I have been waiting and waiting to give you an update because I wanted my husband to take pictures of the birds (especially the little ones in their new cages) but he has been (and still is) busy doing stuff around the house (painting, refinishing floors, etc) because Nya, our youngest daughter (the one that is a widow), said she and the kids might be coming in September for a visit and I immediately 'carpe diem' to push him (read 'nag') to do the stuff I've been asking him to do for the last year or so (gotta be fast about these things and jump on them
) so I decided to just go ahead and post the pictures later.
Let's see... I finally 'finished' the budgie flock with a female I named Flora (she is green). As you all know, I've been looking and looking for a mate for my button quail male which has been calling and calling for one since the beginning of spring without success. I posted in CL both for Northern and Central New Jersey and looked in NYC, Long Island, Delaware and Pennsylvania every single day with no luck. But the lady who adopted Pookey found a guy in Brooklyn (I had told her of my search and we have kept in touch over emails) so there we went. After a two hour drive, I go into this tiny apartment (the living room/dining room area is the same size as my kitchen and the kitchen was just a bit bigger than my walk-in closet!
) and this guy has a baby playpen in the middle with a tiny Chihuahua, four aquariums (the small, starter size) three of them with big turtles in them and nothing else (just water!) and the fourth with a large iguana, a cage the size I would use for a cockatiel with five (FIVE) ringneck doves (one of them sitting on a nest) and another aquarium with about 15 baby quails on shelves around the room. The babies were all brown, which I don't mind, but, as I had mentioned that I would much rather have an adult, he comes from a bedroom? with an adult female for me - only thing is, this bird is twice as big as mine! So I said to him that my quail is half the size and that this bird has to belong to a different species and that I cannot use it. All this time, I am hearing budgies chattering in the kitchen where there is a cage covered with material and when I tell him that birds should never be covered during the day, he uncovers it and there are like 30 budgies in it! The poor, poor things!!! Soooo crowded! I tell him these birds are suffering, that they are too crowded, their cage is too small, as it is the one for the doves AND the aquariums for the turtles - and he tells me that that all his animals are 'rescues'. Now, you have no idea how much it aggravates me when people call animals they buy in CL "rescues" and use that as an excuse for bad care!
These poor animals needed to be rescued from him! He said that he started with one pair and that they had bred. I asked him why he didn't prevent them from doing it - he said he did (not true, there were two nest boxes with hens in them that either had eggs of babies in there) and that they were all going to go to Petco so I offered to buy a female from him and, do you know how many females were there in the 30 or so birds he had in there? Three! Just three! He had ten males for each female! That should tell you how terrible the conditions these bird were kept under for the hen to produce clutches with such gender imbalance! I took the only female that was not in a nest and that is FLora. I did not even bother quarantining her because, if any of the parents had had any contagious disease, the babies and the parents would have died long before I got there what with the bad food and the huge stress from the crowded conditions. She is a typical budgie, green body with black markings on wings and back of head, a yellow face and front (forehead) but I happen to think that the wild phenotype is actually quite beautiful, and she is doing very well, eating gloop like a champ and wolfing down leafy greens like there is no tomorrow. All of them are doing well. They 'discovered' sprouts after a couple of times I put them there and nobody touched them and they now LOVE them! As soon as put them at the bottom of the cage, they all fly down and crowd each other trying to eat more than the other birds
Paquita (Her Royal Meanness) and Rajah are also doing very well. Paquita is completely feathered and her plumage is now slick as it should be (she used to have contours kind of sticking out even after the 'holes' from plucking had filled up). They both eat very well and I saw Rajah feeding her in her beak a couple of days ago. I will watch them and, if I see she is getting nesty, I will give them a nest I ordered for them online made out of natural material (some sort of pliable grass) and which I have been saving.
Pablo is still alive and he seems to have gained a tiny bit of weight but I don't know how much because I can't really weigh him -I am going by how his chest felt the last time I toweled him to trim his beak. Codee hurt her foot or leg. I don't know what happened but her nails are growing very curved now so I am going to have to trim them because, sometimes, they get stuck around the bars of the cage and she doesn't seem to be able to dislodge them easily - and I think that maybe she got them stuck and pulled too hard and got something hurt because, one morning, she wasn't putting any weight on it. I waited a day and, when she was still keeping it to the side, I took her to the vet for an XRay which did not show a fracture so the doctor said that it's either that she got a crack fracture in a foot bone (too little to see in an XRay), sprain it (unlikely as there is no swelling or bruise) or that she hurt (tore?) a tendon -I think it's the tendon because it's been days and days and she is still favoring it.
