Lost a Bird.....

An archived photo of one of my cockatiels.  The bird had lifted the door and escaped, flying around the room and finding a place to land on the window slats on a very ice covered outside window.  I lost my female cockatiel yesterday from injuries on one of her wings.  She had apparently flapped down into a perch pole and got it caught between the side of a cage and the rod.  The reaction of that kind of bird is to wildly flap her wings to regain her balance.  That process caused her to tear off feathers and skin from the top round part of her wings.  She did this two or three weeks ago.

She did start to heal up and new feathers did start to grow out in places but she just couldn’t get healed up fast enough.  The area was just too large for her to completely get over her damage.  Of the different cockatiels that I have had, the three in the cage were brothers and a sister.  I have had them for a long time.  I am thinking that I have had them for more than 15 years maybe 20..  I will have to research it sometime.

 I received the parents originally form a student whose mother wanted them out of the house as they were making too much of a mess in the room she kept them.  I kept the parents in school for a few years and then one summer when I brought them home, I just kept them at home.  The parents nested in a nest box and gave me two hatchings in a four month period.  Two birds hatched out first and then a couple of months later they hatched out three more.  The last three are the ones that I still had until loosing the one yesterday. I had given a pair of young ones to a friend from school at the time reducing the number of seven birds to five.  Even though I bought a large cage the female still managed to hurt itself.  That is how I have lost others as the would fall to the bottom of a cage and break something.

This is another shot of one of them which had escaped.  The cockatiel are friendly and each has a personality.  The female that I lost was the queen of the cage and she pushed her brothers around a lot.  She was always the first to get to eat and the two brothers always yielded her some space.  I could hear the brothers calling for her yesterday and they do seem to know who was in their group. They tend to peck beaks towards each other to know who is who.

It is Monday and I am trying not to do much today.  I need to get a spark plug for my snowblower and there are a few mundane things that get cleaned on Mondays.  It is still cold but it looks like we might get above freezing this afternoon for a few hours.  I hope everyone will have a good day.  Thanks for stopping by today.