The Life and Death of a Little Birdie

I must start with this is not really my story; this is the story of my roommate. And the first part of the story I only know second hand. The second part I did witness. The timeline above pretty much tells the story, but I will recap it here.

My roommate was on her way to work, and when she opened the door she noticed a bird flying around, and for some reason that I don’t quite understand she is intensely afraid of birds (which might help to explain her lack of knowledge of what types of birds can fly, for example, ducks and geese). Instead of running for the elevator, which in hindsight would have been much more effective in terms of what happened later, she ran back in to the apartment, attempting to hide from the theoretical violent attacks of the winged creature outside the door (maybe my roommate has watched too many Hitchcock movies).

Hoping that the bird would eventually fly away, and forget all about her, she waited for a little while in the apartment, periodically checking the peep hole for the vulture that was outside her door. After looking through the peep hole and not seeing any sight of the pterodactyl, she opened the door, to find to her horror that the bird was sitting on the floor looking at her, which is why she didn’t see it in the peep hole. Then her rational mind kicked in, and she realized that this winged menace was not the threat she thought, she looked down to see a 6 inch green little birdie. Then the cuteness of this little bird clouded her mind as she let it hop toward her and eventually let it hop its way into our apartment, and once it was in the apartment it took flight and started flying all over the place. Because of the fact that she went and hid in the apartment for several minutes, instead of heading straight for the elevator, she was late for work and didn’t have time to catch the bird. So for several hours, there was an unattended bird in our apartment we are still finding the places where it cacaed everywhere, and I am sure it will be a while before we find all of them). Please refer to the timeline for the things that happened prior to this next sentence. When I got home the bird was in a cage and not looking great. After trying to soothe it and give it food, the bird only lasted about another five hours from the time I got home. In total, the bird was in our lives and our apartment for about a sixteen hour period. The lesson from this is that birds that I encounter in China have very short life spans and I don’t think that I should be getting any pets anytime soon; I am having enough trouble trying to take care of little Ben and Hey Zeus, an orange tree, I inherited.