Well This Isn’t One You See Everyday

I first heard its unique and loud call from inside the house and after the third sounding came to the bay window in the dining room to see what I could see, which was nothing because it clammed up for whatever reason. Then I saw the way the afternoon sunlight was hitting the few remaining suflowers and I decided to bust out the DSLR to more properly immortalize them…

And while I was moving around Coyote Corner doing just that the bird called again almost from directly over my head in the tree overhanging the sunflowers, and there it was (click it for the bigger picture):

Much larger than your average parakeet, it looked more cockatiel than conure, but I’ve never seen so colorful a cockatiel. And unlike the skittish flocks of yellow-chevroned parakeets that can often be found flitting noisily about the place, this bird had no problem being in such close proximity to me, leading me to think it either was or had been a pet. And when I mimicked its tweets we even got something of a dialogue going on, at least until it tired of the dead-end conversation and flew westward out of the tree directly into the setting sun where I lost sight of it, but later heard it tweeting from somewhere across the street.

So if anyone’s missing a unique looking and sounding bird or knows of someone who is, it was last seen and heard yesterday afternoon south of Sunset and east of Silver Lake Boulevard here in Silver Lake.