I was born into a home with birds. My grandmother was a bird lover and she would buy quaker babies from a farmers market every summer to raise and release back into the wild because, in the country where I was born and raised, it's legal to kill them and farmers knock down the nests with tiny babies inside and they would sell the babies. I hand-fed my first baby when I was ten (under the supervision of my grandmother who actually did more of the work than I did ). I got my first purebred Hartz Roller canary for my 13th birthday and the very first thing I did when I moved to the States was to get a budgie. I've always loved birds and have always had canaries in my house until 1992 when my ex-husband's new wife asked me if I wanted a parrot that a co-worker could no longer care for. That was Pretty Bird, a female red lore amazon. And the whole thing grew from there until I opened a rescue when I moved to Pennsylvania. I never told anybody I had a rescue, never advertised and never even got my tax exempt status but, of course, my family, friends and co-volunteers at a dog and cat rescue I worked at knew about it and, through word of mouth, I ended up with around 240 birds!
I started doing research on parrots natural diets, biology, their physiology, avian medicine, etc as well as nutrition in 1994 when Pretty Bird was diagnosed with high uric acid and I haven't stopped yet although I don't do it most Sundays. I also had my own website for a few years where I gave advice on birds, I gave chats and presentations at schools to teach children about parrots and wrote articles on them.
Do NOT get a cockatoo! Not yet. Cockatoos require company all day long and somebody with a very stable situation and HUGE patience because they are always chewing on something or getting into trouble so, unless you can dedicate yourself 24/7/365 for years and years and years, it will not work out for the too.