My name is Michael “Baldhead” Jacob, better known as, “Mr B,” and I’m a birdman.
This year will be 18 years I’m coming to the bird ground on Queen’s Park East.
I’m from the Quarry Street area, East Dry River. I come from a small, poor family. Eight of us. Was nine of us (but) one did die. Come and lose a sister.
We were a struggling family but we grew up in a kinda way with discipline, no trouble, and try we best. What is yours, is yours, what is not yours, is not yours.
We grew up minding animals: fowl, duck, dog. The only thing we didn’t have home was elephant and tiger.
I always liked bad animals: bad dogs; bad birds. A bad bird is a bird with temperament. Bird that could sing. Me ent want no bird that ent performing.
When I check, I spend real money on birds. Nearly $200,000 in birds! You know how much things I could do with that money now?
Bird keep me out trouble. I was 51 years last year and never get in no trouble. Because I was always with animals. If a fella tell me, “Baldhead, let we go and do so-and-so,” I tell him, “I coming!” And I pick up my bird and gone and leave he there. When he see me and ask, “What happen?” I say, “Boy, I drop to sleep!” Nobody can’t get me involve in nothing.
I tell parents to try to involve their children with animals. So they would be responsible. My old man had bring home two pigeon and build a cub and tell me, “Mind that!” When I come home from Gloster Lodge Moravian School, I had pigeons dancing coming to me, I could tell you who cooing.
Monday to Thursday, I walking the sand track, my birds at the side of me. The only place I don’t carry my birds is the Mas Camp pub. If Mas Camp allow me, I would set up my birds by the bar. Let them sing when the music playing. Mas Camp pub is my third home, when the weekend come.
Savannah is my second home.
I had birds used to real win competition. Prize money in bird is what you want to bet on the animal.
A singing bird worth a piece of money. Men paying $60,000 for a bird!
Birds love children, they love TV, they love anything exciting. As you crack your door, your birds will jump down and watch you, because he want to see this hand coming to the cage to put him outside. My birds know when Sunday in the air: they making noise because they want to hear car running on the Barber-Greene; they want to take in the scenes.
You could see a champion bird from young, in his attitude. When he see a cage, how he coming to the cage, any little thing, he aggressive! I looking right now for a bird with a set of ignorant passion. I don’t know where I would get that because most of the good birds die out.
The singing comes from the bird’s aggression. When you put up two birds on a pole, one might start to sing one-time. The other might test him, then back away. He might be quiet for a while, but he will sing, because he realise he have to perform, to save his owner money!
Birds know what they doing because that’s how you train them! For a bird to perform, you, the owner, have to do what you supposed to do. If you have a dog chain up, first chance he get to go outside, car go lick him down! Because he don’t know how to cross the road! The more you acclimatise your bird to people’s reaction, the better they perform in a galley.
A Trini, for me, is a person that do what he supposed to do, as a Trini. Try to be loving, try to be respectable. And don’t let nobody upset you.
I never left Trinidad. Where I going? It have one-two people trying to have the place upset but I love my country. You will never hear Baldhead get gun down by the Savannah because I not into nobody business. Every man to he own order. I born in the ghetto, I holding my corner.
• Read a longer version of this feature at www.BCRaw.com.