She was Cajun's successor. A few months after he died, during the summer of 1989, I placed an order for another bird with a breeder near Gainesville, FL when the babies were just hatching. Six weeks later, after finishing up some business in Gainesville, I stopped at the aviary and picked Tinker out from a half-dozen other babies. She seemed particularly energetic and curious, as well as hungry, taking a hand feeding from me -- a total stranger -- quite readily.
Tinker lived for only five years. The last three were not entirely pleasant for her due to a problem from feather picking and self-mutilation. The feather picking started when she was two years old and we're pretty well convinced that this was due to a hormonal influence. Over night she had plucked her chest bare of feathers, piling nearly all of them into a food cup. That, we thought, must have been her nesting urge talking. She was initially treated with Depo-Provera, which stopped the feather- picking in its tracks but made her so fat (155 grams) that she nearly died. And that was only after one shot. She was due for another, but I never took her in for it. At any rate, it did stop the feather-picking for a year.
The problem worsened with time, unfortunately, and grew into mutilation where she would literally chew holes in her flesh (once through her hip, exposing muscle and bone and another time through her neck, breaking open an air sac and exposing blood vessels in her neck). We made more than a few emergency trips to her veterinarian to have her -- literally -- sewn back together.
In early 1995 she began having problems with coughing, mostly when she tried to eat, seizures, and a bone infection. She died during a bone biopsy that our vet was performing, trying to determine the cause of the infection. A necropsy found that there were streaks of dead tissue in her heart, which was then too weak to endure the anesthesia.
The vet has, since then, come to the conclusion that Tinker may have had an infection of Staphylococcus epidermidis, a drug-resistent, flesh-eating bacterial strain that, in birds, has been associated with brain, bone, and heart infections as well.
In her last month of life, Tinker had completely lost the use of one leg because of the bone infection, yet she adapted amazingly well to her disability. She got around by hopping on her good leg, sliding her beak along the surface as an extra support. When she sat on my shoulder, she'd cling to the neckline of my t-shirt to keep her balance as I moved around. I offered countless times to hold her, but she would struggle out of my grasp, insisting on returning to her long-held shoulder perch.
I have never seen an animal endure as much as this poor creature did
and still maintain a sweet and happy disposition. I would like to think
that that's what comes of being well-loved. Her attitude seemed to be,
"I can endure this because I know that I am loved and wanted."