LESSONS IN FEAR

I’d like to think of myself as a brave person – not afraid to try new things, or go to new places, or talk to strangers, or rescue strange creepy crawly animals from getting squashed in my house – but the other day something happened out of the blue that made me realise the true nature of what exactly fear is. I was at home one afternoon by myself, doing stuff around the house as I usually do on my day off. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day, so I had the entire house wide open. Just then the phone rang. I answered it and, as I usually do, moseyed around my house chatting to my friend about the party she had gone to the night before, who was there, gab gab gab, you know how women can talk on the phone!

I ambled onto the front porch and as I stood there, talking and laughing with my friend, I looked up and saw, perched on a power line directly opposite my porch, a green parrot. How odd, I thought to myself, for a wild parrot to sit by itself on a power line. As I watched the parrot, I realised it was watching me as well, straight in the eye. Just as I was about to tell my friend, it suddenly it cooed, “Hell-ooo… Hell-ooo…” I then realised this was no wild parrot – it was an escaped parrot. It was then I remembered seeing a sign up for a lost parrot posted around my neighborhood. But in the blink of an eye, before I knew exactly what was happening, the parrot suddenly took flight from the power line, and flew, kamikaze-style, with what looked like giant, powerfully flapping wings, right towards me.

Well, I start screaming for dear life as it swoops down, drop the phone on the floor, and run into the house. But I find no safe haven inside, because the parrot flies right in after me through the open doors, and all I can hear is an eerie “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” every time it flaps its powerful little green wings against me, cawing in a frenzy. I continue to shriek like a banshee and run into a bedroom and slam the door, my heart pounding like a million tassa drums playing at a wedding. In the bedroom, I crouch down on the floor and try to catch my breath. There’s nobody home, nobody to help me, nobody to show me how to deal with a parrot.

I don’t know what to do! Do I pick it up? Will it bite me? Should I make it fly away? What do I do? But before I can answer that question, I then remember that I have two very shrewd cats that are quite adept at hunting, who would love to eat a parrot for lunch. So I grab an old badminton racket from the room (for what I can’t imagine… what was I really going to do  lob the parrot out the window?), cautiously open the door and run through the house, swoop up my felines and throw them into the bedroom, because the last thing I want is to have to call someone and say their precious pet has become cat food.

With the cats out of the way, I now have to figure out what the jail to do with this parrot. I have no idea what to do, but I knew I had to do something. I collect myself – barely – and open the door and go outside. The parrot sees me, and I see it, and it starts to make noises, clicking noises, human noises. I crouch down on the ground so that I wouldn’t appear quite so scary or big to this little parrot walking its way across the kitchen tiles towards me, because it is then I realise that this poor thing is just as frightened and bewildered as I am. I sit cross legged on the tiles. It says “hello” to me a few more times, wobbles over to the water bowl I have down for my cats, and takes a long, long drink of water. It even sniffs the cat chow but decides against a snack. I put out my hand slowly, fingers cupped under so not to intimidate it, and it walks over, eyeing me cautiously, and reaches out with its little beak and gives my finger a tiny squeeze. Not enough to hurt me, but just enough to make contact. 

It is a very beautiful bird, with stunning bright green feathers, with dashes of red, yellow, and orange on its chest and wing tips. It is like the green parrots I always admire in the wild, the ones flying around in large numbers by the Savannah, sitting peacefully with their partners up in a tree. As I admire the parrot’s markings I suddenly feel very sympathetic towards it – it has been lost in the wild, with no home, nobody to talk to, and although I cannot imagine what a bird thinks, I can tell that it is very happy to be interacting with a human. By now I am feeling utterly and completely foolish for having such a fit over something as harmless as a parrot. I mean, think about it. I am a grown woman, five feet six inches tall, a hundred and…. um… heh heh, like I was saying, a grown woman, and the parrot is a little over a foot tall and probably not even as heavy as my foot.

Yet this tiny parrot had scared me out of my mind, imagining it to be some sort of major threat to my safety. Of course, it is not every day that a parrot dive bombs you on your front porch, but still I felt quite silly for letting fear get the better of me. Eventually I got hold of the contact number on the missing notice, the owners came for the parrot (whose name was Kiki, by the way, who happily munched on a sweet pepper while we waited) and that was the end of that. But the attack of the parrot taught me a very valuable lesson about human behaviour and human instinct, and why we must be very careful how we react to new and scary situations. I remember a quote from the movie Minority Report that I found very fitting: “At the end of the day, every species on this planet is concerned with one thing and one thing alone – its own survival.”

For all our advancements and technology and “superior” intellect, we still react like animals out of fear, because we fear what we cannot control, we fear what we are not familiar with, and we try to destroy what we fear (even if all you have is a badminton racket!) because we think it is trying to destroy us. Humans are still just mammals, advanced mammals at that, but nonetheless we live in the same world with all kinds of unpredictable creatures, both human and non human, and fear is an innate reaction. This is perhaps why we are so quick to fight, so quick to reach for the gun, so quick to slap anybody that threatens us. When you let fear and instinct get the better of you, perfectly rational people can find themselves doing some very, very irrational things.