|
|
Archives
Parrot
We dropped Swoozie off to DJ Feathers today for her vacation stay at the Tiki Bar. If you look closely, she is in the middle cage on the left side of the bar closest to the doorway in the back.
Scott created a monster. He found her in the pantry ONCE. Now every time he is in the kitchen, she has to fly over and bat her birdy eyes at him to open the pantry door.
This is what happens when you try to remove her from it.
Leave it to a small English town to generate a story about a parrot "terrorizing" a neighborhood. Praising quirkiness for its own sake is a famous English past time, but there have to be limits somewhere. Do you know how much one of those things costs?!?
A very loud squwak No-Prize to Annie for bringing us this!
Swoozie... yeah not that smart yet.
Anyone who can take care of (what looks to be) 20 macaws can't be all bad:
Once she was the world's richest vice queen, earning ten million dollars. She bedded Hollywood legends like Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando.But now the only men's pants Heidi Fleiss sees flying round are the ones in the machines of her LAUNDERETTE in a remote desert town.
...
Today Heidi—who lost her fortune after being busted and jailed in 1997—lives in a trailer she shares with twenty parrots she took in when a pet shop closed down.
A little, well ok a lot, crazy maybe, but not bad. As long as you're happy, there's not a damned thing wrong with living in a trailer and taking care of a laundromat. There are other ways to be mighty after a fall.
Annie came over on Sunday and brought over a mouse shaped LASER TOY! What did we all do...showed it to Swoozie!
Look for the red dot! It had to die. Much success was had!
Behold the manic intensity that is a parrot at play. Swoozie gets this wacky over some of the toys in her cage, but since she's a pionus she's not as loud. Which is a good thing.
The deserts of western China have done it again, this time producing an extraordinary, and extraordinarily old, bird fossil. Every once in awhile Swoozie definitely puts on airs, looking at us like "my kind was soaring around dinosaurs when yours barely knew how to dig a hole." Of course, then she stumbles, falls off her perch, and bounces like a tennis ball when she hits the floor eight inches below, so we don't take her all that seriously.
SQUAWK!!!
Scientists may have finally discovered the mechanism that allows birds to navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. Swoozy definitely knows how to get from the perch to the food bowl and back. So far, we've never tested if she could figure out going any farther.
It would seem baby birds babble just as much as baby humans. Swoozie had a couple of distinctive calls when she was really little, now gone. We're still trying to teach her R2D2 whistles.
What? You thought we were just acting nerdy?
Swoozie is going through her first molt and is very itchy right now. After O's bath every night, Olivia and I give Swoozie her own shower. We even bought a new shower head to bathe her more easily.
African Gray: 1, False Leg: 0. If ours is any indication, toys which can be destroyed are the best toys of all. Anything which can be destroyed is therefore a toy. No wonder they're such happy birds.
Swoozie kept asking Olivia for head scritches, but O would not have anything to do with it, so I stepped in.
Olivia would not let me take a pix of her and her bologna sandwich, so Scott took pixes of Swoozie making a mess with pizza crust.
We are dorks, what do you want from us?
Yes, after spending dozens of $'s on toys, she likes the free ones the best.
Fortunately, Pionus do not have a reputation for being escape artists. Note the padlock in the upper-left corner of the screen.
Oh Nos! It's a wet bird!
Shake it out Swoozie!
Ahhh....blowdryer...we luvvvss the blowdryer...
Fresh and clean!
Swoozie wears a special flight suit now. She is guaranteed to crap on you when you hold her. The diaper works really well and after 10 minutes of wearing it, she was OK with it.
Bonding. Yes, bonding. Even if it includes munching on the weekly church offering envelope.
AMCG's new member is home! Acting indignant and barking her displeasure at us already!
Swoozie is in the front. Her leg band is on her right foot. Her sister was banded on the left.
Those of you who've wondered what Ellen's bird sounds like? Wonder no more! The funny thing is, in the bird world, Pionus are considered the "surfer dudes" of the parrot world.
One must only hope that, in our case, the dude abides.
Scott and I went and saw Swoozie for our weekly visit today! Apparently her brother's new parent is coming all the way from West VA to finally come see him.
Yes, Virginia, they really can be this manic. I'm pretty sure that's the kind we're going to get, but they all look pretty much the same to me, so what do I know? Dance birdie, dance!
A family was saved from a fire by its parrot, which imitated the fire alarm so convincingly they woke up and escaped. From the little I understand of parrots, it's not that the thing was trying to help its owners, it was simply trying to yell down a rival that was burning down its house. The fact that it was able to do so speaks volumes about a parrot's ability to blow the windows out when the mood strikes. Whee!
It's official! Pinkie Pi is a girl! We have been waiting for a permanent name until we got the DNA results.
A bit on how we chose the name of our bird.
The "Swoose" is the oldest B-17 Flying Fortress in existence. It is also the only known U.S. military airplane to have flown a combat mission on the first day of the US entry into World War II and to remain in continuous military flying service throughout the conflict.
The aircraft is in storage at the National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility at Silver Hill, Maryland.
This was the first "Swoose" flown by Frank Kurtz, and is the inspiration for his daughter's name, Swoozie Kurtz - the actress
Why did I pick the name? Well, Scott's a font of all sorts of useless trivia (shocking, I know), and the real Swoozie is on Pushing Daisies, our favorite new series. It was impossible to stop him from telling me the story, and the name caught my fancy. We've got one other pet named after an airplane ("Wobbly" is Goblin's "silent" first name), so why not? At least this one's supposed to fly!
And it's our parrot. We'll name it what we want!
[Why yes, we do both have Nerd merit badges, with oak leaf clusters no less. And thank you for noticing!-- Scott]
I had the pleasure of getting to visit Pinkie Pi again today. I had the day off. Amongst running errands, I had to fit a visit in! I was told we should have DNA results any day now to see what sex it is.
One More...
My parents came to see Olivia for a much overdue visit. One of our stops was to meet Pinkie Pi.
AMCGLTD has been 'egg-specting' now for a few weeks. We finally got pixes of the babies for us to choose from! Hopefully we will have a visit this weekend with more photos and a choice on our baby!
Hatchdates are 9-12 and 9-16 so they are 3 weeks old now. They should be weaned in about 11 weeks which is mid-December.
Ignore the bird poo! Ours is going to learn to wear a 'flight suite', aka-bird diaper.
