Tutu was a Molucca, or salmon-crested, cockatoo, a largish, handsome parrot from Indonesia with the sort of coloration you'd get if you tossed a bright red garment into the wash with all of your whites and let it bleed out onto them. She was a former pet, surrendered to our zoo by an owner who couldn't handle her high-maintenance self, which would have been a great thing for them to have realized before they bought her. Like many former pet parrots, Tutu had poor socialization skills, was easily bored, was highly destructive, and could scream for hours if she didn't get her way. Unlike most former pet parrots that I worked with, Tutu liked me. A lot. I'm pretty sure that from the moment that she first laid eyes on me, she was already starting to pick out names for our future kids.
The keepers called her my "work wife." They stopped laughing the first time that nutcracker of a beak snapped shut inches from their nose. The problem was that Tutu's love for me came at the expense of everyone else. She loathed every single other person that we worked with, and if she saw a female colleague get to close to me, her rage was uncontrollable (though she never seemed angry at me for this perceived infidelity). At best, she was grudgingly cooperative with the other staff, sometimes letting them tend to her unmolested, sometimes not.
This was especially unpleasant because Tutu had to be carried back and forth each day in the spring and fall between her unheated outdoor enclosure and her indoor holding. I remember watching keepers carrying her outside with their arms stretched as far away from their faces as possible; they wore the kind of expression you'd expect to see on the face of a soldier who was carrying a live grenade with the pin pulled out. As a result, most days I had to be the one to ferry her around, which meant that I often had to plan my days around Tutu. I was always living in fear that the day would come when I'd be off, home and relaxing, when I'd get a panicked call from work, saying that Tutu had darted up a tree, or was lunging at anyone who came close and couldn't be carried in, so would I please come and get my stupid bird?
The one job that I would not do, it was decided, was trim Tutu's beak and claws, both which had a tendency to get overgrown. Tutu was smart but she was resistant to training and she never allowed me to trim them voluntarily. We wanted to make sure she was still on good terms with someone, so I was excused from what, to her, was a very stressful job. Actually, I did have a role in the process. The keepers would grab Tutu up, wrap her in a towel, and then do the trimming. Once they were done, I would swoop in and take Tutu home... and then, in a ridiculously overblown style, I would beat the towel and scold it for harming Tutu. That always seemed to take the edge off of her feelings, seeing her arch-rival and tormentor being punished for its sins.
If I'd been in charge and planning from the beginning, I don't think I would have indulged Tutu so much. I would have socialized with her and played with her still, sure, but I would have made more of an effort to rotate other keepers to her instead of doing what was easier and surrendering to her whims. Everyone needed to learn to work with Tutu, and Tutu needed to learn to work with everyone. Eventually, she did start to settle and become more tractable with other keepers. A week could pass at a time without my needing to do anything with her. That's just as well, because eventually, I did leave to take a job at a different zoo.
Before I drove away on that last day, I made one slow, careful inspection of my car. I needed to make sure that none of my coworkers had slipped a pink, feathery passenger into the backseat as a goodbye gift.
No comments:
Post a Comment