Thursday, May 14, 2020

Weighing Cheepy

This is another out-of-order Cheepy video. There will be various of these interspersed with the retrospective. There's a LOT of video of Cheepy since we saw him through a lot, from staying around despite his homicidal father, a swallowing disorder which threatened to starve him, lame feet, and all sorts of stuff that we managed to get him through. Susie taught him to eat various things in the yard which he didn't learn from his parents, and indeed he treated her/us like parents.

So when Sue decided she needed to know how much he weighed, and wasn't satisfied with the estimate "about an ounce", it was easy to figure out his exact weight. Just put a few mealworms on the postal scale and set it to "tare" and have him hop on.

Cheepy is pretty seedy-looking in this vid; in addition to not swallowing right and having problems with his legs, he apparently didn't groom his tailfeathers properly for a long time so spent a long time looking like he passed several times through a vacuum cleaner or something. Unquestionably he would have died in the normal course of events, but when last we saw him he was in full plumage and had survived nearly two weeks without any help or food from us, off having a shama life. That last visit he came in, hung out, had a meal, and then did something he'd never done before: while sitting on my finger after having a meal, he pulled one leg up and perched there contented on a single leg for a time. This is something they do when feeling secure, and perhaps happy. This lasted 5 minutes or so.

Then he flew out the door, out of human knowledge, and into history. Fare thee well, Cheepy.

We'll talk about the Cheepies in a bit, the third fledging of 2019; Cheepy was originally Cheepy1, and there are stories for the others as well.

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