Poncho
Date of Passing: 07/22/2025
Message to Poncho: For Poncho, a little bird who leaves behind a huge hole, and who will always be missed.
Tell us about Poncho: I don’t know where to begin to try to sum up 33 years with my little Poncho. He was such an integral part of everything in my life and for so much of my life. He was with me through most of the major events I’ve experienced. His absence is so profound. For many years, I’ve worked at home and every time I moved around my house, I’d stop and give him a tickle on his head. We would whistle, talk and laugh all day. He’d join in all my Zoom meetings to the delight of everyone on those calls, although if he was on my desk and on camera, he’d clam up because he never seemed to want to talk in front of strangers. For the last 10 years, he had a heart condition that caused seizures, and he received medications 3 times each day, so I never really went anywhere for any length of time because I needed to be home at the right times to give his his meds. I’m having to relearn not having such a stringent schedule.
African greys are so incredibly smart. When he came home with me when he was about 8 months old, all he said was a quiet little “Hello.” His vocabulary grew FAST. By the time he was about 3 years old, he probably spoke around 400 words – many in context. Once, he was playing with a mirror on a chain in his cage and said, “Come here.” I had my back to him and told him “I’m busy. You come here.” He repeated his come here a couple more times, then sort of yelled it at me. That got my attention, so I turned around and he had a link from the chain stuck on his beak! When I went to him to get him and the toy from the cage to get him unstuck, he eagerly praised me with a “Good birdie!!”
Even though I got Poncho when he was young, someone else had him before me. She was a young teenager with younger siblings who stuck their fingers in his cage and teased him. The stress of all of this started a feather chewing habit which I could never completely break him of, so he always looked a little scruffy. Because of the feather chewing, any time I left my house for more than about an hour, he had to be locked in his cage so he wouldn’t fall and not have access to food and water – with chewed feathers, he couldn’t just fly back to his cage, and he was a little clumsy. When I was in college, I came home from classes one day and looked at his perch in his cage and there was no bird! The cage door was open, so I started looking around my apartment for him, worried that I’d forgotten to put him in the cage and lock the door and that the poor little guy was somewhere hungry and thirsty. When I walked close to his cage again, I noticed the lock on the floor which is not where I kept it. Then I looked up and he was on top of his cage! I truly didn’t notice him there when I first came in the room because he shouldn’t have been there. I was so relieved! When he saw me make eye contact at last, he excitedly said “Hi!!” I said the same back to him. I swear there was a comedic pause before he next said, “Let the birdie out!” and then HE started laughing uproariously.
He was always so much company for me. He had things he would say randomly. My days were filled with “Hey, turkey butt!’ and “Whatcha’ doing little birdie?” but there were certain things he would say that showed me how much he understood certain connections and emotions. It was so different from my dogs over the years, who certainly all tried to be a comfort when things were hard, but with Poncho, it just seemed as if he understood some things very deeply. I had an extraordinary amount of loss during covid. Each time I was in the middle of some new loss during that time, he would say, “I love you. Are you OK?” Are you OK wasn’t such an unusual thing to hear, but the I love you was never spoken except during the hardest of times. I can imagine that it might be hard for some to think that a connection with a bird isn’t as strong as with a dog or a cat, but my life with Poncho was filled with love, communication, connection. An animal that can speak to us in our own language – and especially one like Poncho who wasn’t just mimicking what he heard but showed an understanding of that language can have a remarkably profound effect on us. And my little Poncho certainly had that effect on me and I don’t know how I will ever stop missing him.