Gone Fishin’

Won Over By Reality

By Tim Bayer

BRIGHTON New York—(Weekly Hubris)—1/28/2013—The previous post in this space was about the astonishing flight characteristics seen during a model aircraft competition. This week, we are dealing with flight by association – the association being that this post is about a bird, and birds fly.

Quite a few years ago, I stopped by a friend’s house to visit. While we were chatting, the phone rang in the other room, but neither Bob nor his wife, Sue, got up to answer it. This was in the early 1980s, before answering machines were in wide use, so phone calls were usually answered. Hence, it really caught my attention when the ringing phone drew absolutely no response.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. Again, no one went into the other room to answer it, so I finally asked: “Why don’t you answer the phone?”

“Oh—that’s just Roscoe,” Bob said.

I knew Bob and Sue had a parrot named Roscoe, so I was caught off guard by the response.

“Roscoe . . . knows how to call you on the phone?” was my somewhat staggered follow-up question.

“Not quite,” Bob said, looking knowingly at his wife. “It all started last week. The phone would ring and one of us would go into the living room, answer it and find no one on the line. Just a dial tone. A little while later, it would ring again and, when it was answered, nothing. First, we thought it was teenagers making prank calls. What was odd, though, was that only the phone in the living room rang. No other extensions in the house.”

“It was Roscoe!” said Sue, “Roscoe mimicking the sound of a ringing phone. Whenever Roscoe’s lonely now, he imitates a telephone ringing because he’s learned that’ll bring someone into his room. Before the phone ruse, Roscoe used to call out using Bob’s voice, ‘Sue, can you come here?’ When I realized what he was up to, and stopped going when he called me, Roscoe switched to the ringing phone.”

The tie-in is this: that story popped into my head when Kris Abbott sent me a video link. Check out the video of this bird “fishing”:

(If you found an entertaining link or video, I would be interested in seeing it. Please let me know: Email: [email protected])