Live from Austin!

Introducing Chester

YouTube has started offering HD video. I’m not sure it’s really HD, but it’s way better than the crappy pixelated video they used to offer.

I re-encoded the video of our new parakeet meeting Chester for the first time. I’ve uploaded it in HD. The result is much clearer. Now to re-do all my other movies…

For anyone else hoping to do the same, the magic settings for QuickTime / iMovie are: 1280×720 progressive, MPEG-4 H.264 1024kbps, AAC 224kbps. It takes a while for YouTube to work on the video before the "watch in HD" link becomes available.

The ‘keet now has a name: Lola.

Baby girl had her first bath, after Chester showed her how.

Although she’s hand-tame, she still has trust issues–if she’s in the cage and doesn’t want to come out, she’ll run away and hide in the corner when you approach. Ah well, eventually she’ll learn that I don’t do the "grab the bird and make it come out" thing.

I got another play gym, a larger one. I also cleared enough space on my desk that I can put both of them next to each other. I’m hoping both ‘keets will spend the afternoon with me.

She’s eating well; in fact, she seems to spend a lot more time eating than Chester does. She already looks larger than when we got her, especially in the evenings when she’s content and fluffed up.

She has reintroduced Chester to the joys of sitting on my shoulders, which was wonderful until they decided to stop preening each other and preen me instead. I guess I need to carefully remove any random neck or ear hairs, and make sure I’ve shaved recently…

We still need a name for her, so suggestions are welcomed. Something cute and slightly comical, that works well as a counterpart to "Chester". Perhaps a name related to green-and-yellow-ness, or to climbing and clowning.

We got a call from Gallery of Pets saying that they had taken delivery of two hand-raised budgies. We drove up yesterday evening to check them out. We came home with a new bird, a small temporary cage, some new toys, and some new veggie-enriched food.

The new bird is very young, barely fully-fledged. Her cheek patches are still stick feathers, and her vent is bare. She seems to be a climber. Because she was reared by a small breeder, she’s already hand-tame and used to finding food in a cage, which should allow us to start introducing the two birds this week rather than having to tame her first.

She’s much more active than Chester was when we first got him, less scared of her new environment.

Photos and video on Flickr!

(Note that in general, if you get a new bird you should quarantine it for 30 days in case it has any illness that can be passed on to the rest of your flock. In this case, since new ‘keet is from an independent breeder and the same store, seems good and healthy, and Chester is robustly healthy too, we’re risking early introduction.)

Chester has continued to be well-behaved, so we’ve let him keep his flight feathers. He flies around, but he lands in places we’ve taught him are safe–windowsills, his play gym, and so on.

He now likes to come out of his cage most days. He’ll typically want to sit with me for an hour or so when I’m working.

Weekends, we’ve been sitting on our back deck with him, by taking his cage outside. Sunlight is good for parakeets: they are tetrachromat and can see ultraviolet, so it helps their mood. Also, when they preen, they spread a chemical from their preening gland on their feathers; sunlight then causes a reaction which produces vitamin D, which they then lick back up next time they preen.

As far as training goes, Chester will now fly to my arm when I call him. He’s also good about being taken back to his cage when necessary.

We’ve purchased a larger cage, a flight cage big enough for 3 budgies. We’re going to get him a budgie friend. Also, a lamp with a daylight bulb for winter, when it’s too cold to spend time outside.

Chester the parakeet has been molting for several weeks now. Shortly after he started, I decided to collect the feathers. A pillow is out of the question, but I think I want to put them on a black background and photograph them. It’s quite amazing how many feathers a small bird can shed; at the worst point, about 20 per day.

Molting is a tough time for birds, and the process has made him itchy and cranky. He basically wants to be left in his cage, and has even pecked at my hand when I’ve taken him out. I’m a bit conflicted–since he wants to be left alone, maybe I should do that, but everything I read tells me that parakeets need out-of-cage time every day.

It might help if he was interesting in bathing. Yes, budgerigars are desert birds, but would it kill him to take a bath at least once a week? Mind you, today I misted him from a squirt bottle and he actually seemed to be into it for a while, or at least he didn’t climb the walls to get away from the water like he used to.

Chester just ate from my hand for the first time.

