Lessons From Parakeets
My daughter got a pair of parakeets a couple months ago. As school was online in Ecuador all the 2020-2021 school year, they provided entertainment for our family. From the parakeets I learned many lessons the last couple of months.
- Don’t fight over the lettuce.
Our birds came to our house quite little and began to grow some by eating seeds. Soon we discovered that they liked lettuce and my daughter would use up a whole head, feeding them little by little. I love to watch them eat lettuce but was also surprised that they were not good at sharing. With two parakeets and several pieces of lettuce, they often would fight over a small piece, screeching at each other. I observed that this sometimes depicted our family during the last school year (the five of us were working and studying from home). There were small squabbles between our children sometimes as their favorite cookies or chips ran out until we did our weekly shopping. Sometimes I even hid my favorite snack in order to not have to share. As a family, we sometimes behaved like parakeets, making a big deal over a small item that does not feel fair to us. Like the parakeets, we need to learn to share the “lettuce.”
- Trust the hand that feeds you.
My daughter learned some about training parakeets and she learned that to teach the parakeets to trust her, she needed to hand feed them, sitting with her hand full of seeds in the cage. With lots of patience, they began to eat out of her hand. At first, when she introduced her hand they would cling to the wall as far from her hand as possible. But with time, they began to lose their fear and would recognize her as the person who fed them. During a difficult year, administrating our in person school as an online school, we saw God provide for our daily bread and that of our staff over and over and over again. It was a situation that caused fear and anxiety due to change, but we learned to trust God’s hand, that fed and provided for us.
- The world is much bigger than the cage you find yourself in.
We bought the birds with a very small cage. However, by watching online videos, my son and daughter aspired to make them a bigger cage with natural walkways and toys. We had a local carpenter build a wood box and my teenage son spent a lot of time nailing the screen to the outside and helping his sister make natural walkways. When it was finished, the day came recently for the parakeets to leave their new cage and enter their bigger world. My son opened the door and extended a stick into their cage to help them walk into their new world. The parakeets saw this stick as a threat and moved as far away as possible from it. Only after my daughter draped enticing lettuce over it, did the first one wander toward it after over an hour of staying away from the intruder. The first parakeet entered the bigger cage and after finding no threats, the second observed and joined over half an hour later. How much happier the two birds are with more space! I watched this process and wondered what kind of fears in my life and the life of my family keep us from really venturing into all God has for us. Do we take a possible opportunity as an intruder? What do we need to do to let go of these fears?
There are lessons we all can learn from parakeets!!
