Page 23 - Animal Kin

little and made her way back up to the deck. That evening I carried the cage back up on the deck and put her in it for the night.
Soon we learned about how protective the other birds in out garden were of their young. When she tried venturing off the deck herself, a pair of catbirds aggressively drove her to the ground. They had a nest in the back corner of the garden and didn’t want her anywhere near it. For a few weeks we didn’t feel that she was safe out there without one of us to scare them off. She started flying in the back door when they were chasing her.
At first she was clearly most comfortable with me. But my kids noticed that she liked playing and started a give and take game- they would hand her and then take back various treasures. She liked to peck at things forcefully, almost like a woodpecker.
I kept the back door open, it was mid-summer by now, and she freely flew in and rested on the kitchen cabinet doors and sometimes ventured further into the house.
“Mom, your bird is in the shower!” shouted Lily one morning. “The bird broke my favorite tea cup!” Charlotte complained another day.
She landed regularly on Max.