Updates on all the parrots

It's been a long time since I've made a post with pictures of all of the parrots in our house. Hopefully this won't get too long!

We've recently been making our own nut butter. We just get bags of roasted unsalted nuts from Trader Joe's and blend them up. It's delicious! Lately I've been dipping apple slices in the nut butter as part of my breakfast. Of course observant Max noticed this and came over to help herself.
Kika loves getting sprayed almost as much as Max does. I've been trying to spray her at least once a day to help with her new feather growth. Another thing we've been working on with her is getting her to hold her own food, like she is with a piece of bread in this photo. She prefers to nibble as Thomas or I hold the food in front of her. She's starting to catch on!
I'll finish talking about the female parrots in the house with Daphne. She is so docile and well-behaved that I rarely talk about her here. She also tends not to photograph well as she gets washed out. I've been unable to capture how pretty she is -- she usually looks aqua in pictures but she's more of a periwinkle.

One nice thing about the small stature of a budgie is that she can perch just about anywhere. When she's in the kitchen with us, I usually place her on a bowl, like here:Calypso is one of the most beautiful parrots I have ever seen. Here he is, wondering why I'm taking pictures of him instead of feeding him breakfast!Caiques tend to be playful parrots, and that's certainly true for Beeps. This figure-8 dog pull toy is the best $1 I've ever spent. He's been swinging on it, doing flips through the loops, and all sorts of other things. One of his favorites is for me to swing it while he hangs off and flaps -- I can get it going faster than he can.

Getting in position to do a flip: Posing (you can see Kika's face in the background):
This video of Rocky is a bit longer than I normally like to do (about 40 seconds). This morning I put the ipod on instead of listening to the radio, and the parrots were happy to hear some of their favorite songs. For whatever reason, they all love the band Bowling for Soup. I was in the kitchen with everyone else and Rocky was in the living room, being antisocial and playing on his cage. As soon as this song came on, I could hear him singing. I tried to capture that on video, but he wouldn't sing in front of the camera -- only dance (I taped a little longer than usual as I was hoping he'd forget about the camera and start singing).

Rocky is quite musical, and I use this to my advantage. If he's really worked up (screaming) or about to attack, I either start singing one of his favorite songs or put them on the ipod (depending on how much time I have) and he immediately brightens up, joins in the dancing, and often starts singing.