Devilcake

Beeps is probably the parrot who spends the most time talking in our house. Since he only knows three words (pretty, baby, cake), however, the conversation is less than scintillating. He refers to himself as Babycake, since that is what he was called in a previous home. We sometimes call him that, too, and he realizes that "Beeps" and "Babycake" both refer to him.

But Babycake connotes a sweet, loving compliant parrot, and when Beeps's mood changes, he is anything but! Thomas I and joke that Devilcake is a more appropriate name for him in these moments (which are, thankfully, rare).

The way the light is reflecting off of his eyes in this picture makes me wonder if he really isn't possessed. That would explain so much...

Max's feather plucking odyssey

I have mentioned briefly before about Max being a recovering feather picker. It's evident in some of her pictures, specifically those from last year. This post will attempt to chronicle her feather picking and what we did about it, in the hopes that it might help someone in a similar situation.

We purchased Max as a baby and had always heard that timnehs were less prone to feather plucking than congos (although I doubt that, given my experiences at the bird rescue where we volunteer -- surrendered timnehs seems just as likely to feather destruct as surrendered congos). Since we don't neglect or abuse Max, we always assumed that feather destruction was not an issue we'd have to deal with.

But we were wrong!

In early January 2006, we returned home and found over 20 feathers on the bottom of Max's cage, and a spot on her lower belly with missing feathers. We hoped it was a one-time thing; perhaps something had scared her outside. Over the next few days, she continued to bite her feathers off at the shaft, leaving only down feathers. Pretty soon she had removed all of the outside feathers on her chest, legs, and back, leaving only her wings and head untouched.

Unfortunately, I don't have many good pictures from this time as our camera was barely working. But here is a picture of Max from Feb 2006. You can see the down feathers on her upper chest showing where they should be hidden by feathers. That's what her whole body looked like!
As I tend to be a perfectionist anyway and of course want to provide the best care possible for my animals, I was devastated. How could Max be so unhappy? We were providing her with a wonderful life, n'est-ce pas? I started doing immense amounts of research into what we could do to improve her situation, and we experimented with many different things. Since we tried so many different things at once, I can't say for sure what stopped her picking, but I have a pretty good idea.

Another component to her picking is that she didn't pluck feathers out -- she bit them off at the shaft at skin level. When a feather is plucked, a new feather will start growing in place. In Max's case, her body didn't know to start growing a new feather because the shaft was still there. So we had to wait until the shaft molted naturally for a new feather to grow. In my mind, there are positive and negative aspects to her style of plucking. It was bad because it took longer for her feathers to regrow, and made it more difficult for us to pinpoint what made her improve. But it was good because she wasn't damaging the feather follicle and could easily regrow the feather. Also, when I saw feathers on the bottom of her cage, I could tell whether she had resumed plucking (no shaft) or was just molting (shaft).

She was examined by a vet and no physical reason could be found for the plucking. Let the experimenting begin!

Here is Max in March 2006, a few months after the picking started:
Among the many articles I read, I found this one, by Pamela Clark, to be the most helpful. Here is a partial list of things we did:

• Installed a 75-gallon aquarium, in the hopes that it would add moisture to the living room and provide Max with entertainment.
• Switched Max from fruity Zupreem pellets to Harrison's High Potency Coarse which is mostly organic and does not contain artificial colors.
• Began clicker training to keep her mind active.
• Allowed her flight feathers to grow in and encourage flying to keep her body active.
• Added Bach flower essences to her drinking water.
• Removed her food dish so that she had to forage for pellets hidden around her cage.
• Stopped worrying about her because parrots pick up on our emotions (this is much easier said than done!)
• Got her DNA-tested, in which we were shocked to find out she was female!
• Installed an in-room humidifier when the aquarium failed to provide adequate moisture.
• Increased the frequency of baths she received.
• Brought her into the bathroom during showers at least 7 times per week.
• Increased the quantity of destructible toys in her cage to keep her busy destroying toys and not herself.

I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting right now. I think the hardest thing for me was to come to the realization that I wasn't a bad bird owner because I had a plucker. Parrots are wild animals!

