Poppy swore at Freda Ireland and tore strips off her wallpaper. The gentle bird handed back to her four weeks later sang nursery rhymes, and it took a television appeal to work out why.
A Bird Shot Past
Freda Ireland lives in the Castle View area of Westbury, in Wiltshire. On 18 February her cockatiel Poppy shot straight past her through the front door and was gone.
An appeal went out to find him. He left through the front door while she was using it, the exact scenario the five-minute check before a door or window opens was written for.
Poppy was not a gentle bird, and Ireland never pretended otherwise. He could say his own name, he swore, and he had a habit of pecking the woman who fed him.
“Poppy was quite a character, he could say his name and he did swear a bit,” she told the BBC. That character turned out to matter more than anyone expected.
Four Weeks Of Nothing
Four weeks passed with no sign of him. Then Ireland was told a cockatiel had been brought in to a local vet.
“I thought it’s got to be my bird,” she said. A grey cockatiel handed in to a local vet, a few weeks after hers had gone — the arithmetic seemed to do itself.
The two BBC reports differ on the timing. The earlier one dates the escape to 18 February and calls it the previous month, while the later one says March, and this article follows the earlier and more specific account.
She had already been through the search that the first forty-eight hours after an escape demand, and it had produced nothing. She brought the new bird home anyway.
The Wrong Kind Of Gentle
The bird she brought home was affectionate. It climbed onto her and stayed there, and it wanted company in a way Poppy never had.
“He just loves to be by me, he clings on to my jacket and seems to like company,” she said. Poppy had attacked her.
Then it started to sing. It knew Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and it kept saying “cheese”.
“He would say ‘you old bugger’ and used to attack me but this one is a gentle little bird, it keeps saying ‘cheese’ and sings,” Ireland said. She had a cockatiel in her living room that was, by every measure available to her, not hers.
Whistling For A Dog
The clues kept accumulating, and they were all in the bird’s voice. It made long whistling noises with a shape to them, the kind a person makes to call an animal in.
“Whoever had him before must have had a dog because he make lots of whistling noises, like he’s whistling for the dog to come,” Ireland told the BBC. The quote is reproduced as the BBC published it.
Her inference was the obvious one, and it turned out to be right. The bird was calling for a dog that was not there, in a house it had never lived in.
If that whistling had been coming from her own bird, it is the sort of sound our guide to why a cockatiel calls for someone who isn’t there sets out to explain. Ireland was not trying to stop it. She was trying to read it.
A Bird On The Pitch
While she was working out whose bird she had, there was worse news locally. Another cockatiel had been found dead at a nearby football pitch.
Her worries heightened when she heard about it. Neither BBC report says whose bird that one was.
She still did not know who the bird on her jacket belonged to. She only knew he had come from somewhere, and that somebody was probably missing him.
Some escaped pet birds last longer outside than their owners fear, and a Manhattan cockatiel turned up four days later in good enough shape for a vet to explain how. The bird on the football pitch was a reminder that it does not always go that way.
Somebody Was Watching
Ireland did the one thing that could resolve it. She said publicly that she thought she had somebody else’s bird, and asked the owner to come forward.
“I would keep him but I also hope the owner hears about this and lets me know,” she said. She was worried, in her own words, that “some old lady or gent” was missing their companion.
The BBC ran her story. 44 miles (70km) away in Weston-super-Mare, Dhathri Bollu was watching, and the singing, whistling bird on the screen was hers.
“The moment I saw Freda’s interview on the BBC, I was just crying out loud. I’m absolutely over the moon,” Bollu said. Her bird had a name, Krishnudu, and a family who had long since stopped expecting him back.
What Poppy Left Behind
Bollu had given him up long before. “It snowed after he flew away and we thought he’d died, it’s quite unbelievable that a cockatiel could fly this far and amazing he is still alive,” she said.
Krishnudu went home to Weston-super-Mare. Lost birds sometimes turn up implausibly far from where they left, and a Brisbane galah turned up on a cruise ship, but 70km under a cockatiel’s own power is a different kind of strange.
Ireland said Krishnudu had “really taken” to her, and had to a “certain extent” taken the place of Poppy. “Although I’ve only had him a little while I shall miss him,” she said.
Then she said the line that stays with you. “But Poppy liked chewing the wallpaper off the walls, so I’ve still got something left of my bird – with the damage he left behind.”
Neither BBC report says Poppy was ever found. What sent Krishnudu home was that Ireland noticed her bird was too gentle to be hers and said so out loud, on a day when the one person who needed to hear it happened to be watching.
Source: BBC News, Missing cockatiel ‘reunited with wrong owner’ and Missing ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ cockatiel back with right owner. All quotes are reproduced as the BBC published them. The two reports differ on the date of the escape and this article follows the earlier one, which gives 18 February. Neither report carries a year, so none is stated here.