Birdkeeping Naturally

EB Cravens

July ‘02

 

                                                    “Love Them Wing Quips”

 

     I wonder how many domestic parrots, parakeets, softbills, finches, doves and other captive birds were affected by the tragic events of last September 11th?  Did someone’s pet Double Yellow Head receive a morning treat, then never see his owner again? Did a flight full of colorful and sociable finches find themselves being fed by a totally new keeper on Sept. 12th? Was some hobbyist’s clutch of lovebirds left forgotten and unfed in the back bedroom while a family tried to cope with worry and turmoil? Truly, life will never be quite the same for we humans. Ah, but for the vast majority of our avian “buddies”, our breeders, our adopted, life goes on pretty much as usual. They always manage to take one day at a time. God bless them. Once again, our birds show us the way…

     Birdkeeping Naturally articles are at the midpoint of their seventh year—another year of reading and writing and study and consultation with pet owners and aviculturists. Here are our favorite wing quips since July 2001:

 

“Ravens’ curiosity declines with age. By the time they are four months old, they are already becoming shy of most novel stimuli. As they mature, that initial attraction to novel things reverses. They become increasingly fearful of novel objects.”     

                                                                           Bern Heinrich, “Mind of the Raven”

 

“In the Forpus psittacine group, perhaps also in the conures, we have observed a kind of ‘avian kindergarten’ where adult birds of several families bring their babies to the tree. Forty to fifty young are left for the day.”                          Thomas Arndt

 

“The crews built stone corrals into which they herded hapless Great Auks. Each summer, men boiled vats of water and threw the live birds in to loosen the feathers for plucking (and sale for pillows); that accomplished, the corpses were either thrown to the wayside or used as oily fuel for the fires boiling the water in which more of their kin died.”

                                           Christopher Cokinos, “Hope Is The Thing With Feathers”

 

“They held the hickory marriage stick together and put it in their cabin, and neither of them broke it as long as they lived. She wore the feather of the red-winged blackbird in her hair, and so was called Red Wing.”      

                                                                Forrest Carter, “The Education of Little Tree”

 

“You always got to look at the tips of the feathers. They’re like the rings in a tree. You can tell if a bird missed a day of feeding, or if it didn’t get enough water.”

                              Orlando Martinez, Champion Pigeon Racer, Smithsonian Magazine

 

“The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.”                                                                                   

                                                                                             William Blake

 

 

 

 

 

“At the moment, nobody wants these birds (Green cheeked amazons). There just isn’t sufficient demand. We have deliberately slowed down the breeding program because if you produce large numbers of birds from one pair, it unbalances the programme, and you get into a situation where the majority of the birds all come from one source.”

                     Roger Wilkinson, Chester Zoo UK, quote by Ron Toft, Parrots Magazine

 

       

“I’m the only parrot in the world who actually knows what she is talking about, rawk!”                                     Polynesia, Blue and Gold Macaw, from the film “Doctor Doolittle”                                         

                                                                                     

“As a group the Poicephalus parrots, like the African Gray Parrots, have a high vitamin A requirement. Like African grays, they will develop Vitamin A deficiency syndrome such as recurrent upper respiratory tract infections, oral abscessarion, sinusitis, and sinus abscessation.”  

                                                                                      David T. Dennison

 

“Some complex songs may include as many as 80 notes per second. Such sounds seem like a single continuous note to the human ear and can only be seen not to be so by examination of sound spectrograph recordings. Not surprisingly, if the bird can give such calls, it can also receive them. The speed of the auditory response of birds may be on the order of 10 times as fast as that of man.”               

                                “Birds, Their Life, Ways, World”, Reader’s Digest Association

 

“Among many breeders, the new bird is usually considered the most valuable. This is the wrong position. The birds already being taken care of are the most valuable.”

                                                                                           Jan Hooimeijer, DVM

 

“I came up here when they finally diagnosed my tumor. I thought I’d throw myself over the edge. I felt my skin was coming off. I screamed and screamed…”

There was this bird, perched right over there, and it looked at me real strange, like ‘Lady, what is your problem?’  Then I laughed. I felt so stupid that I laughed out loud. You know what? I think it was an angel.”              

                                                                              “The Doctor”, A Randa Haines Film

 

“In England, it is now nearly impossible to obtain genetically pure Gouldian Finches because of the craze for mutations of the Gouldian Finch. All available normal Gouldians are split to a mutation.”                                                    Graeme Hyde

 

 “At one point in my life I had 22 pairs of Moluccan Cockatoos. I know you cannot generalize. Each pair is different. They are so intelligent.”                Richard Porter

 

“The same force formed the sparrow

 That fashioned man, the king.

 The God of the whole gave a spark of soul

 To furred and feathered thing…”                                       

                                                                                     Ella Wheeler Wilcox