Here's a picture of Max from April 2007, still a bit plucked:For about the past month, I'd say that Max has been fully feathered again. What was the cause of her plucking? I'm pretty sure it relates to the humidity in our home. I had read that birds who bite their feathers off at the shaft (as opposed to plucking the entire feather) often do so due to lack of humidity. It's after reading that article that we added the humidifier in the living room. We saw an improvement after that, and she'd start to pick again when we stopped using the humidifier, so it will be in constant operation in our house.

Her plucking started about 6 weeks after we started using the furnace in the home we recently moved into, which lends support to my theory -- our old house wasn't so dry, perhaps.

In any case, I think her picking may have been a blessing in disguise. Although it caused me stress and some sleepless nights, it also propelled me to research ways in which I could improve her life and, by extension, the lives of the other parrots living with us. Had this not happened, would they be clicker trained, flying, and on a better diet? While I like to think the answer would be yes, I really don't know whether it would be!

Grey matters

In the absence of anything exciting happening at our house, I thought I'd share some pictures of my little grey girls.

Here is Kika on top of her cage with one of her favorite toys. It's a wood block with paper sucker sticks inserted. That toy was new when she came into our house less than a month ago, and she works on it a little more every day. She'll need a new one pretty soon!
Here she is on the shower curtain this morning, looking quizzically at me. She has so many pin feathers right now! I've been misting her daily and she sits on the shower curtain when I shower so that the humidity might help her skin feel better where the new feathers are poking through.
And preening herself on her cage.
Now, on to my mischief-maker, Max. I've shown pictures in the past of our shower curtain. We space shampoo bottles out so that the parrots are less likely to bother each other. My face wash is apparently no match for Max! As this separates her from Calypso and is therefore unnecessary, it just makes me laugh.

As I was putting the birds in their cages for the morning, I came for Max last. As the longest-tenured bird in our house, one of her perks is that she gets out of her cage first and goes into her cage last. I found her perching on our dishes! If you look on the top of her head, you'll see a darkened spot. She has lip prints on her from when I kissed her after applying chapstick. I just couldn't help myself -- her head was so soft and she smelled so good.

That's not Rocky!

We stopped in at the bird rescue where we volunteer last Saturday. I really think my husband might be half-macaw. Over the years, he has interacted with scores of macaws, and I honestly can't think of one that didn't like him. A few minutes after meeting him, the Illiger's macaw in the picture above is putty in his hands.

A few years back there were 4-5 female blue and gold macaws all up for adoption at the same time. They would start calling for him as soon as they heard his voice in the shelter. He'd let them out, and they'd blush and vie for his attention. At the time, he joked about leaving me for his harem of ladies.

Rocky would be pretty jealous if he knew what was going on behind his back!

Garden failure

Last month, I decided that the lizards would appreciate some edible flowers. They so enjoyed the dandelions and I wanted to give them more exotic flowers as well. I couldn't find any in the grocery stores near us, which meant that I would have to grow them.

Although things started out well enough, the picture here from mid-April shows the last day I had hopes of blooms.
The next day, all of the stalks fell over. Despite my best efforts, I had failed at growing flowers for my lizards.

Our community holds its farmers' market on Wednesdays, and Thomas got off of work early enough yesterday to go. He met a wonderful farmer that had listed edible flowers as something he had. Even though he was sold out, he had a few flowers on plants he was trying to sell. He cut off a few blooms for the lizards. This is Andreas enjoying the flower:

He also purchased some greens from this farmer, so we had a salad last night. Of course I had some help cleaning the lettuce.
Max found a post-it note I had on the side of the counter. Luckily I didn't need it anymore, so I let her destroy it. We keep our garbage can on the side of the counter, and when she was done with the note, she walked it over and threw it in the garbage.

I don't have a picture of this, but I got a little nip from Rocky lately. It's now a blood blister on my right middle finger (appropriate!) Last night I had him step up on my arm and we were going to find Thomas. He was so excited that he started leaning forward and flapping his wings, which caused him to lose his balance and fall from my arm. He reached out with his beak to grab on to anything he could -- and got my middle finger. I gently lowered him to the ground and he went off running to find his mate. I'm not counting this as a bite since it was unintentional and minor.

Also, Calypso is finally back to normal after our trip. He spent the morning in the kitchen with me. It took him four days this time. Hopefully that will continue to decrease as he realizes that we do return from our trips!

The Figure 8 Toy

We have a figure-8 rope toy that I think is made for playing tug with dogs. I may have mentioned this before, as one of Max's tricks is to do a loop through the bottom section, and she also loves hanging off of it as I push her. Lately, Beeps has been hanging out in the bottom part. I catch him there several times a day. We've added several swings to his cage, but he's not interested in them.
Max also likes to perch on the upper level of the stand and swing the figure-8 toy at whichever parrot happens to be hanging out underneath it. The caiques are too short to be knocked off, but she has successfully knocked Rocky and Kika down in the past. They have learned and no longer stand where she can reach them.

Kika has been revealing more of her personality to us, which we love! She is still incredibly sweet to the humans in the house, but has started asserting herself more with the other parrots.

Last night, Max was on the middle part of the stand and I was scratching her head. Kika has been closely watching my interactions with the other parrots, and she inched closer for a better look of what I was doing to Max. With no warning, she reached out and bit Max on the wing! Luckily she just grabbed a beakful of feathers and no harm was done. However, I felt guilty because I had lulled Max into a false sense of security.

This is what I saw when I came home from work yesterday:Thomas was in the living room playing video games, and the other parrots were with him. Max had flown into the kitchen and was playing with the jacket that he'd left on the kitchen counter instead of putting it away in the closet. He said Max wouldn't stay in the living room because she was so enthralled with the jacket! I was surprised he allowed this as she ruined the zipper on another jacket the morning we left for Madrid earlier this year. I hung the jacket in the closet before any damage was done to this zipper.

Return from vacation

I was in too much of a rush to post this picture before we left for Belgium, but here is Max enjoying a wine cork:
The parrots took our absence quite well. I think they're getting used to us leaving and returning. Rocky, of course, was ecstatic to see Thomas again. The bird who seemed second-most happy to have us home, surprisingly, was Kika. She tried to regurgitate for me several times and whistled some pretty songs. Max and Daphne were quickly back to their normal personalities. Beeps was excitable for the first day or so, but is now back to normal. As he did last time, Calypso is too excitable and is threatening to bite when I offer my hand, so we're interacting from afar for a few days.

We had Monday free, so we were working on cleaning out our closets and creating a pile of clothes to donate to charity. Max and Rocky were intrigued:
We also bought 4 tomato plants and 2 hot pepper plants and are trying our hands at container gardening. We hope to have a large garden someday, but don't want to put one in at our current house since we don't plan on staying here long:
I also made some carrot bread yesterday. It was unwrapped on the counter this morning, as I had taken my slices but Thomas hadn't yet. Max instantly flew over to help herself:
Here's a Kika picture from yesterday. I still haven't been able to figure out how to take good pictures of her! Her mutilation sores have completely healed, and she has tons of new feathers growing in, including flight feathers. We're hoping that she may be flying by the end of the summer.

She definitely feels more at home and is starting to assert herself a bit more, which is good. We've started clicker training and she picked up targeting (the first step) very easily. I can't wait to see what other tricks she'll learn!
Now, a couple of photos from our vacation in Belgium.

Here is the cathedral in Belgium. There was a big sign saying that a pair of peregrine falcons was nesting in one of the towers! Thomas and I spent quite a while watching the facade and were rewarded with a falcon that flew out and returned to its nest a few times. The nest was too far up for us to see, but it was quite exciting, and we loved how the Belgians seemed to embrace the pair!
We were eating outside on the terrace of a restaurant, when we noticed the name of the store across the street. This is something that Rocky says to me constantly, so we had to take a picture!
Bruges is a wonderfully preserved Medieval city, and is sometimes called "Venice of the North" because of its canals. Although somewhat touristy, a canal tour is a great way to see this city. We were so happy that we went! We got to see a ton of wildlife, including many baby ducks and swans. Here are some of the ducks. When they needed to go fast, they would rise up out of the water and almost run across the top of the canal.
This dog had a pillow placed in this window so that he could comfortably watch the canal. We thought this was such a pretty tableau. What a life!
We had a wonderful vacation but, as always, were happy to return home. I should be able to visit blogs later in the week and can't wait to see what everyone's been up to!

