In 1988 Birdy (the Gold-Capped conure) and I moved up to the house in the Santa Cruz mountains.  It didn't take long for me to realize that Birdy wouldn't be happy being alone all day while I was at work.  I was always keeping my eyes open for bird related things on the different USENET groups (what the Internet was before the Web). Almost immediately I saw a posting about a conure in need of a good home.  I emailed and went over to see what was going on.
When I got there I found a little Half-Moon conure living on carpeted stairs in the middle of the living room.  He didn't really have a name, but the first sounds I heard him make was "sqweee-ah" so Squeek (or Squeeky) it was.
He walked with a limp because is mother had bitten off a couple of toes.   This got worse later in life after Squeek crash-landed on a cockatoo cage and he got a warning-nip on his leg.



Squeek was a very nippy and pissy little guy that would sit on your shoulder but bite at your hands.  It took a week of blowing in his face to get him to understand that nipping and slamming his beak into my hand was not cool.  One look in his eyes and you could tell that he thought it was some kind of exciting game for him.  I also found out that he was big into rhythm.  Anything with a big beat got him super excited.  Instead of letting him slam around on me, I started drumming on his cage with chopsticks. Then when he was totally worked up he'd let out a loud "YEAH YEAH" - that's when I'd let him have the chopstick and he'd grab it and smack it around the top of his cage.  Big loud fun for a big little bird.



Once Squeeky started to come out of his shell it became apparent that he had two distinct personalities - Dr. Squeeky and Mr. Spike.  Dr. Squeeky was mild mannered, skittish and constantly making short "squik" sounds.  Then there was Mr. Spike, who acted like a drunken sailor - picking fights, slamming his beak around, touching his shoulder (which, for some reason, meant that he is an incredible bad-ass) and mumbling almost-recognizable words like a crazy street person.



Lucky for me, he didn't really want to fight - he just wanted to let everyone know how HUGE he really is.  And huge he was.

Squeeky immediately glommed onto Birdy.  Birdy was happy to have someone to hang out with, but I could tell that he wasn't sure what to do with his new Best Friend Forever.  Birdy would fly over to me and Squeek would be right behind him, making little worried sounds as he hovered around looking for a place to land.



He was always the first bird to call out to you when you got home.  He'd do his two-note "PEE pee!" call (kind of like the first two notes of the Jeepers Creepers song).  We would whistle back to him and he'd follow up with a big "Hay-low" or a loud exaggerated kissy sound.



Then he figured out how to use the cage to make noise. He'd grab the bars of the cage with his beak and pluck them very hard and very fast - "pingpimgpingpingpingping YEAH YEAH!"



- Or he'd start laughing in a way that he had to have picked up in his former life "heh heh heh heh heeeeeeeeeh heh heh" - stretching it out like he's straining for breath.  That had us in tears from laughing so hard.



Squeek's life was peachy, sticking to either Birdy or me, until Aki came along.  Aki, a baby Gold-Capped conure, joined us in 1989, right before the Loma Prieta earthquake.



This is the exact order of things - Aki on one side of Birdy and Squeek on the other.
Everything went pretty smoothly until Aki got older, then Birdy would fly back to the night cage and get all "nesty" with Aki.  That started to leave Squeek by himself.





That was when Squeek turned into my Best Friend.  While Birdy and Aki would be off messing around, Squeek would be sitting on my shoulder, sleeping, preening my beard, or playing with my ear.  After a while he started to spend every evening on top of my head.  I would feel him plop down on my head and fall asleep.  I had a stiff neck from holding my head still so he wouldn't fall off.



Squeek loved to sit up there and watch as I worked on the computer - even on a hot summer night.



Even though Squeek wanted to be cuddly, he never got to be ok with being held, like Birdy.  It made things hard when he would start slipping on his gimpy feet and I couldn't reach out and catch him without him getting upset.
Aside of that, he was great at expressing affection and whatever oppinions came to mind.

Many years later, after the arrival of The Lovebirds, the move to Washington, and Aki's premature death, Squeek had Birdy entirely to himself again.  The phrase "stuck with a valuable friend" is like Birdy and Squeek.  Squeek was never more than a foot away from Birdy.

Squeek never stopped being a strange and crazy little guy.



When Birdy died in the summer of 2009, Squeek took it very hard.  It took him a long time to accept that Birdy was gone and not just off in another part of the house.  After a while he started hanging out with the flock of lovebirds. He wasn't accepted by them, but he seemed amused by the drama that was taking place all around him.

Squeek coined these "words" -
- Diddleh = Yummy!  Feep, Momma of the lovebirds, picked that word up and used it in the exact same way, except that she added a little shake of the head to go along with it.  She passed it on to the flock. Now everyone uses Squeek's Diddleh word when they come across something good or tasty!

- "YEAH YEAH" = Wonderful!  Again, Feep picked this up, but only the females lovebirds use it. For some reason boys aren't allowed.  It's so cute hearing the hens say YEAH YEAH - except in their tiny scaled-down voices.

November 4th, 2009 we got home in the early evening.  I opened the door to the bird room and heard Squeek making a distressed squeaking sound.  I found him on the floor having a horrible seizure.  I knew that he was in very bad shape and wasn't going to be alive for much longer.  Even though he died twenty minutes later, it was torture for him. It was awful not being able to do anything for him.  We cried the whole night.



Later that night, as I was going to bed, there was an empty 2 liter bottle that I was putting in the recycling.  It felt so wrong putting it in the recycling without first bringing it in to Squeek and crushing it up in front of him.  He loved the crunching squeaking sounds that smushing plastic bottles make.  It's like a roller coaster for him - a little scary, loud and fun. He'd run up to the mouth of the bottle while I was crunching it and bite at it, click really fast with his beak and YEAH YEAH when he couldn't hold it in anymore! Only then was it ok for me to put the bottle in the recycling.
We miss you so much, Squeek.