The Morning Morpheus Scalped His Brother

One of the things nobody prepares you for with peachicks is the picking.

They pick at everything.

Not casually. Not occasionally. Obsessively. If something exists and it is slightly different from the thing next to it, a peachick will find it, examine it, and attempt to remove it from the surface of the earth.

A loose thread on your shirt. A seam on a shoe. A freckle on your hand.

Morpheus was especially gifted in this department. He would zero in on a freckle on my hand — a personal offense, clearly. Not a peck. A project. A deliberate, focused attempt to correct what he felt was a manufacturing defect in my skin.

I’d learned early on with Han and Leia that this habit doesn’t stop at inanimate objects. They’d pecked at each other’s faces so relentlessly that I’d added mirrors to the brooder — instant virtual flock, instant calm. Han was especially committed. He’d park himself in front of the mirror for hours — finally, someone who understood him.

But mirrors only solve the boredom problem. They don’t solve the “something new just appeared on my sibling and I need to investigate it immediately” problem.

The Crime Scene

One morning, I checked on the little ones and found Neo looking as though he’d lost a fight he didn’t know he was in.

The tiny crest feathers that had just started to emerge — barely there, brand new, the first sign of the bird he was becoming — were gone.

Just gone.

In their place: a small bloody spot on the top of his head.

And another one on his neck.

I stared at him.

I stared at Morpheus.

Morpheus stared back with the vacant, cheerful expression of someone who had absolutely no memory of committing a crime.

He had scalped his own brother.

Not out of malice. Not out of aggression. Out of pure, unrelenting curiosity. New feathers had emerged. They were different. They were there. And Morpheus could not leave them alone until they weren’t.

The Day I Turned My Bird Purple

I scooped up Neo and brought him inside.

He was fine. Annoyed, maybe. But fine. The spots were small, and he was more confused about the sudden change of scenery than bothered by the tiny wounds.

In my first aid kit — the one I’d been assembling since the morning I lost Luke — I had Blue-Kote. It’s a gentian violet antiseptic with a dauber applicator, designed for exactly this kind of thing. You dab it on. It disinfects. It discourages further picking because the taste is terrible.

It also turns everything it touches a vivid, unapologetic purple.

I dabbed Neo’s head. I dabbed his neck.

And then I stood back and looked at what I’d done.

My tiny yellow chick now had two enormous purple splotches — head and neck — as if a very small graffiti artist had tagged him while I wasn’t looking.

This was not the look I was going for.

And now I had a new problem: I was about to put this freshly purple bird back in with Morpheus, the chick who could not resist anything that looked different.

Two giant purple spots on an otherwise yellow bird?

That was a neon sign that read: PICK HERE.

I held my breath and put him back.

Morpheus looked up.

Looked at Neo.

Looked at the purple spots.

And went back to doing whatever he’d been doing before.

Nothing.

Zero interest.

It turned out Morpheus had taken a nap while Neo was being treated. And whatever had happened before the nap had been wiped clean.

This wasn’t object permanence issues. This was ADHD in a three-ounce package. If you could distract him long enough — or in this case, wait for the system to reboot on its own — the obsession reset.

Sounded a lot like me, honestly.

From that point on, this became my primary Morpheus management strategy. You didn’t need to outthink him. You just needed to outwait him. If you could survive the current fixation, a nap or a meal or a sufficiently interesting bug would eventually clear the queue.

It wasn’t elegant. But it worked.

The Porch Show (Now With a Live Studio Audience)

So our days settled into a rhythm.

All four birds on the porch. The Morpheus Hour every night at sunset. Andrea Bocelli drifting through the screens while Morpheus performed his nightly duet with a man who did not know he had a co-star.

And every single day, Bill and Ted claimed their front-row seats.

Our two cats had been using that screened-in porch for nine years. It was their domain. Their kingdom. Their personal sunbeam collection agency.

Then I turned it into a chick nursery.

They could have been resentful. They could have staged a protest.

Instead, they discovered they had been given the greatest gift a house cat can receive: live television.

Every morning, Bill and Ted stationed themselves in the chairs by the glass porch doors and watched.

All day.

Sunrise to sunset.

Not the way cats watch birds outside — that focused, twitchy, predatory tracking. This was different. Two retirees who had found a channel they didn’t know existed and could not stop watching.

The cats watched them eat. Watched them flap. Watched them chase each other in circles for no reason. Watched Morpheus have opinions. Watched Neo follow those opinions to their logical and usually chaotic conclusion.

Every night when the Morpheus Hour kicked off and the whistling started, Bill and Ted conveniently found somewhere else to be.

They had lost their porch. But they’d gained sunup-to-sundown entertainment.

Fair trade, apparently.