Ralph the budgie at a bird feeder in Toronto's High Park neighbourhood. Photo: Kenneth Kidd/Toronto Star
It took scarcely any time for Ralph to become the existentialist of the garden, the one prompting all sorts of gauzy questions about the nature and meaning of life.
Why had he come, for starters, and what had been his circumstances?
There was the attraction of food, of course. Even a budgerigar on the lam needs to eat from time to time. But the rest is a mystery, at least in its precise details.
Does Ralph, as we've dubbed him, know that he's an escaped prisoner? Does he realize how perilous this course might become? Does he know about cats?
Wearing his natural garb as a blue budgie would not be Raymond Chandler's idea of inconspicuous, especially when you take up with a disputatious flock of dull-feathered house sparrows.
But maybe Ralph figures it's all worth it, this tempting of fate, his down payment on a newfound freedom and a breeze in his wings.
He certainly never looks worried. Or maybe that's just his noble defiance. The pondering of Ralph, his budgieness, his inner Ralphness, just seems to invite such speculation.
Not that Ralph had much competition for the job of existentialist in residence. The previous and tenuous holders of that post, a family of mourning doves, were always a bit dubious on the intellectual front.
Big-hearted, yes — how else to explain their yeoman nesting in the sleet of March, their baleful moaning. It's enough to crack open the casket of the worst villain's soul. But little grey cells? Not the first thing leaping to mind.
So Ralph, if only by default and the curiousness of his arrival, has become the subject and object of sundry stray thoughts in the garden.
Does Ralph really know much about the house sparrows with whom he's consorting? Another import (from Europe), these sparrows can be a nasty bunch, readily killing smaller birds such as purple martins and stealing their nesting areas.
And don't be fooled by how sparrows readily accept other birds, notably budgies, into their midst. Natural gangsters, the sparrows likely have an ulterior motive. Should a hawk happen along, argues David Bird, a professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, the raptor is apt to target prey that stands out from the crowd.
Does Ralph understand that he's a kind of insurance policy?
Is there, in other words, a reason he sometimes bullies the sparrows, yet at other times perches alone, away from the fray?
And what does Ralph know of the lethal threat that a looming winter represents, that this might be his “summer's lease,” which, as Shakespeare reminds us, “hath all too short a date”?
Does he have a bucket list, and if so, does it include more than eating millet at the feeder and circumnavigating just one part of the garden, from peach to magnolia to cedar to wisteria-laden pergola, where the sparrows tend to muster?
Maybe that's enough, though, a vast universe compared with a tiny cage far from the Australia of his ultimate forebears. Ralph doesn't seem to be the complaining type, his chirps invariably friendly and clear.
“Budgery” is Australian slang for “good,” after all, which, as lives go, is among the better options.
So maybe Ralph is right to hold out, seemingly oblivious to the winter tempests that await. Or perhaps he's heard tell of the wild monk parakeet colony that somehow manages to survive in Chicago, so he, too, will take his chances in a High Park garden.
“It's not impossible,” says Bird, noting how some budgies have even weathered Montreal winters. “But he's got a lot of hungry hawks and cats out there.”
In the whole riddle of Ralphness, however, one certainty has emerged, if a little late, and it has to do with his so-called cere, the area around Ralph's nostrils.
The skin there is light brown rather than blue, and in all things budgie, this turns out to be a telling difference.
Whatever Ralph might be, or might come to symbolize, he's actually more in the nature of a Rachel than a Ralph.