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squatters huddled inside a box.
    Back indoors, I kept replaying the howl through my head until the idea that I had heard it before paid off. I rooted throughmy CDs and found a collection of Malagasy music called
A World Out of Time, Volume 2.
Linda was cleaning birdcages in the dining room when I triumphantly slid the disc into the boom box and hit the play button. Overlapping primate whoops burst forth over a drumbeat.
    â€œWhat is that?” she asked as she filled Howard’s seed dish.
    â€œLemurs,” I announced with a note of triumph in my voice. “Indri lemurs. Native to Madagascar and found nowhere else on the planet.”
    â€œThat’s a sound Dusty would love to copy. We’ll have to start playing it for him.”
    â€œThat’s more or less what I heard in the yard both times,” I said. “Not
exactly
what I heard, but closer than anything else I’ve found.”
    â€œYou could make that sound, couldn’t you, Dusty?” Her parrot was not only adept at dead-on mimicry of our voices but also impersonated electronic appliances, hand claps, creaking doors, and ice cubes falling into a drinking glass. “Maybe you just heard Dusty,” she said.
    â€œDusty? How could it have been Dusty? He hasn’t even heard the lemur calls until this very minute. I haven’t played this CD in years.”
    â€œBut he could have made a sound like that. It could have been Dusty.”
    I retreated upstairs.
    S HIFTING MY SHORT attention span to our gnawed kitchen woodwork, I recalled reading about high-end robotic toys that moved and emitted sounds in response to motion or noise. They seemed tailor-made for discouraging Stanley Sue from venturing into the room. I found the budget version at a store just downthe road. The blue mechanical bird with transparent red crest, wings, and tail feathers resembled a cross between a baby blue jay and a tuna can. The two pairs of eyes hinted at the dual nature of what proved to be a troublesome toy. Red plastic domes the size of quarters bulged from either side of the head where a bird’s eyes ought to be. But a black rectangle up front, just above the yellow beak, contained two more eyes. These were red LEDs that blinked and changed shape from hearts to X’s, depending upon the robot’s mood.
    Waving a small magnetic corncob near the beak was equivalent to feeding the bird, and the automaton expressed its gratitude by chirping “Merrily We Roll Along” or another annoying ditty, accompanied by head swivels, wing flaps, beak snaps, and enthusiastic bowing. A sharp noise near the toy caused a happy twitter, as did waving a hand across the light-sensitive eyes, which I hoped could detect a close encounter with Stanley Sue.
    More than anything else, though, the mechanical bird craved pressure on its crest. Pressing the plastic plume whenever I entered the kitchen kept the toy nattering joyously in response to the piercing chirps, squawks, and whistles from our parrots and parakeets. Failing to press the plume or forgetting to proffer the magnetic corn plunged the bipolar robot into a silent depression so unshakable that no crescendo of noise in the room could lift its spirit.
    This insistence on attention proved to be the toy’s downfall. For nearly two weeks, Stanley Sue stayed in the dining room, well away from the mechanical bird with its repertoire of random-interval song-and-dance routines. My heart soared with hope that her behavior had finally changed. But the robot bird’s behavior had shifted, too. The sadists who had programmed its microchip had decided that every few days it would be fun to have the toycycle through a sullen phase that required intensive plume pressing and magnetic feeding. Otherwise the mechanical bird merely issued a brief grumble in response to stimuli. Frankly, I wasn’t having it. It was one thing to coddle a flesh-and-blood pet; it was quite another to include a plastic bird