was though, as it didn't matter if I'd got up (and uncovered his cage) later than normal - it was always a whistle exactly at the time the kettle should be on!



Despite how grouchy Sparky looks in that photo, he did really adore having spray bottle showers. Sometimes he'd just sit there and let the water soak through his feathers without bothering to do anything at all, and other times he'd be on the side of the cage, or sitting on one of his favourite toys, happily flapping his wings and pressing his feathers through the bars to get them as wet as possible. Mum always joked that Sparky had his waterproofing on at the beginning of a shower, as it seemed to take forever for the water to seep through the outer layer of feathers so he'd start interacting with having a wash.







Sparky clearly wasn't a completely healthy budgie (he had digestion problems as well as the feather problem) and in January 2021 I really thought he wouldn't make it. He'd seemed out of sorts and got to the point where he seemed unable to eat. But just as suddenly as he seemed to go downhill, the next day he was back to his normal self, chirping and eating like there hadn't been a problem. Early October Sparky was acting out of character, heading down to the bottom of the cage and runnning about on the newspaper lining the cage base. But he always got back onto the perch and seemed fine otherwise. The next day he wasn't eating, and seemed to be a bit wobbly but given what happened in January we were expecting him to bounce back in a similar way. Unfortunately that never happened, and he died on October 5th 2021.


Sparky - hatched Dec 2016, my pet from 18th February 2017, died 5th October 2021

Credits:
Profile by Ringo
Pet overlay by Morse
Minion overlay by dalice
Story and photos by Paddy