Parrots

{Pretty}

The spoils of a 50% off sale at a local nursery that now inhabit my windowsill. I had been hoping to expand my indoor garden for a while, so I responded eagerly to the billboard outside advertising the sale. While I planned on bringing home one or two, somehow I brought home four. Hey, discounts that deep only come around in January, right? Carpe diem!

I love the furry rhizomes that slip over the edge of the plant’s pot, and give the Rabbit Foot Fern a name almost as charming as the foliage. Maria has a different idea, however, and has dubbed this my “tarantula plant.”

{Happy}

I’m on the countdown to a trip out to visit my family’s new home. I’ll also get to meet my youngest sister, born about three months ago at the beginning of November, just three weeks after the family transplanted from Midwest to the hometown of the California gold rush.

{Funny}

My feathered friend Gamgee, who came all the way from Virginia on Delta airlines last October to be my friend. A true people parrot, there’s no shenanigan he won’t devise in order to get some attention from me. He’s just getting in some new brighter plumage on his face, and will be shedding his duller baby feathers over the next few months.

{Real}

This morning, I wanted to take off my coat and shout, ‘spring!!!’ That’s what 30 degrees with sun feels like after shivering through -5 degree mornings.

 

~ {pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

The trip went smoothly, and now I have my birds! The male is on the perch and the female on the side.(You tell them apart by the red feather on the male’s chest, and the female’s more streamlined appearance.) The female says some words, including hi, hello, watcha do’in, come here, uh-oh, whoops, and meow, along with an assortment of beeps and whistles. Uh-oh and whoops are even on cue, such as when she drops a seed to the floor of the cage! I want to go look at them all the time, but I am forcing myself to spend only short times in their room so they can be comfortable enough to breed for me.

In the last week of December I sold my last baby sun conure. I was both sad and excited to see him go, since now that I no longer have any baby suns, I can now get into breeding a larger kind of bird. Tomorrow Dad, Maria, Landon, and I are going to Minneapolis to pick up a breeding pair of African Greys, the best talking parrot breed of all.  I’m chomping at the bit to leave, and I’m going to have a hard time sleeping tonight from excitement.

J+M+J

We took the baby parrots to the nursing home again today, and they were just as big of a hit as last time. THey puffed up their heads to be petted, and everyone thought they were really beautiful. I still can’t believe that they came from those ugly little pink things I pulled out of the nest:

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J+M+J

After many inquiries, we sold our first sun conure baby last week to a family with an autistic son. They just called us to let us know that everything was going well, and that they had DNA’d the chick to find out that it was a girl. They named it Stevie, are very happy with their purchase. Hurray!

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J+M+J

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Two on the first day! The fluffy chick is about twelve hours old, and the other chick I think is less than an hour because he’s still wet from inside the egg!

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J+M+J

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J+M+J

All three of the baby sun conures are doing great, and the oldest two are able to fly. They look so different from the time when I pulled them from the nest just over a month ago!

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J+M+J

March has arrived, bringing encouragement that the winter will soon end. The temperatures are beginning to rise slightly, with a 40˚day in the forecast, and there is actually a spot along the road in our yard that the snow has receded enough to see (gasp) grass! I heard a few birds chirping this morning, completing the feeling that spring is near.

The atmosphere inside the house is also rather spring-like because I finally have  three baby sun conures from my breeders. The oldest was born on February 20, the middle was born sometime around the 23. I actually saw the youngest in the process of hatching on the 26, and I was afraid it had been accidentally cracked before its time. (And I was really, really happy when I saw that it was alive.) I will pull them for hand-feeding on March 10, to get them used to humans. I’m having a terrible time waiting.

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