I never chose to have budgerigars (or any other birds) as pets.

Nonetheless, two budgies came into the household... when? Ah, good question. I really can't be sure now. There was Bluebell, a boy with a massive amount of personality (stick your finger against the cage and he'd come over and peck at it), and Bella, a less expressive but somewhat louder female.

Late in 2020 we had some air conditioning guys in to give quotes. One of them was a bird guy; he had owned birds since he was a kid. "That's a big cage for just one bird", he said. "Ah, yes, about that...", I replied.

A few weeks earlier I had noted that Bluebell seemed to be breathing very heavily. Also, he didn't seem to be eating very much. And there were other disturbing signs. Our regular vet, the one that cares for the wolf and the tabby tiger, no longer had a bird specialist. Somehow the name of a specialist vet named Cannon and Ball (no I am not kidding) came up, and Bluebell was taken out of his cage and sent there.

Unfortunately, he didn't return. The vet found that he was massively underweight due to having a cancerous growth which was blocking his digestive system. The poor little sod was starving to death, and wasn't finding it easy to breathe either which accounted for his mouth (beak?) breathing and heavy breathing that I had noticed.

"Birds in the wild know that if they show any signs of sickness or weakness, they'll get eaten", the air conditioning guy said. "By the time you know there's a problem, it's too late", he shrugged.

I had never taken a proper shot of Bluebell. Maybe, possibly, he's in the background of one or two testing shots in the hundreds of thousands of photos that I've accumulated in the last couple of decades. But he exists now only as an increasingly fading memory in a handful of minds. Whether even Bella remembers him half a year after his passing... who can know? One would think that sharing a cage with someone for years would ingrain them into one's memory, but birds have a very different mind, one which survival instincts have probably forced into looking at the now rather than the then.

I try to make sure that I go over to chat to Bella at least once every day now that she has nobody else to keep her company. Sometimes she responds, sometimes she flies to the back of her cage.

I had been thinking of doing a shot of Bella to ensure that there was something to remember her by when her time comes, even if it's something as meagre as this humble gallery. The problem is that she assumes that she's under attack if you ever reach into her cage.

In reality my original shot was a macro of the autumn sun on one of the flowers in the front yard, but I had put Bella onto the balcony because she does seem to like being in the open air. I decided to point the macro lens at her on the off chance and hey presto... the bars between us optically vanished. It also allowed me to read the band on her leg which shows the number "16"; possibly her year of birth. Budgies live 5 to 10 years in captivity so she may have a way to go yet. But just in case, this shows that "Bella was here".