Poor Dagwood. He’s such a terrible flyer, and yet he’s constantly trying to keep up with Blondie.

Yesterday, she took off from the top of the cage to land on the kitchen curtain. I guess she wanted to look out the window. She landed on the curtain, Dagwood took off to follow her, smacked into the window sill and landed in the sink.

All of his terrible landings can’t be making him any smarter, and he seems like such a clueless little bird that I can’t imagine how he ever survived “in the wild” before we found him. But half of the time he just has plain bad luck…..

Like this time. Because he landed in the sink, on top of my husband’s breakfast dishes, which were covered with pancake syrup. Consequently, before I could even get into the kitchen, Dagwood was stuck to the top plate. He managed to free his chest from the sticky stuff, and then made a valiant effort to climb up the butter knife. However, that was wet, so he just kept sliding back down into the syrup. For a bird his size, that has to be like an encounter with quick sand. He was so terrified he wasn’t even making any noise.

I coaxed him up onto my hand. His feet and tail feathers were also sticky. I gently placed him back on the top of the cage, where Blondie came to meet him and see how he was. She started to try to groom him, but he wasn’t up for that yet. I set up their parakeet bathtub on top of the cage, hoping that Dagwood would hop in. Blondie tried to give him a hint. She went over to the birdbath, got her beak wet, and then went over to Dagwood and flung some water on him. But it didn’t seem to inspire him.

Finally, she just gave up and climbed down to the parakeet gym and Dagwood climbed down to be with her. Then the dog showed up.

Now, this is kind of a routine that the dog goes through with the parakeets. The parakeets don’t always hang out on their gym, but, when they do, Winston always goes over to them and gives them each a gentle sniff. They are both used to this: Blondie because this is her first home and the dog has always done it, and Dagwood because, I guess, he sees that it doesn’t scare Blondie. Besides, the dog has never shown the slightest aggression towards them. He seems to sniff them in the same gentle, thoughtful way he used to sniff our cats. As if he is discerning “Yes, you are still a cat/ bird and you are all right”. It’s the same way he sniffs me if he finds me or The Hub lying on the floor: up one side and down the other, as if checking for problems.

However, this time, Dagwood smelled like syrup. So Winston stretched his head further forward and stuck out his tongue a little. Winston gets a particular look on his face when he’s excited about food, but he had none of that avid expression. He instead he had the gentle, patient, “Doctor Dog” look. I guess he could tell that syrup did not belong on a parakeet, or detect stress hormones, or something. The only trouble is that Winston’s nose is about the size of the entire parakeet. He seemed aware of this also, as evidenced by the fact that he had only the tip of his tongue hanging out – I can’t tell you how weird this looked – and his wrinkled brows were furrowed as he kept turning his head, this way and that, to try to get a good angle from which to get the syrup off of the bird.

By now, poor Dagwood was so flipped out that he simply hopped up beside Blondie with a look that seemed to suggest defeat. Blondie leaned forward in between Dagwood and the dog. She didn’t peck Winston’s nose. She leaned forward and opened her beak the way parakeets do when they mean “ get out of my space right now”. Winston sat down and appeared to consider this deeply. He then gave a slow “thump thump” of his tail ( that’s Dog for “I’m friendly”) and leaned in again. Blondie said something to him in parakeet ( “wron-a-wrona-wronk-wronk”) and did the same thing, this time with the tiniest peck for emphasis.

The dog looked at them again for a minute then lay down and looked at me urgently. As if to say “Hey, did you know the parakeet has gunk all over him?”

I put the parakeets and the parakeet bath back in the cage, hopeful that when Dagwood felt less upset he’d use the bath and let Blondie help him clean up. If not, I figured I could always rinse him off under some warm water, though I wasn’t looking forward to it. I looked on line for parakeet friendly soaps. That’s not a search that turns up much, incidentally.

It made me think of the time that the cat we had in Massachusetts, Mercury, got paint all over him. I was e-mailing everybody to try to figure out how to get white paint off of a black cat – his whole face and left side were covered with it. Finally, I noticed that it looked like Winston had Mercury’s whole head in his mouth, and I jumped up to stop him from killing the cat. Of course, he wasn’t harming him. He was patiently licking all that paint off the cat, who was sprawled out gratefully on the living room floor. And it worked too.

When I was researching mastiffs, one of the questions that kept coming up was about their intelligence. The literature often said things like, “Mastiff owners credit their dogs with great sensitivity more than great intelligence.” Having had Winston in my life for almost 5 years I know have a much better idea of what that means.

Anyway, by the time I got home, Dagwood seemed to have had a bath. At least there were a lot of green feathers in the little bathtub, and he was no longer sticky. He and Blondie and The Hub were all watching Star Wars Episode III, with the parakeets chirping excitedly every time R2D2 made a noise.

Another day, another adventure.