Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Black Crows

The AGP does not like crows. She particularly dislikes the large, noisy ones that arrive in groups. She figures, apparently, that they are not referred to as "a murder of crows" for no reason.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Does your parrot know its address??

I'm late tweaking to this story. But here it is: A Japanese parrot got lost, then found again after it told the vet its name and address (really).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24753683/

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Spoiled? Not me!

The AGP is adopted. She came to live with us just before her 10th birthday.

The cage she came with was nice. It was a King's Cage, and had a playtop with water and food dishes. At her first home, she spent a lot of her time during the day up there. Unfortunately, when we were moving her to our house, the cage came off the truck on the highway and the playtop got smashed to smithereens. Also, it was almost 10 years old and the paint was peeling.

So we bought a used, custom cage from a coworker of the Birdfather's for $150. It was bigger, and prettier. The Birdfather's friend had kept two Amazons in it, so it should have been more than sufficient, space-wise, for the AGP.

So don't ask me why, but barely six months later we bought this huge thing she's in now at a bird show for about half off retail. It's generally described as a 'double macaw', which is kind of silly, if you think about it, for an African Grey whose weight puts her at about the 2nd percentile. She has about 131 cubic feet of usable cage space (I did the math), and it's loaded with perches and toys. It takes up one whole wall of the bird room.

It took two men (the Birdfather recruited the bird's regular sitter from down the street) to put it together, and one woman (that would be me) to read the directions.

She even has a "pond". I bought a big piece of driftwood from the aquarium department at PetSmart and put it on the bottom of her cage, and put the biggest dog's water dish they had next to it. The dish is sort of a muted gold color, not unlike clay. I put river rock in the bottom of the dish and then put about an inch of water in it.

This whole arrangement cost nearly as much as her first cage. She initially expressed a great deal of curiosity in it, but has yet to take a bath in it--or even drink out of it. And the only time she's ever perched on the driftwood was when I once baited it with a huge fresh strawberry. Oh, well.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Parrot Tree

We built the AGP a parrot tree over the weekend, and set it up in the window in the bird room. She wouldn't have anything to do with it until she needed to use it to get away from a misting.