Dogs are considered unclean in Islam, there are cats with some loose affiliations to homes and families, but they’re mostly feral. Here in Indonesia, the pet of choice is, if you guessed from the title, birds. Small birds, big birds, loud birds, quiet birds, ugly birds, pretty birds. A menagerie of winged creatures bound by small wooden cages in people’s homes. More than a fifth of households have them, which (conservatively) comes out to around 2.6 million birds in captivity in the five biggest cities, according to a 2005 study. (Thanks, Nat Geo).
So, you see a bird, flying around, doing it’s thing. What do you do with an animal that is biologically adapted to fly anywhere from 15 to 600 miles in one day? I’ll tell you what you do, you put it in a cage and hang it up in your house. My bapak, or host dad, is a big bird guy. He feeds them, and cleans their cages if he feels like it. Birds are very popular here, and if you’ve ever driven past an Indonesian bird market, you’d believe it.
One time there was a bowl of live maggots casually sitting in my kitchen. Bird food. Another time my bapak had something in his hands that he was feeding the birds with. I asked him what it was, he proceeded to put one on my shoulder. It was a dead bug *lol*. For a few months there was this one bird, it was orange and black, that I hated. It sounded like a wining baby, and wouldn’t stop moving in its cage, flying in the box it lived in, flapping it wings. Whenever I came within several feet of it, it would freak out and rattle the cage, swinging it so hard that it looked like it was going to come loose and smash onto the floor. I cannot emphasize how annoying this bird was. One time I woke up, walked through the kitchen to get to the bathroom, and it was dead, lying there in it’s cage.
Right now there are four birds outside, hung in the front terrace. Then there’s usually one in the guest room, when you first walk into the house. Then there’s another in the living room, conveniently feet away from my bedroom. Then there’s usually another one or two in the kitchen. Because what else do you do when your kitchen is already full of dirty pots, pans, dishes, with food lying out, flies scattered about, vegetables on the floor and a lingering stench penetrating not only your nostrils, but your pores, clothes, and moral fiber? You put a bird cage in it, and you refuse to clean the cage until the smell of bird shit gets so bad you cannot enter the kitchen without retching. Anyway….here’s some of the birds!
This one just looks like a NYC pigeon but I have been told is a mourning dove. Indeed it sounds really pretty, and for some reason was hung up on my neighbor’s roof today:
This one was really annoying when I took a picture of it. It’s really loud and always is spazzing out in its cage:
This is the only bird that I like. Her name is Pikachu. That’s not actually what my family named it, it just reminds me of the Pokemon character. Also she's quiet and minds her business in her little cage. She's also really cute when she sleeps:
The other ones are irrelevant.
That was a post about the birds in my house. Thanks for reading this whole thing and I hope you have a great week!
