Koki Kaikai

"Koki kaikai, koki kaikai," all day long our cockatoo would say that phrase over and over. It means "cockatoo wants to eat" in Pigeon English. We got the koki (cockatoo) from a missionary that was moving back to the US. I guess he really wasn't thinking when he taught the koki that phrase. This coincidentally was kokis the name, Koki Kaikai. Not too catchy, but it kind of made sense if you were around the cockatoo for more than five minutes.

We kept Koki Kaikai in the chicken coop which obviously no longer had chickens in it. We went from eating eggs to eating chickens and eventually ran out. Koki Kaikai was a lot of fun. He would fly around the village but he would always come back and he liked to walk back and forth across your shoulders or go up on your head. He never bit or scratched. We really enjoyed owning him until he started to develop some bad habits.

I guess he started to get bored in the chicken coop and so one day he started cutting a hole in the wire and flew out of the coop. He immediately went to the nearest electrical wire and started peeling the plastic coating off. The wires were only 12 volts so they weren't dangerous, and he wasn't really hurting anything until he started clipping the wires. One day we went to turn on our radio and it didn't work. We thought it was broken some how until we went downstairs and found Koki Kaikai chewing on the wire. One of his other favorite things to do when he flew the coop was pull clothes pins off the line and let the clothes fall to the ground. One day he got out and clipped our neighbors radio antenna right in two. While we were on vacation for a couple weeks, our neighbor Mr. Nichols was feeding Koki Kaikai when he flew at him and bit him in the face.

That was the last straw. We decided we had to get rid of him before he caused major problems with our neighbors or actually damaged something that was irreparable. We didn't want to give him to the tribal people because we knew he would probably just end up on their dinner table, so we gave him to an Anglican priest who lived about a half hour away (hiking, not driving).

The priest really like the bird, but he couldn't get it to stay with him. Koki Kaikai kept trying to fly home to his coop that he had previously spent so much time trying to get out of. In the end the priest decided to clip Koki Kaikai's wings until he got used to his new home. One day the bird was wandering around the yard and a very large very hungry pig grab him and ate him.

Who ever heard of a bird getting eaten by a pig? Does this sound normal to you...no? ...me neither.