A pet budgie is a small Australian bird. Winnipeg in December is not Australia. Somewhere between those two facts, a bright green and yellow budgie spent the better part of three months living outdoors on the Canadian prairie, and he did it by attaching himself to a flock of house sparrows.
Two CBC News reports followed him from the first sighting to the morning after his capture. What they describe is not quite a rescue story, because the bird who came back indoors was not the bird who had gone out.
A Green Bird Among Sparrows
Sylvia Cassie was looking at the feeder in her outdoor space in the Southland Park area of Winnipeg on 22 November when the color of it went wrong. In a cloud of small brown house sparrows there was one bird that was bright green and yellow.
“I just stood there and looked at them and I couldn’t believe in the middle of the flock was this little fellow,” Cassie told CBC News. “There he was in all his glory with 50 sparrows.”
He had already been out a long time by then. A budgie had been reported outdoors in the Island Lakes area of the city back in October, which is where the eleven-week count in the later CBC report begins.
Neither report says how he got out, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than guessing at it. What we have written about the ordinary household moment that puts most birds outside covers the routes that come up most often.
A Gang Of Buddies
He came back, and he kept coming back. Cassie said the bird started showing up three times a day for a week, and between visits he sat in the cedar tree beside her deck.
The sparrows were not merely tolerating him. By Cassie’s account they were showing him where to feed and where the warm spots were, which is the part of this story that explains why he was still alive in December.
“They just seemed like a gang of buddies! We’d never seen such a big flock,” she said. “I felt that he was really being looked after by them, but we didn’t want them leading him astray.”
Melanie Shura, president of Avian Welfare Canada, described it as ordinary budgie behavior running in an extraordinary place. “They [budgies] enjoy being in a flock, that’s their safety and security and what they’re like in the wild,” she said. That instinct does not switch off indoors, which is why what a single pet bird actually needs for company is worth sitting with.
What A Prairie Winter Costs
Shura’s description of budgies is of a bird tougher than it looks. “They’re really rugged little birds. They can fly up to 500 kilometres in a day following thunder in their native country of Australia,” she said.
Rugged is not the same as equipped. The species thrives at around 20 °C (68 °F), Shura said, and sleeps about 12 hours a day on average, neither of which a Manitoba January offers.
“The stress of trying to maintain that body temperature outside with the long nights we have is astonishing,” she said. The follow-up report put the arithmetic of it plainly: temperatures dipped far below the bird’s normal comfort range.
Her own read on why he lived was partly luck. She suspected the mild winter was a factor, along with the flock that helped him find shelter and food. Indoors the risk runs the other way, and how owners get winter warmth wrong is its own hazard.
The Cage That Failed
Cassie and her husband called the Winnipeg Humane Society, who put them in touch with Shura. Shura brought over a cage fitted with a heating lamp and special bird food and set it up outside the house.
Then everyone waited, and nothing happened. They played the waiting game, in CBC’s phrase, and could not coax the bird inside it.
This is the unglamorous middle of a recovery like this one: the bird is visible, the equipment is right there, and the animal does not cooperate. It is also why the first forty-eight hours matter most when a bird gets out at all.
Shura had already explained what that delay does. “Once they’ve become kind of feral, which doesn’t take long, about a week … and you’ve got a wild bird on your hands, then you need to try to reverse that process, and it’s not very easy,” she said.
A Second Yard In December
In early December the green bird turned up at a different feeder in the same Southland Park area. Shelley Corvino saw him chumming around with her own house sparrows.
“‘OK,’ I said, ‘That is not a house sparrow,'” Corvino said.
She called Shura too. Together they set up a second cage outside the Corvinos’ house, this one stocked with toys, a heat lamp, millet and seed.
And then, again, they waited. This time the wait ran from the first week of December to the last day of the year.
New Year’s Day Morning
On New Year’s Day, Corvino’s husband looked outside and saw the bird. It made its way slowly into the cage and started to eat.
What happened next is where the bird got his name. Corvino’s husband had rigged a long string to the cage door so that it could be pulled shut from inside the house.
“He pulled the string, which he’d MacGyver’d to capture the fellow, through the little gate on the setup here … and that was it! He was still feeding!” Corvino said. “We high-fived and actually went and drank a toast and then we called Mel and Sylvia right away.”
The Corvinos named him MacGyver, after the fictional secret agent who builds complex machines out of ordinary objects, and he slept the night in the cage at their house. What came next was not a homecoming so much as the slow work of making a budgie trust a hand again.
He Forgot How To Eat
MacGyver went to Shura, who took him in and set about re-domesticating him. The morning after he arrived, she watched him do something that stopped her.
“I noticed the next morning that he was panicking in front of his food dish. He was looking at a dish full of food and pacing back and forth. And I realized that he needed the cue from the flock to eat,” she said.
He was not sick and he had not forgotten what food was. He had spent eleven weeks in a system where eating happened when the flock ate, and without that signal a full dish meant nothing. “They depend on flock cues, that’s part of their psychology,” Shura said, and she solved it by bringing in her own pet birds to show him it was safe.
The other change was audible. CBC built the title of its follow-up clip around the fact that the budgie now speaks sparrow, and the report describes him as speaking fluent ‘sparrow’ after his months in the flock — which is what lets a parrot copy the sounds around it working exactly as designed, pointed at sparrows instead of at us.
Six Calls, No Match
Once the story ran, the phone started. Shura said she heard from at least six people hoping MacGyver was their missing bird.
One call came from Brandon, Manitoba, which Shura thought was too far for him to have traveled. Others came from across the city, and one from somebody whose budgie had gone missing nearly two years earlier.
“When people have a budgie that’s escaped, they really, really want this to be their budgie and that’s understandable,” she said. The obstacle was the bird himself: “He is a normal green budgie which is the most common form of budgie. They do tend to look identical.”
She asked people to send photographs and video, and warned that a match would not be a simple homecoming. “I have to put the needs of the bird first, so right now he’s being medically monitored. And we have to see if he’s even going to be fit to be a pet budgie again or if he really needs to live with a little flock of budgies with someone who really knows their stuff,” she said.
Both CBC reports end there, with the search for an owner still open, and neither says how it was resolved. The last word on the record is Shura’s, and it is aimed at everybody else’s birds rather than at this one: “Don’t give up on your lost birds. I know all of your hope goes with them but they do tend to show up.”
Which leaves the part that is not in doubt. For eleven weeks, a pet bird whose species comes from Australia survived a Manitoba winter because a flock of house sparrows made room for him, and the cost of that was that he came back knowing how to be a sparrow and not much else.
Source: CBC News. Budgie rescued after weeks spent outside braving Winnipeg winter, with files from CBC’s Erin Brohman, and the follow-up, Rescued budgie draws flock of hopeful pet owners. Neither page carries a publication date, so this article gives months rather than a year. The two reports also differ on how long the bird was out: the first says “more than a month”, counting from the November sighting, while the second says “at least 11 weeks”, counting from October. We have followed the second. Photographs of MacGyver himself are CBC’s, by Holly Caruk, and are not reproduced here.