I had gone to work, as I did every morning, and I either didn't latch the cage door properly, or she had been reaching through the bars and managed to open the door. But when I came home that night, I found a very exhausted cockatoo who was head-under-her-wing fast asleep on the back of my couch.
This is not a good thing to see, because she is a voracious ripper of all things wood, rubber (like the kind found on remote controls) and plastic. Or anything that can be ripped into tiny pieces, for that matter.
While I was standing, frozen with dread, my cat came skidding around the corner, batting furiously at something. I bent down and picked it up. It was the letter A from my keyboard.
I knew then that whatever was around the corner was bad. Very, very bad.
With heavy feet, I walked down the long hallway and into my living room. It was worse than I thought.
The stuffing in the chair had been pulled out, my ergonomic mouse was in pieces, bills and invoices had been ripped into teeny tiny pieces that rivaled the best shredders on the market, and just about every key from my keyboard had been ripped off and shewn haphazardly in every direction.
I found my camera on the floor, just n front of the book case and marveled in the fact that it was intact. Rubber buttons and all! And, not knowing whether to laugh or cry first, took these two photo's of the mess.
A few days later, I had picked up the developed film and flipping through my photo's I found one that I just didn't remember taking. It was such an odd angle and upon closer inspection of the negatives, it showed up right before I took the two photos above.
Even closer inspection of the camera showed a few nicks out of the rubber ... beak looking nicks.
I'm quite sure that my cockatoo had indeed found the camera and had been settling in to dismantle it, bit by bit, and had, instead, set the auto-photo. The ensuing flash was likely what saved my camera AND caught a culprit in the act of being naughty. Very, very naughty.
The following is a photo of a bad, bad girl!
This happened back in 1999.
She eventually killed the camera.
It's amazing that such a demure little face can unleash such destruction in a few short hours.
