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ParrotTurns out San Francisco's Telegraph Hill isn't the only place hosting a colony of wild parrots. Quaker parrots in Brooklyn makes us visiting the place much more likely this spring or summer, I'm thinking.
The only thing I have a problem with is the basic view. I thought he was in San Francisco until I saw the monument. While dramatic and fun, that view doesn't exist.
Pedantic? Me?
A VERY tweet NO-PRIZE to Joshua for bringing us this.
ADORABLE!!!
The image that came in an unlikely form of a bird dropping appeared on Sunday.
Don't forget to watch your parrot for a stigmata!
Personally, I think the second picture of this brief gallery is the "win" shot. Then again, I obsess around and plot out airshow pictures 364 days a year, 365 on leap year. I guess you'd call it, "expected."
No, Ellen, you can't have one:
Yesterday at around 7 a.m., Morgan Pitts, a 36-year-old propmaster who works out of Silvercup Studios in Queens, had an Encounter With Nature. While on a routine coffee run near his Greenpoint home, he heroically and rather nonchalantly saved a baby falcon from a dangerous urban environment...
That sound you here is Ellen and Amber "squee!!"-ing several hundred miles apart at the same time.
That sound you heard was Ellen's head exploding with candy. Amber's too, most likely.
Note: video is safe for work, but the site itself seems marginally NSFW. Watch it at home.
Good thing it's extinct!
How cool is this though? Colors?
In a unprecedented discovery, Nicolas Rawlence of the University of Adelaide and a team of researchers found they could extract DNA from the feathers' shafts, and use the genetic material to prove the feathers belonged to four species of the flightless Moa, including the Heavy-footed Moa Pachyornis elephantopus.
With pix goodness!
The nestlings were among 13 survivors of a group of 53 baby birds confiscated from a 15-year-old Longmont boy’s bedroom on June 16 and taken to the Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, where they are now recuperating and growing.Sgt. Dave Orr of the Longmont Police Department said the boy’s mother called animal control when she learned of the baby birds the boy had brought to his home on the 1800 block of Meadow Street.
Another messed up kid.
BIRD TALK’s Top Lists For 2009
Nominate your top picks for our top bird-related lists.
It’s time to find out the “best of the best” and BIRD TALK wants your input. Check out BIRD TALK’s Top Lists for 2009 below and send in your top bird-related picks.
The deadline to submit is August 9, 2009.
Don’t wait until to the last minute, submit your Top Picks today!
Go vote!
What, does no one in behavioral sciences own a parrot? Cockatoo owners in particular are always advised to keep bits of wire away from their birds, not just because it could injure the bird, but also because the little feathered monsters will build lock picks out of them.
While Swoozie is certainly no rocket-scientist bird, I can say she picks up on tricks faster than any other critter we've ever owned.
Jeff gets a no-prize that'll squawk as the sun goes down for bringing us yet another example of science telling bird owners what they've already known for years.
I guess Asian song birds must not make as much noise as parrots. If you tried to strap Swoozie to your leg it'd sound like you had a car alarm taped to your ankle.
From the "you don't get out much, do you?" file we have the discovery that parrots dance to music. The "discovery," which just about any parrot lover in the past, I don't know, three thousand years or so could've told these guys about, may lead to insights into how consciousness works.
Swoozie's not much into dancing now that she has her space collar on. She mostly walks over, looks balefully at you, then thuds the collar down on the ground. She'll stay in that position until someone acknowledges she is in fact a very poor birdie who has been done wrong. Which is usually Ellen, who is having some serious mom-burd issues over this whole thing.
Swoozie has a bubble collar on for a while. Why? She wants to go to the moon!
In all seriousness between the giggles, Swoozie won't leave a few feathers alone and this is the last resort.
When the village store was gutted in a mystery fire, its owner Paul Sheriff was understandably less than chirpy.
...
But his shock turned to amazement when, after weeks of extensive investigations, his insurance company finally traced the cause of the fire - to a sparrow with rather an unusual taste in nest-building, not to mention a laissez-faire attitude to the perils of smoking.
