What can you do with a broken heart?

Everything was going so well. Yesterday morning, Neil spent an hour or more sitting on my shoulder before I put him outside (out of his cage) with a grape. I needed to eat my breakfast too. While normally a noisy bird, his shrieks generally came in ones or twos, and normally seemed to be saying not much more than "Come here and let me sit on your shoulder again, where I will clean myself". So when he uttered five or six shrieks in quick succession, I figured it was a distress call of some sort. Just as I made it onto the terrace, he was off: flying faster than I'd seen before (he was usually a bit nervous flying).

As he flew away, I noticed two things that might have scared him: a huge gull had just flown over the terrace and I guess it could have looked like some sort of predator. Indeed, it probably is. I'm not sure what type of gull it is, but I can remember herring gulls in Devon being pretty nasty. Also, my 80 year-old neighbour, Fina, had stuck her head round the divide between our terraces to try and get a look at Neil. My theory is that one of these two or a combination of both) scared him and made him fly away. The sad thing is that we'd just built a bond with this bird and had started to consider him a member of the family. Though at the same time, we we were aware that the 'open cage' system might prove ineffective, still, we were at least agreed that it was morally better. We've seen him about five or six times since then, flying around on his own (and looking quite lost) but I find it unlikely that he'll come back to us.

So what have we learnt from this experience? Simple: never let anyone into your heart because they'll just leave. Only kidding! The main thing I've learnt is how nice it can be to have a bird as a pet (it never really clicked with me before), and also just how many birds there are around here… it's really opened my eyes! If I see Neil again, I-ll be sure to mention it.