Grandma Betty, bless her cotton socks, decided at the ripe old age of eighty-two that she needed a roommate. Not for company, mind you. She was perfectly content with her collection of porcelain kittens and reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.” No, she needed a roommate to help with the squirrels. Those pesky squirrels had been raiding her bird feeder with alarming efficiency.
“It’s an outrage!” she declared to her bewildered grandson, Timmy. “They’re brazen! They’re bold! And they’ve got better manners than some of the children I see these days.”
Timmy, who was more accustomed to video game battles than squirrel warfare, suggested a scarecrow. Grandma Betty scoffed.
“A scarecrow? Timmy, dear, I’m not trying to win a prize for garden artistry. I need a deterrent, something…fierce.”
And so, Grandma Betty acquired her new roommate: a magnificent, if slightly grumpy, macaw named Captain Squawk. Captain Squawk, it turned out, was not only a master of mimicry (he’d learned to perfectly imitate Grandma Betty’s delighted shriek upon winning a game of Scrabble) but also a fearsome guardian of the bird feeder. The squirrels, after one particularly terrifying encounter involving a deafening squawk and a near-miss with a surprisingly accurate peanut shell projectile, vanished completely.
One sunny afternoon, Timmy visited Grandma Betty. He found her sitting peacefully on her porch, watching Captain Squawk.
“Grandma,” Timmy asked, “how’s Captain Squawk working out?”
Grandma Betty smiled, a twinkle in her eye. “Oh, wonderfully, dear. He’s kept the squirrels away, and he even helps with the crossword puzzles… although he does have a rather strong preference for the word ‘Squawk.’” She paused, then added with a mischievous grin, “He also seems to have developed a rather unhealthy obsession with my collection of porcelain kittens. Turns out, he thinks they’re remarkably good at mimicking squirrels.”