Mami and Naida Zon are doing well if one doesn't take into consideration the degree of plucking Mami has done on both of them but I think that it's because they have been much more hormonal this year. So much so that Naida laid two eggs for the first time in her life! She kept on throwing them out of her 'nest' so I've been putting them aside when I clean but the new kitten (a sick feral one I brought in) loved playing with them and they ended up cracked so I had to throw them out - but it didn't faze her at all!
Zoey and Sweetpea seem also to be more hormonal this year than ever. Not that they are being aggressive or anything like that but Sweetpea has been chewing up a storm! I've had to change the two rolled up magazines I put in their cage almost daily and the confetti he makes have been ending up inside the wood nest they have in their cage so I guess he is preparing it. Zoey appears to have accepted him more fully because I saw her preening his head the other day for the very first time! Also, Sweetpea continues to astound us with how well he uses speech. Last week, he was really pestering me with the "Ready?" he uses when he wants his breakfast and, in all honesty, I was real late that morning because I had had to finish the gloop so he was on my shoulder and it was a constant thing: "Ready?" "No, wait" "Ready?" "No, you have to wait" "Ready? Ready?" No, you have to wait a minute" "Ready?" so, in exasperation I answered in a loud and angry tone "NO! NOT READY! CAN'T YOU WAIT A GODDAMN MINUTE?" - one single second pause and I hear a soft "Sorry" It floored me because I had never heard him saying it like that before! I turned to my husband who was helping me by sweeping the dining room and living room and I was like "Did he just say 'sorry'?!" (I don't hear very well as I suffer from a mild form of nerve-end deafness and, sometimes, I mix up the consonants in my head) but he said he also hear him saying 'sorry' very clearly. I swear, this bird is a genius!
Sunny is doing great and the time will be coming soon when I will have to look for a male companion for her because she is now becoming more independent of me and doesn't seem to need to be ON me all the time. She still spends lots of time on my shoulder and kissing me but she now also takes little flights off my shoulder and perches somewhere close and watches me so she is, obviously, feeling much more self-assured and comfortable with herself.
Sophie CAG continues sitting on her eggs. She has never done this before - I mean, she has laid and she has sat on her eggs but not for months and months like this time. And, if you ask me, it's because of Linus which, as soon as she gets up, runs to sit on them and I don't know if he doesn't sit on them at night because there have been quite a number of dawns when I peep inside the room (I always make sure they are OK and that everything in the room is as it should be before I go downstairs at 5 am) and I see him sitting on them! Unfortunately, the 'father role' has also made him a bit of a stinker and he doesn't allow me to scrape, sweep or mop the floor so I am putting him in his cage every morning while I do this. He actually does it to himself because, as soon as he sees me grabbing the scraper he comes running with his beak open and hangs on to it so all I have to do is lift my arm and carry him dangling from the scraper and drop him in the cage. Then he proceeds to verbally complain about it and, hanging to the bars in the front of the cage, puts his foot out stretching his leg as much as he can trying to grab whatever he can reach -usually my clothes or my hair-and pull -- HARD! What a stinker!
Isis and Davy Redbelly are doing well, too. Not much in terms of interaction but no fights or even bickering so it's good. Isis continues to beg all the time for scritches and to try to scare away whichever bird happens to be on my shoulder at the time but she doesn't bite them. She did once pull a couple of feathers from Sunny which gained her a scolding and a 5 minute time out in her cage but she never did it again - so far... Davy is beginning to fly to my shoulder and spend a few minutes there so we are doing OK in that sense. The only problem I've had with him is that he likes to go into smaller birds cages - he has done it to a canary once and twice to the plets. The poor canary was in a corner of the cage and I don't know how long he had been there because I did not notice it until I went looking for him and couldn't find him but I know he did not stay long in the plets cages because Paquita raised hell over it and as soon as I heard her I came over and took him out.
And, after months and months of looking, I finally found a hen for poor lonely Itsy so we now have a new Bitsy, She is younger than I wanted but it's been so hard finding one that I decided to take her even though she is not an adult which means that, in reality, I am not sure it is a female. She was the only one mottled in the bunch and, usually, that is the hens coloration so I took a gamble - I'll let you know if it works out.