My sweet little budgie, Belle, passed away yesterday morning at 7am. She was 3 ½ years old, which is fairly young for a bird, but had been sick throughout her whole life.
She was named after the princesses in two of my favourite Disney movies- Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, and she was beautiful.
She was white with rather unusual black and blue markings, and I always thought she looked a bit like an abstract painting. She was tiny, even for a budgie, but what she lacked in size she made up for by being louder, braver, and crazier than either of my other birds. She was also the most naturally tame, I barely had to work to train her at all- she sat on my shoulder and climbed on my finger from pretty much the first day, after seeing Missy and Valentine do it.
She loved to sing as loud as possible, hang upside down for no apparent reason whatsoever, and explore- she was one of those creatures who would climb into anything, eat anything, love anyone. She got along well with all the other pets and was quite well behaved when she needed to be handled for all the diagnostic tests she underwent in her life.
For the first few years she saw a lot of Vets, in our attempts to figure out why she was always so sick. They gave her a bunch of treatments, some of which helped temporarily, some of which never did anything for her. They never figured out what was wrong. We changed her environment completely, changed her diet, tried everything.
Eventually we had to make the decision to ‘let go and let God’, as long as she was comfortable and happy. She had almost a year of good life after that, and every time we thought she was close to the end, she surprised us and bounced back. This time she didn’t. She died just after I woke up yesterday morning. She was singing and preening the night before, so we never got to the point of having to choose euthanasia. She looked peaceful and didn’t seem to suffer. We buried her under the Mulberry tree in our yard, a tree often filled with birds and purple flowers. Purple was her colour- mainly because Missy hates purple, and being the little sister, she got all the hand me downs that Mis didn’t want. I miss her very much and it will take a while to get used to seeing two cages instead of three, but I know we were blessed to have her and probably lucky she lived as long as she did, under the circumstances.
Hopefully she’s in heaven now, playing with Opi and all the other animals and people we loved and lost.
