Navre wrote:The problem with a “no questions asked” dropoff is that we need to know things about the bird. Maybe its name, its age, its likes and dislikes. Knowing that the bird hates children, or is not scared of dogs, etc, helps us place it successfully.
I kind of disagree with this.
Now I understand there are people who relinquish birds because of personal tragedies and issues unrelated to the bird. Those people won't mind providing all the info/help possible.
But the vast majority are people who are just unhappy having such a difficult animal in their house (even if they try to make it sound otherwise). In that case, they are the last person who's judgement of the bird is useful.
However, instead of worrying about what the bird used to like/dislike, it's better to educate new owners on how to discover this from scratch! When you get a baby parrot, you have to discover and help create its personality. The same is true for an adopted bird! Taking shortcuts like saying "this bird hates men" or children or whatever prejudices the volunteers and adopters which makes them not really give the bird a full chance. Not knowing this and giving the bird a new start, those predispositions may get rebooted or may turn out to be falsely assessed in the first place.
When you follow my training and positive reinforcement based approach it doesn't particularly matter what the bird's history is. I teach how to make the future awesome instead.
Knowing the birds name, food preferences, fears, etc is nice but not really important. There's really only one thing that I'd really like to know is a bird's medical history. But given that most people are oblivious and don't care enough to have the bird seen by a vet, most won't be able to provide it anyway. Knowing the age is also something you probably can't otherwise discover so it's nice to know.