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wall. But he didn’t care for any interaction with us.
    “Maybe we can tame him,” I suggested with unfounded eagerness. When I had first moved into our house, I’d read Alfred G. Martin’s book
Hand-Taming Wild Birds at the Feeder
about tempting chickadees and tufted titmice to take food from a human hand. But standing motionless in front of the bird feeder, arm outstretched, cupped palm spilling black- oil sunflower seeds while birds scoldedme from a nearby pine tree lost its charm after a matter of minutes. Still, if wild birds could theoretically be coaxed into fellowship, I reasoned that a bird raised and kept by humans ought to be a pushover. I extended a wooden dowel identical to his wall-mounted perch toward Chester and urged him to land on it, but this activity quickly degenerated into my chasing Chester around the room with a stick. A better way to proceed, a pet-bird magazine informed me, was to begin by merely placing my hand into his cage until he became used to its presence. From there, I could gradually acclimate him to my finger. But when I introduced my thumb into his cage, Chester threw himself against the bars in fright, a poor foundation for building a bond of trust.
    Remembering how Binky’s independence had grown rather than diminished over his months with us, we decided that we’d give up trying to change Chester’s personality and enjoy him for his effusive voice. The obvious solution was a second bird that would willingly perch upon our shoulders and enjoy our company.
    Now, if out of ignorance I decided to stretch my right leg across a set of railroad tracks and a passing freight train clipped it off just above the knee, I’d think twice before putting my left leg on the rails. But after impulse-buying Binky, I still hadn’t grasped the consequences of purchasing an animal merely because we liked its looks. No voice in our heads cautioned us to interview bird owners about which type of bird would make the least troublesome pet. Had we known anything of substance about caged birds, we would have proceeded with great caution before subjecting ourselves to a parrot. And had we known anything about parrots, we wouldn’t have blithely brought home a breed that had justifiably fallen out of favor even among the most hardboiled hookbill enthusiasts.
    Once imported in great numbers, brotogeris “pocket parrots” were sold at department stores throughout the 1960s along withgoldfish, turtles, hermit crabs, budgies, and other low-maintenance critters. I remember seeing, in my high school years, these small parrots for sale under the relatively innocuous label “bee-bee parrots” (though later I’d learn that the B-B tag accurately describes the sting of a brotogeris bite). In the early 1990s, just before the 1992 Wild Bird Act banned the import of wild-caught birds for the pet trade, aviculturists across the country furiously stocked up on macaws, cockatoos, Amazon parrots, toucans, flamingoes, and anything else they could breed and unload on animal lovers. Few bothered with the pocket parrots, ostensibly because of their low selling price. I now think they probably let the brotogeris dwindle due to its temperament, which fluctuates between a lack of civility and demonic possession.
    Our first choice for a bird was actually a cockatiel, based solely on the fact that we knew what a cockatiel looked like. One afternoon Linda rushed into the house waving a slip of paper. “Sweetie, look what I found! A lady at Food City had an ad on the bulletin board for two pet birds.”
    I took the paper from her. “I wouldn’t trust anyone with handwriting like this. It looks demented.”
    “That’s
my
handwriting. And it does not.” She snatched back her note. “This lady has a cockatiel for sale with cage for a hundred dollars and a Quaker parakeet with cage for a hundred and fifty.”
    “A Quaker parakeet? We don’t want one of those.”
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But