Life With Parrots

I have been living with parrots for almost sixteen years. It started with one bird - a present from my husband for my birthday. We now have seven. My aim in writing this blog is to share the experience - both good and bad. I plan to introduce each of my birds and write about their individual personalities, quirks and exploits. While it takes a serious committment to care for these birds, they bring such wonderfully odd comic releif into my life that I couldn't imagine being without them. They truly are my feathered kids.

Spike is our first baby - a Citron cockatoo. She was about 3 months old when we brought her home in June of 1993, and we knew nothing about caring for a parrot. Neither one of us had ever owned a bird. I couldn't actually see any point in it. When I was a kid the only birds I ever saw were parakeets that stayed in their cages. You just fed them and cleaned up after them - and they certainly didn't talk!

Before bringing Spike home I read everything I could get my hands on about caring for parrots. There were a few magazines available (such as Bird Talk) and they were a great help. There was so much to learn! One of the things we read about was how to tell the sex of a Citron cockatoo. When they are babies their eyes are black. The female's eyes turn brown as they mature - male's eyes stay black. My husband was convinced that ours was a boy (hence the name Spike), and as she passed her first birthday her eyes were still black. But soon after they did turn a brownish color. Unfortuantely by then she had learned to refer to herself as a boy and we were also so used to her being a boy that to this day we still slip up and call her a him.

Here is a picture of our 2nd baby - a pied peach faced lovebird. She was 4 months old when we brought her home early in March 1994. As a baby her back and wings were totally green and with every molt she gets more and more yellow.

Again, we decided this was a boy (some people never learn) and named this one Waldo Wigglesworth. Luckily the name didn't stick and we've always called her Peeper. We discovered she was a girl after we had given her one of those hanging tents called a Birdie Hut or some such thing. She loved it! She would get in there and sratch the bottom or just sit in it peering out at everything. She would be in there for hours. What we didn't realize was that it brought out her nesting instincts. She began laying eggs soon after! Thank God I had read enough to know that they had to be left in the cage until she lost interest in them. If removed the bird will just keep laying and it could result in a calcuim deficiency and even death. Needless to say, that was the last Birdie Hut for her.