For about 10 days in the summer of 1999, we had no fewer than eight inhabited animal cages in our small, hot, messy, humid house:
Mouse went to visit a friend overnight and while they were on some outing, they found a baby bird in a driveway. Not knowing any better, they picked the darn thing up. At the end of that sleepover, Mouse somehow coerced me to let her bring the friend over to our house for another sleepover. Back to back sleepovers are bad enough but then they showed up with the bird!
I was told that the bird would go with the friend when Dad came to pick her up the next day but when Dad got here, he clearly had no intention of taking the bird with him. So, for a little while, we had a pet bird. It was just a small, non-descript brown bird like the ones you see in parking lots at burger doodle type restaurants. Mouse named it Willow.
4th of July came in the midst of all this and we had planned one of our infamously complicated little odysseys: take two cars, drive to Houghton Lake, stay a couple of days, pick up the Little Princess trailer and haul it up to the beach, drop it off, stay for a couple of days, drive back to Houghton Lake for a couple more days, then home. Does that make your brain hurt?
Anyway, what to do with all those aminals? Lairi picked all of hers up plus the middle school hamsters and we found friends to board the rat and guinea pig and feed the anoles once in a while. But we really didn't want to put the responsibility of the wild bird off on someone else, so we put it in a cage and took it with us! It fledged on the way up to Houghton Lake.
It was a long, hot, traffic-y trip with lots of severe weather including tornadoes in the unlikely area of Whitefish Bay. The bird went everywhere with us, chirp -- chirp -- chirp, and the GG kept it fed and cleaned and it became kind of imprinted on him, just what we needed! We were pretty road-weary by the time we finally got home or at least I was. I was mortified when a neighbor told me someone had spotted us in Grayling. I was afraid to ask if it was at the Shell station where, being at the absolute end of my rope, I'd had a hissy at some moron who cut in front of me. Not my finest moment!
We put the bird-cage on the patio just outside the back door and the GG continued to feed the bird. But it was obvious the bird wanted to fly someplace besides inside a cage and it would keep beating its wings against the bars. One morning, he accidentally left the cage door open and by the time anyone discovered it, the bird was long gone. We were worried that Willow wouldn't be able to eat in the wild and the GG spent his free time for the next several days in the back yard whistling for Willow to come back. But as far as we know, we never saw it again.