This story comes from May, 2015, when I worked as a service technician for an alarm service company.
I went to a home where the alarm system had been installed just the previous day; it needed a little tuning up, probably because the installer had been in a hurry. The customer was a woman about my age, whose husband had recently died, and she lived alone in this house well north of town. She wasn’t quite alone; also in residence were two or three dogs, and a multitude of caged birds. (“But no cats,” she told me. “I’m allergic to cats.”) She made some apology for the noise, which I assured her was unnecessary, though it was impressively loud.
As I worked, checking on batteries and system programming, I was serenaded by a variety of sounds–not just barks and squawks, but also random voice mimicry from some of the birds with that talent. I heard a few voices, one of them clearly an imitation of my customer, as well as remarkable renditions of other sounds, such as power tools and car horns.
At one point there came the very clear sound of a stern male voice shouting “Quiet!” The birds continued their banter, but I froze for a moment when I realized what I was probably hearing. This happened two or three more times while I was there.
When I was finishing up, I asked the customer if she had some neighbors next door who were working in their garage, because their seemed to be voices in conversation nearby. “No, that’s all birds,” she said. Sometimes you hear my husband’s voice.” I said nothing. “It’s odd,” she continued, “but they don’t imitate him when I’m alone, but only when other people are here.”
“Maybe that’s their way of offering you protection,” I said, immediately wondering whether I shouldn’t have done so. There was no reply.
As I drove away a few minutes later, I pondered the idea of hearing the voice of a departed loved one echoed in a pet bird. Some people put up photos of those they’ve lost, maybe as a way of keeping some sort of presence going during the hard transition. Would that bird serve a similar purpose? How long would it keep evoking her late husband’s voice? Some of those birds can live for decades. Would she get accustomed to it, maybe even tune it out, or would she eventually find that she must part with the bird and silence that voice forever?
