It happened on Sunday. Bobby, an African grey parrot who lived with my friend Anne, flew away. Now, I lived with Bobby and Anne for about six months, and fondly remember his mimicking of ringtones, cats, dogs, fireworks, and the way he found human language boring by comparison. We were friends!
The tragedy occurred when Anne went to visit her brother in a remote country area. His small children had left a door open while Bobby was out of his cage. Curious, Bobby flew outside, and up, up into the blue sky above the forest, where other birds were also on the wing.
Anne searched the area for hours (I’ll spare you the details because it’s all unbearably sad) and she has now started a poster campaign to inform all the locals about this. Being a parrot, he couldn’t have flown very far, and might have just dropped from the sky and died instantly. And at night, the temperature would have been too low for him to survive, but he could have found shelter somewhere. I don’t know whether to mourn a friend or to hope for a miracle.
There’s a Swedish poem that goes, “You can catch the bird but you can’t catch its flight…”
I don’t have that many pictures of him. You can just glimpse his red tail here:
