Rescued 8 year old Maximillian Pionus

[flyingsowm]

He was cage bound in a tiny cage for years. Occasionally allowed on top of cage. No veggies. In a small room with the door closed with 5 other screaming parrots - 2 amazons, a grey, a sever macaw and a quaker. He is in a bigger cage now but won't go in and he does not have to. He is accepting treats from hand and is going crazy for veggies. Poor baby! Would love cage set up ideas and taming ideas. Right now I am leaving hin alone and just listening to his sad story he is telling me and talking from afar. I give him a treat now and then from hand which he lunges to take (but a couple times he was gentle - especially after seeing my parrotlets eating millet with me). He loves to chew but won't go in the cage so I am putting everything on top. He has been caged enough! He is flighted but can't fly with his weak musles. Makes me teary hearing him. He has been through a lot.

[flyingsowm]

I am having trouble uploading my pics but these are pictures from his previous home.

Yesterday the vacuum startled him (A broom was used in his room) and he flew down. He stepped up to me to go back which was so amazing. I hope that in a year he is stepping up to me and trustd me! I am seeing Barbara Heidenreich at a workshop in a couple of months and am very excited to learn. I will probably be bringing Indigo with me, my BH pionus.

[liz]

He is so cute. He is twisting his head around while trying to figure what you are doing.

[flyingsowm]

He is doing well so far. He calls very loudly when my husband leaves but I am ignoring it and rewarding when he is quiet. He must be missing the male person from the house before the last house 6 years ago! Also someone used welding gloves in that first house to return him to the cage at night. Maybe it was the woman so he prefers males? This will be a slow road! I an slowly trying to build trust.

[Pajarita]

Yes, it sounds as if he was previously bonded to a man but parrots are very pragmatic about things like this and they do love who they are with if one is patient about it.

Thank you so much for taking this bird in, it was really very kind of you! And, please don't take this the wrong way but you have gone from zero to 7 birds in a VERY short period of time... It's not only that you can easily become overwhelmed (I don't know how you are going to manage giving each bird a couple of one-on-one hours plus another two of flight time and still have enough time to take care of the children and the household chores) but that you need to allow the new bird to find its place in the mixed flock before you take in another one. It's not fair to them to keep on adding birds without enough transition time for them to adjust. And it's not only something they do on their own, you need to concentrate on one bird, make it trust and love you (and that takes hours of work every day), observe it, learn its body language and quirks, and tweak husbandry to accommodate it and, once this bird is fine (and it usually takes a couple of years for this), then and only then you can take another one. One single unhappy bird can destroy a household dynamics faster than you can say Jiminy Cricket. ...We say it all the time and people resent the repetition but parrots are not dogs...

[flyingsowm]

Did you mean a short time as in 3.5 years? I had my first bird (my Budgie Luna- 10 years ago and she sadly passed away, but we have had birds in the house on and off since. Our oldest here is Indigo who has been here for 3.5 years
I won't be getting more though- I am full -I agree! Very grateful, fulfilled and happy and they are too.

Edited - Actually my first bird was my canary Frisco who was hand tamed. That was way back in '98.

[Wolf]

Patience is going to be the main thing with this bird, I currently have a 16 year old Amazon who is cage bound. She also told me all kinds of stories of abuse and dead birds, she did watch about 7 other birds die in front of her. She was not only allowed to come out of her cage, she was not allowed to ever touch a human and was never given treats.
I open her cage when she wakes up and make a big fuss over giving her breakfast and talk and sing and scream with her for a while and then she settles down and eats telling me how good the food is. She is slowly making progress and I really believe that having the other birds around her coming in and out of their cages and interacting with me has been the biggest help for her. She is trying very hard to overcome the abuses that she experienced, she has just started to take an almond from our hands and has only been trying to touch us for a couple of months. Her most recent adventure has been to come out of her cage and climb around to the side of the cage, screaming the whole time until she returns to the perch that I placed on the cage door to give her a place outside of the cage to perch. Then she goes back and forth telling me that she is a bad bird and saying" Mimi, being a good girl" along with a lot of " Mimi scared". I do not pressure her to do anything, but I do spend a lot of time just talking with her, which she seems to enjoy immensely.

[flyingsowm]

Oh Wolf, that is heartbreaking! Amazing what they put up with. All of my pis have ipen doors alk the time along with aooden trees beside their cage as a playstand to entice them out. We had a major breakthrough today - I had a unsprayed apple branch with leaves on it for a giant moth caterpillar my daughter found wrapped on some concrete at school. I had to come in the house for something and Elmo was calling me so I went up with apple branch and he just loved it, nibbling the leaves and letting me play peekaboo with him. He even let me scritch him with the branch then my finger! I know it was a rare moment. He has been accepting treats from my hands much more gently today and was even talking and whistling with us. You are right, he really wants to jump onto me when I have my Dusky on my other hand but we are not there yet.

When my husband leaves I don't even mind the screaming/honking anymore knowing what she thinks must be happening -abandonment.

Poor Mimi. Did the previous owner mention birds dying there too? I am so glad she found her way to you!

[Wolf]

Oh yes, they had Mimi, her brother and several other birds and apparently didn't observe the quarantine periods that are needed to prevent disease when you add a new bird to your flock and they lost all of the birds except for Mimi. Due to the way that they treated the birds, I suspect that they picked up a respiratory or fungal infection due to their immune systems being so depressed, but I don't actually know much more than that Mimi watched them all die and survived. She has been given a clean bill of health, but I still worry about it because of my other birds.
When I took Mimi in, I was very new to having parrots and didn't realize the extent of their abuse of these birds until I went to pick Mimi up. They gave me a piece of paper with instructions on interacting with Mimi, and a blue towel that they said was hers. I got home and read the paper. Mimi was screaming non stop and I was crying over what I read. Mimi screamed non stop for three months except for when she was actually eating or sleeping. before the screaming began to let up.

[flyingsowm]

So grateful that Mimi found you! And that Elmo and Storm came here. Tookie too. Our house is completely silent right now. The pareotlets are cuddling, the budgies are cuddling and the pis are eating. We moved Elmo to our dining area around the Round Table. The Round table now seats the 5 of us humans and is surrounded by 3 amazing pionuses! Now Elmo can see the other two really well. His trigger for calling/screaming is the sound of a door because he was shut in.

He even came out on the wood tree beside his cage!

I am very relieved. I offered him a seed and he bit me hard on the pink part of my nail and there is a crack and blood but it wasn't so bad. I shouldn't have gone down to a safflower seed. My other two accept them well but I will stick with larger treats now. I don't think Elmo even recognized what it was. I am going to have a black spit on my nail now but I deserved it.

How do add pictures? I am not sure how to resize them on my phone.