Talking to the birds

by Jorge Santos
(Toronto , Canada)

I went in to a pet store to buy fish and ended up being adopted by this tricolor female kitten, which I named Lola. I remembered later that she was surrounded by bird cages . This is important for the story. I was the only person she related to for two years, she spent all day at home by the back window . When my brother arrived she started to go out with him. He noticed the there would always be a bird around and Lola would go into this strange chatter with these birds. We moved to another house that had a small roof outside my bedroom window, this was on the first floor and next to the roof were two very big maple trees. One day we got home from work and heard cat chatter from the roof. When we went to look what was going on there was at least 20 birds sitting on the trees in defined groups of about five in each group plus two pigeons that lived on the sill on the same roof.
We spent over two hours watch these birds having one fantastic conversation with Lola. This went on every day until we moved again two years later. We think that animals have limited intelligence and I can tell you that they are much more intelligent than we think.