The parakeet finally came home with us on Monday, as he seemed to have settled down to life without other birds in his cage. He traveled from the pet store in a little cardboard box with air holes in. Unfortunately, the store is the other side of Austin, so by the time he got here he was huddled in the corner of the box, terrified.

We returned him to the cage, and set up his food and water. He spent Monday evening in what looked like a state of shock or misery, his head low. He didn’t really move or make a sound, and we felt rather concerned for him.

This morning I woke him when I went down to make coffee. He was more alert, but still very quiet. He had a morning handling from rothko, and we weighed him to check he was maintaining his weight. A mere 28g, but that’s apparently healthy.  He spent most of the afternoon sitting quietly. When I checked on him he would occasionally yawn, or fluff himself up.

I think he was basically recuperating, because after I finished work he suddenly perked up. Half way through my exercise break he suddenly started chirping loudly. He wandered around the cage, played with his toys a little, then went to the food dishes and started eating.

I think he spent a good couple of hours filling his face. At one point he paused and went and got a drink, then returned to the food; this resulted in his beak getting the dietary supplement powder stuck all over it, which was pretty amusing.  He sat and digested for a bit and watched me. After a while longer he took some of the crunchy food (seed and fruit-flavored pellets), and sat and munched at it noisily on the upper perch.

By around 9:30 he was looking sleepy and content. So I’m feeling better about his general health. Hopefully tomorrow he’ll be back to his normal self, clambering around like he did in the pet store.

We’ve been wanting some sort of pet for a couple of years now; rothko more than me. We both love cats, but with my cat allergy that just wasn’t an option. (I’ve heard about a breed of Russian cat that supposedly lacks one of the genes that leads to the salivary protein that triggers the allergy in humans; however, they’re a pretty rare breed, so I haven’t encountered one I could test.)

I’ve grown to like dogs. I hated them as a kid, but I really liked Martha’s beagle. We considered an Italian greyhound. I gave one a thorough allergy test, sniffing deeply. No problems on that score. But it would have fallen onto me to walk the dog, and I just couldn’t deal with having to pick up feces.

For a while we thought we might get a couple of ferrets. We bought magazines, read books, and gave the matter careful consideration. Certainly they’re cute, entertaining, and I like all kinds of weasels. We almost went the ferret route, but ultimately we decided against it. The main problem is that our house just isn’t even close to ferret-proof, and it would be a massive adjustment to make it so. Plus, they need very hands-on constantly supervised playtime every day, and we couldn’t come up with a good location for the cage. Overall, I just didn’t think we would be able to do a good enough job of looking after them.

Then rothko got enthusiastic about birds.

I have to say that initially, I had no enthusiasm for them at all. But then we looked after Jennifer and Chris’s canary while they were away for a couple of weeks, and the little guy’s cheerful cheeping grew on me. He seemed to love the noises the Wii made while I was playing Super Mario Galaxy. I’d wake him in the morning and chat to him each time I walked past. He’d flutter around, tweet back, and eye me curiously.

We started with the research again, and soon started to focus on parakeets; specifically, American budgerigars. Unlike canaries, you can let them out of the cage, have them sit on your finger or shoulder, let them play on toys, and so on. They’re basically miniature parrots, they like to be talked to, and many learn to talk back–it’s not unknown for a parakeet to have a vocabulary of a couple of hundred words. They also like music and occasional gentle grooming.

There was a minor problem, though. Budgerigars were a huge fad in the 1970s in England, and even the word "budgie" immediately reminded me of the 70s–and not in a good way.

However, it turns out that there are two kinds of budgerigar : the English budgie is the larger bird with the fluffed up inset inbred face that I find unattractive, while the American budgerigar, more often called a parakeet, is more svelte and avian. Also, there are colors other than the yellow, green and blue stereotypical shades that make me think of flared trousers.

So, we looked at parakeets. We got a nice large cage. And last week, we went to a store that had a new shipment of birds, and selected a blue-gray one who seemed to have a reasonably nice boyish disposition. (The males are more likely to talk, but it’s impossible to sex them until adulthood unless you get them DNA tested.)

The store likes to keep the birds paired up while they get used to their new cage, and have you visit them for a few days to handle them and have them get to know you. I was a little concerned about our ability to tame him, as initially he was fairly flighty and bitey. However, by the time we left on Friday he would sit on a finger for ten minutes at a stretch while we talked to him, so I think he’s going to be fine.