We have the opposite problem with Swoozie, who merrily pitches everything not firmly attached over the side of her cage first chance she gets.
A DC-area parrot rescue has just doubled their flock population and could use a few bucks to help (right side of page). Donate today! The window-shattering-squawk-volume feathered dinosaur wannabe you help could one day be your own!
Except you, Ellen. You can't have one.
The Pionus strut= "IdontlikeyouwhatisthatthingthatismakingthathorriblenoiseIKILLYOU!" walk.
Or to politely put it, Scott was vacuuming.
Swoozie came home from boarding today, and so Ellen was giving her the run of the house. Her "perch West" location is the turtle's tortoise's cage in the kitchen, which is actually a large metal dog crate. It has perfect parrot-sized bars, and from birdie's perspective is little more than a square jungle gym. The "get off my lawn!" expressions Om gives her when she climbs down to sample whatever's in his food bowl are something to see.
At any rate, Ellen was puttering around in the kitchen with Olivia when I came around the corner.
Me: "Where's the bird?"
Ellen: "Behind me... rrrmm..."
Olivia, loudly: "MommyWeWentToChuckiesLookWhatIGot"--skwmph--"Isn'tItCool"--skwmph--"Purple'sMyFavoriteColor..."
Ellen: "Olivia, do you know where the"--skwmph--"birdie went?"
Me, peering down the stairs: "I don't see her, but I"--skwmph--"hear something"--skwmph--
Everyone quieted down, and sure enough, we heard, muffled, softly and rather calmly, "--skwmph--" pause "--skwmph--"
Which lead to Ellen opening the pantry: "Swoozie! What are you doing in there? I could've squished you!"
Swoozie, now unmuffled, and literally unruffled, quite calmly: "Squawk... squawk..."
Whereupon she tip-tap tip-tapped her way back to the cage, triumphantly carrying her quarry, a soda straw. She quickly climbed back up and repositioned the straw for disassembly. She then paused when she realized we were all staring, and gave us all a perfect "what?!?" expression.
When they said Pionus are laid back parrots they weren't kidding. The tone was nothing more or less than, "umm... excuse me? Parrot inside. Not meaning to trouble you, but..."
Welcome home, birdie!
Mark gets a very clever no-prize for bringing us this demonstration of just how smart a crow can be. As I understand it, parrots and crows are considered the two smartest groups of birds, with brain-to-body mass ratios similar to higher primates. Interestingly, their brain structure is very different, with small cerebral cortexes but large "medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale" areas.
In other words, birdies is smart!
Pionus are known to be "Perch Potatoes". Ours... well, is a perch potato. BUT, if birdy wants to be on the couch, birdy's got to wear her dress. No bird poop on the couch. The cats throw up on it enough!
MANY thanks to Lisa from 'Down Under' for an "Australian Christmas Wreath."
DENVER (CBS4) ― A babysitter's parrot is being credited with helping save the life of a 2-year-old girl who was choking Friday at a Denver area home while the sitter was in the bathroom.
A story about a parrot? A parrot saving a child other than just pooping? AWESOME!
*Many thanks to Jay Tea!*
NOT TO MISS! I laughed my ass off.
It's not every day that you get to see skateboarding budgies!
Ok...for you non-bird people. A budgie is also known as a parakeet. All budgies are parakeets, but all parakeets are not budgies. Confused yet?
I was bad. I broke a blood feather in the shower.
Mum bird told me that it looked like a scene in a movie called “Psycho”.
I did not like that she snipped off the broken part and held pressure on it. Now I KNOW I have to see the Dr tomorrow. She made an appointment anyway for my year visit. Now I have a REASON to go.
I am most upset at Mum bird.
Right now I do not like Mum bird.
I had a short shower.
I’m not going to speak to Mum bird.
Wait… she has a treat.
I love Mum bird.
I'm not sure what Swoozie would make of a fish tank in her cage. It seems like it'd be a bear to do a water change on the tank.
Today is her actual hatch day! Have a beer Swoozie!
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.