Max is angry

Max knows something is up (we're leaving on vacation in a few hours). She was misbehaving and begging for attention all morning. Thomas just called to tell me that she'd taken all of the lizards' medication that were on the counter and thrown it in the garbage. I'm just hoping I can avoid a Beeps bite before we leave.

Have a great week and I'll update as soon as I can!

Our gardener is not doing his job

Beeps and Rocky both like to garden, although Rocky has mostly left that to Beeps lately. A few days ago, I took some video of him playing in our Christmas cactus (listed here as a safe bird plant, although he doesn't eat it) when the action suddenly turned sinister. He has also almost destroyed another plant we have -- I may post a picture after we get back.

Last night, Rocky stepped up onto my bare arm, which was the first time I had him do that. He was in a really bad mood this morning -- even Thomas had to use a stick with him -- so I didn't try.

I think the birds can sense our impending departure. Last night I was wrapping up Max's pellets so that our birdsitter can have her forage (I usually wrap them as part of my morning routine but want to simplify things for her), and Beeps flew over, intent on attacking me. The last time he bit me was the day of our departure on our last vacation.

Also, our vet got back to us on the lizards' blood work, and he said everything looked fantastic. Elsa has been a bit sluggish lately, so I was worried she may be forming eggs, but he told me that he couldn't feel any forming in her, and her bloodwork didn't indicate that she was in the mood to breed (he said this much more scientifically, of course!) Since they are never together, the eggs would be infertile, but of course I worry about getting egg bound and other reproductive issues.

Finally, I thought I'd post a link to an article on Alex the African Grey and Dr. Irene Pepperberg. I'm trying to catch up on my magazine reading and was pleasantly surprised to see this article last night. It's kind of long, but I thought it was very interesting.

I'm not sure if I'll have time to post tomorrow -- it's the day our flight leaves, so I'll be very busy (I'm still not packed!) -- so I wish everyone a happy week and I'll let you know how the parrots take our absence and return. We're most worried about Kika. We don't want her to feel abandoned just as she's found a new home!

In which we fail fostering (again)...

This will probably not come as a surprise to some of you out there, but we have decided that we can't live without Kika.

The reason I didn't post on Monday is that I had to bring Kika to the rescue facility to meet her potential new owner. I felt sick, my emotions were all over the place, and I couldn't come up with words to express how I was feeling.

When we agreed to take her in, we knew that there was someone interested in her and that this most likely would be very short term (less than 2 weeks). She just couldn't handle it at the rescue and we wanted to stop further mutilation. Based on the description of her by her previous owners and her behavior at the center, we expected a scared, difficult grey. What we found was completely the opposite.

We told ourselves we couldn't fall in love with her, but we couldn't help ourselves.

She started making sad, mournful noises (grey owners will know what I'm talking about) the moment I took her toys out of her cage so that she would have something familiar if she was adopted. These continued the entire drive, as I fought back tears. It was so hard leaving her there.

A couple of hours later, Thomas called me, himself almost in tears, and asked whether there was any way we could adopt her. I called up to the facility and was told that if the person looking at her didn't want to adopt her, we could have her, but we would have to wait and see.

Luckily for us, Kika was still available at the end of the day! She made happy noises the entire car ride back home. I'm sure she was just picking up on my emotions, but it's amazing how sensitive these creatures are.

We got home much later than usual, so Thomas was cooking dinner. He told me that all of the parrots were mad at me for possibly sending one of them away and they were worried that they might be next. Of course he was just kidding!

As was the case before, she is adapting quite well to our house. Max hasn't tried to buzz her in almost a week. She gets along with the caiques, and the parrots are able to share stands without problems.

Kika must have lived in a technologically advanced house (at least compared to us) as she has regaled us with her repertoire of at least 5 different phone rings. She also makes normal grey sounds that I love -- clicks, clucks, beeps, whistles, etc. She and Max make identical sounds, to the point where it's impossible for me to tell which grey is making the noise.

Although we weren't looking to add another bird to our house, I think she's a good fit and will enjoy life with us. But she is absolutely the last until we move as there is no more space in the living room.