And then there was Dumpling

So the big question on everybody’s lips is “who is Dumpling?” Unfortunately I can’t tell you. He appeared pretty much out of nowhere and no matter how much we interrogate him and threaten to take his swing away, he refuses to tell us anything about himself.

What I can tell you is that he doesn’t speak English, he might be a scholar and he's definitely homicidal.

Here’s his story:

About three weeks ago, just moments after Mark and I had left Block 130 to spend a few beautiful hours skipping through the streets of Munich,  I spotted a tiny white hopping dot on the pavement.

The dot was irritably chirping to itself while pecking at the concrete in search of birdseed. When I crouched down next to it, it looked at me, let out a weary chirp of surprise and then hopped over to my sandal to check whether I wasn’t storing delicious seeds somewhere inside it.

Mark and I exchanged looks of AWWWW BIRDIE and stretched out our fingers to triumphantly save the bird from its concrete distress. But rather than come along nicely like a good little bird should, he got all HOLY SHIT GIANTS! GIANTS ARE AFTER ME! and launched into a panicked flutter. 

I don’t know what sane, balanced individuals do in these situations, but I’ll tell you what we did: we got on all fours, fixed our eyesight on the pavement (so as not to appear threatening) and slowly crawled forwards, cooing about birdseed and grapes. In hindsight, this would have been terrifying.

This is precisely how Simon found us when he came jaunting up our street. However since he knows us quite well, and is quite insane himself, he didn’t act surprised. In fact he obediently froze in his spot when we whispered something along the lines of SMALL BIRD. TAME. CATCH. GRAPE. DON’T MOVE!

We clearly had things under control.  But the happy ending wherein the bird finally gave in to our theatrical charms and we all lived happily ever after in a castle made of grapes and birdseed, didn’t happen.

Why, you ask?

Because one of our crazy toothless neighbours (and I say “one of” because we live next door to a housing project that is brimming with shady, unsavoury characters with mental problems and questionable dental habits) decided to interject. Apparently we looked so incompetent that this particular 60-year-old trackie-dack-wearing  individual took it upon himself to come to our aid…with a garbage bag.  

So picture this: Mark and I both low to the ground, still talking softly to the pavement. Simon frozen in his spot, watching us and offering useful bird-catching tips, and a crazy toothless man skipping around us all, waving a garbage bag around like a butterfly net.

This was too much for the bird.

Too much.

He gathered up all of the energy he could muster and flung himself into the path of an oncoming car out of sheer embarrassment.

Don’t worry this story doesn’t end badly.

Mark, Simon, Crazy Random and I all watched in horror as the car approached, but then the bird decided that getting smooshed into a bird paste was just the slightest bit worse than witnessing our four-man show, so he came back.

We got right back to it and after a few more minutes he gave up on life entirely and allowed me to catch him and carry him up to our apartment.

This is where we encountered problem number two: what the expletive do you do with a small frightened bird in an apartment without a cage? (Answer: let it out and spend the next two days frantically cleaning up after it, thereby convincing it that you are indeed insane and also possibly have some sort of disturbing stalker poo fetish).

So there we were - no birdseed, no cage and one tired, pissed-off bird flapping about threatening to cut us in our sleep.

 

We looked up some information about his kind (a Zebra Finch, native to Australia), slapped together a poster announcing we had saved him, found a box and even managed to buy some birdseed at a local supermarket.

Of course the small bird didn’t want any part of it. The small bird was all “I am not eating anything these freaks give me” and instead drank some water, screamed at us, wedged himself between the VCR and our DVD collection and went to sleep. 

His owners never rang – probably because he had pecked them to death, so we eventually bought a cage with a swing and named him “Dumpling”.

So you see, we don’t really know much about him at all. Except that he’s plotting our imminent demise. He lets us know by sharpening his beak in a menacing, deliberate manner.