Even now, three years later, I beat myself up over the fact that I allowed this to happen. I should have known better! Luckily this experience did not have a permanent negative impact on her life (at least as far as we can tell) and we recovered her, albeit after a harrowing 34 hours.
It definitely made me more appreciative of her. Every single day since then, I've given her a few extra head pets and told her how lucky we were to find her, how much we love her, and how we'll always protect her. It's made us much more cautious in our daily lives, especially now that many of our parrots (including Max) can fly.
On to happier thoughts, the baby Australian Rainbowfish were finally big enough for us to clean the tank and do a partial water change. The larger Australian Rainbowfish had been enjoying swimming through the inflow of water, which is what I'm showing here. After each bucket of water was removed, we had to make sure that the three babies were still in the tank!
I bought some cherries at the store the other day. I love cherries, but hate having to deal with the pits. I had a bit of extra time on my hands yesterday, so I removed all of the pits and placed the cherries in a bowl for us to easily eat.
Curious Max came over and started doing that weird thing she's been doing with fruit lately -- licking it. She probably did this for about 10 minutes.
I went around and offered cherries to the rest of the parrots, and imagine my surprise when I came back to see that Max had moved from just licking the cherries to picking them up with her feet and eating them!
Cherries were a big hit in our house. All of the larger parrots (that is, everyone but Daphne) enjoyed them. We're still working with Stella on using her feet to help her eat -- she really likes it when we hold the food up to her beak for her. When I won't do that, she either has to use her feet or figure something else out, like here:
This was Stella's water dish on Sunday. I had given the parrots their new water and food in the morning, then I left to go running. I returned about two hours later and saw that Stella had been busy with chipping up her wood toy.
4 comments:
So Stella likes to make soup huh? Lucy does that sometimes as well.
Mm, wood soup.
Also the thing with Max and the cherries was great; it made me laugh.
One of my worst fears is one of my birds getting out -- it's a terrible feeling I wouldn't wish on anyone.
I've had all my birds microchipped, just in case.
I'm glad you got him back so quickly and so unharmed.
Birds that have been lost for awhile tend to be "different" and more fearful when/if they get returned home.
I am so lucky with Max that we found her pretty quickly and I don't think it's affected her nagtiavely at all, although I suppose I'll never know for sure. But you're right, BP, it was the worst feeling. I just kept beating myself up that my negligence made her terrified and might possibly mean she was going to die. Hopefully my experience will make other people think and save a few birds from what happened to Max!
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