Updates and Musings About Life with Parrots
Last week, Stewie and Mika went to the vet for their annual checkup. Stewie posted about his trip on Facebook resulting in a long comment thread about everybirdie’s vet-visiting habits. Among most of Stewie’s bird friends, the consensus matches the advice you’ll find on boards and parrot organizations: a routine checkup every year is the…
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For a while now I’ve been trying to put together photos of different types of body language my parrots exhibit to show people what an angry parrot looks like, a scared bird, a happy parrot, etc. In trying to study and document Stewie’s body language, however, I invariably have to introduce additional stimulus that completely…
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After a whole year of watching Mika enjoying head scratches, Stewie has decided that he’s going to allow me to touch him. Not just touch him, but rub his neck and pinch the keratin off his new feathers! Pin feathers are itchy and uncomfortable and, in the wild, parrots engage in allopreening to help each…
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This is Stewie. Inside my shirt. It’s his new favorite hangout. That is all.
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Nothing sillier than a wet parrot 🙂 Here’s Mika looking like a wet chicken after a shower: Here’s Stewie sporting a faux-hawk. Mika loves her showers, always getting good and soaked, while Stewie prefers a more gentle misting (or a bath in his water bowl).
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Stewie is eagerly eating his treat… a snap pea! (Shh, he doesn’t seem to realize that peas are veggies). So far, beside corn, these are the only fresh veggies he likes — and both are kinda high in sugar, more like fruit than veggies in terms of nutritional value — but I’ll take what I…
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I’m watching TV today — an episode of Monk (Mr. Monk and the Red Herring) — and imagine my surprise when they feature a sun conure! On the show, Monk goes to a pet store and notices a bird. The geeky pet store clerk says, “You can have him for free. We can’t get rid…
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Got Stewie to step on the scale today, finally, after many months of getting him used to the idea (yeah, I wasn’t in a hurry). He weighs 104 grams. Down from 106g last time I took him to the vet for a nail trim, and up from 103g when I took him to his first…
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I’ve been housesitting and dogsitting for some friends this holiday, so I brought Stewie with me. His regular cage was set up in the guest room so I could keep the dogs away from him, but he just pitched a fit. Much more than he ever did at home, he screamed every time I made…
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Stewie got tired of the “put the ball in the cup trick”… not sure why, but he just doesn’t want to do it anymore. Here’s a picture of him when he was still eager to do it: We’ve been working on “put the ring on the peg” but this one has been difficult. To tell…
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