The Welcome Wagon

Two quite funny things happened yesterday; however, I wasn't able to get either of them on camera.

I got home first after work, and Max, Stella, and Calypso were with me in the kitchen as I went through the mail and started getting ready for dinner. Beeps was playing with some new toys on his cage, and Rocky was under his cage, ringing a bell.

As soon as the garage door started to open, signaling Thomas's return, Beeps flew in, happily beeping, and Rocky ran in as fast as he could, making happy gibberish sounds.

I tried to get Rocky to come over to the door that goes into our garage so that he'd be right there to welcome his mate, but instead he ran over to the sliding patio door and started saying Thomas's name. Smart guy -- it turns out that Thomas had gone out back to harvest a tomato instead of coming right in.

Rocky really follows Thomas around like a little dog. He had gone upstairs to change out of his work clothes, and look at how fast Rocky follows! He didn't even stop to threaten me with how big he is, like he usually does when I try to film him on the stairs.

Stella's flying continues to improve. I am seriously doubting whether she was fledged as her landing skills are very poor. Her in-flight skills are also not fantastic as it seems to take her a lot of effort to propel herself forward. Despite that, she is really enjoying flying and doing much more volitionally. Yesterday, for the first time, she took off from a stand in the kitchen and landed on her cage. Previously, she'd only flown when she was in the same room with her target destination.

But her landing definitely needs improvement, which brings us to the funny story. She had taken off from one stand in the kitchen and wanted to go to the other stand. She did a lap around the room, and came in for the landing. Unfortunately, Calypso was perched on the stand, and she tried to land right on him! He took off, just in the nick of time. I'm still not sure whether this was intentional or not (given her poor landing skills, I don't think so) but it was funny to watch! The entire stand was open, and she tries to land on the caique.

One of her favorite places to land in the kitchen is on the side of the sink. Yesterday, during one flight, she ended up in the sink itself.

Here she is, on the stand (and pretty much the exact location) where she tried to land on Calypso. As usual, that's Beeps hanging out on the metal stand in the corner. Poor guy -- everyone picks on him! He'll be going to the vet in the next month or so as I want to make sure he's not hiding an illness that's making everyone try to drive him out of the flock.Max is going through a molt, so her chest has been looking a little scraggly. Given our past experiences with her plucking, I get a bit concerned when I see copious amounts of feathers on the bottom of her cage. However, when she feather destructs, she bites the feathers off at the shaft, so I could tell that these were molted.

This picture turned out a bit blurry, but she had this feather on her head for a few seconds before she realized it was on there and preened herself back to normal.

We leave tomorrow, and the parrots don't seem to realize that anything unusual is happening. We'll be doing a bit of extra cleaning tonight (always nice to come home to a clean house!) as well as packing, so they'll probably figure it out.

We have told them that we're leaving, but their behavior hasn't changed on account of that. I'm expecting Beeps to try to bite one or both of us, so I've been on caique watch the past few days.