Cocky Bastard

“You’ve been hanging around cars for too long.”

That was Emergency Contact’s response when I straightened up from the kitchen sink and said, “I think someone just ripped my rear vision mirror off!”

What made her say that was the length of the house, the one storey, and the several closed windows between the car in question and me. She was sort of right. I had hung around cars for long enough (and done enough damage to them) to know exactly what a Ford rear vision mirror hitting the cement sounded like; and I had just heard it.

Racing down to the end of the house and peering out the back window, I could see my mirror lying on the ground. Perched on it, admiring himself as he set about removing the plastic lip and backing on the thing, was a rather magnificent and self-satisfied cockatoo.

If you’ve read any of A Grey Area before, you will know that I have a very special relationship with birds. I like them, on the whole I admire them, I find them interesting and they in turn treat me with disregard and contempt. (Documented under the Natural World.) 

I can take this. Not because I have a rugged ego and an unerring sense of universal justice, but because I know that they are usually pea-brains and they are just doin’ what they is born to be doin’.

Not so the cockatoo. Cockatoos are smarter than your average four-year-old child and somehow manage to mix that with the personality of an irascible old man. They are airborne bastards. I love them. But knowing how smart they are meant that I had no hesitation in launching into a stream of choice invective at the white wanker on my mirror, and he knew exactly what I was on about too, because he stopped and gave me one of those looks. Right - gloves off.

I race out of the front and around the side to really give this guy a fright. I’m pretty sure that I can get the mirror back on without the need for adhesives (and therefore retaining its remote-control feature) but if he really takes a shine to the practice, that car is toast.

A cocky with a will can reduce vegetable or mineral to its composite atoms in very short order. They keep themselves in shape by destroying things and this guy was in tip-top nick.

Screaming around the corner to insert the fear of a feathered god into him, cocky takes a leisurely look at me, takes a lazy hop into the air and with two flaps is on a neighbour’s shed, about four centimetres out of my reach but completely within view so that he can really giggle at me. A good squawk, flip of the head and one insulting raise of the crest and he settles in to preen himself with the inherent underlying message - You gotta go inside for lunch sometime buddy. Just leave the mirror somewhere nice, ok?

No. I go inside with the mirror, find a pair of socks I don’t care about, go back out and reattach the mirror. Then I pull the socks over both the rear vision mirrors. Cocky looks at me, impressed; one squawk and he’s gone. 

Nick - 1. Cocky - I’ll give him a half. (It’s only fair. There’s a good chance this animal’s nearly a hundred years old and cunning as a cunning bandicoot who’s just been made Dean of Cunning at Macquarie University. [Apologies Ben Elton])

Pulling the socks on and off the rear vision mirrors before and after driving grows old faster than you can say “You don’t even wash the car, how long is that chore likely to last?” and within the week the socks are back inside and within six hours of them being off I hear a squawk and my mirror hitting the cement. I’m impressed this time. Patience and daring. Such a rare combination.

I’m out round the back yelling and he’s squawking and nodding from the safety of the shed and I realise that it is now Nick - 1. Cocky - 1 ½ .

Seeing that the bird always goes to this one shed, and that he’s been keeping an eye on my car, I wonder if he’s not actually a resident of the house that owns the shed. 

Walking around to the front of the house, I see a nice, old, miniature Italian couple sitting on their front steps, holding hands. I say miniature because they are of that generation where Europeans of five foot height would not be so extraordinary, and with a little Australian weathering and desiccation, you’ve arrived at this compact appearance.

“Hi, uhm, I’m your neighbour out the back and I was just wondering if you own that big cocky who’s sitting on the shed over there?”

The man answers in a booming, accented voice driven by deafness and small contact with Anglos.

“No. Why? … do ya wan’ ‘im!?”

That wasn‘t where I’d predicted the conversation would go, but no matter. “No, I really don’t, thanks. It’s just that he keeps pulling my car apart.”

Tiny old wife joins in, “Ahhhhhhhh, he’s not a bed bird!” After a second, I realise that she quite likes his rascally tendencies. Not bed at all. Bad.

She grabs me by the hand, he leads the way and they give me a noisy and confusing tour of the destruction that the cocky has wreaked. He’s pulled their car apart: both bumpers, the mirrors, the windscreen wipers… to name some of the choicer parts. He’s removed all the window frames from the house, the screens, and countless other weatherboard pieces. They’d ended up putting in double screens fronted by metal bars to hold everything together. 

As I’m gazing in wonder at the wreckage, she yells me a question that sounds like, “Waddya gonna do towim? Just mebee kitchen?”

“Kitchen?” I don’t want to be rude. I hate it when I don’t instantly catch on, but there’s been a lot going on and I’ve been making polite nodding and uh-huh noises through most of it.

“Yeah, maybe kitchen and taik ’im somewhere and led ’im gow. You know. Don killim. His nod a bed bird.”

I promise the old couple that I would never kill him and that if I did get my hands on him, would think about relocating him. I would never bother with that either. Relocating an animal that can fly is daft. If he wants my mirrors, this is going to be a battle of wits (with an unarmed man, sure, but It'll be good for his self esteem).

The challenge never eventuated. I think he saw me doing the un-Australian dobbing thing (in his cocky mind was probably some monologue that went like, “Well, now you’ve gone and involved Mr and Mrs Pushover, pal. That’s taken all the fun out of it“) and he never did it again.

Not long after, I saw him up the road with parts of shiny Beemer in his beak. I nodded to him. He nodded and squawked back, and I politely steered around the bolshy bastard and let him get back to work, smack bang in the middle of the road.

When I told my Dad the story, he relayed it to my half-brother Josef who was 12 or 13 at the time. It inspired this poem from him, and I’m proud to include it in A Grey Area.

The Air Lout

By Josef  

As he spreads his white wings and gives chortling squawk,

With pale yellow armpits and feathers like chalk,

But most impressive of all is his great golden crest,

Which stands erect above all the rest

With gnarly grey fingers he grips onto the frame,

His hooded beak striking again and again,

His beady eyes become really quite savage,

As the car’s side mirror becomes more and more damaged

Can any phrase describe this odd bird?

Whose daily antics are rather absurd?

“Love Him or Hate Him” I think would suffice,

No other saying could be as precise

Can one ever know what goes on in his mind? 

Of the one which many a once quiet street may be lined

Who can say that we may have a lead,

Into the brain of the eater of seed?

Mysterious, Majestic, some say aloof,

But I don’t think anyone will ever have proof,

And many a man still gives a great shout,

At the presence of the beautifully annoying Air Lout.