One Dog and Two Birds

A lot of people visit our site, looking for tips on adopting birds, mostly conures of course. Though we have been meaning to write about adopting birds, we can tell you this right now: It is not easy to keep two of them busy.

Pepper is a quite girl and hardly ever makes any noise, she calls to us if she wants food or need to go to bed. However, Nikko is a entirely different story. He is young, very healthy and has loads of energy. It is a challenge to come up with ideas that would help him burn off some of that excess energy, if he is not tired, is directed towards me (mostly with anger). Nikko did not grow up with toys and doesn’t care for them. I have tried to get him interested in them, but we haven’t had any luck yet. However, he likes to shred (Pepper too) and thats one way to keep him busy.

I gave him this card board box, about a month back. Pepper tends to keep away from new things, whereas Nikko loves to investigate them. So, as he came near, I threw in some seeds inside the box (I had cut a hole for him to get in) and in a few minutes he was inside.

The first day, he shredded all the flaps of the box inside and threw the box off the cage a couple of times, and scattered shredded cardboard all over the place.

Pepper joined him from day 2, she liked to shred from the outside and did not want to venture in.

Watch out for happened to the box in 6 days!!!

Nikko and Pepper love peanuts. Equivalent to Amy’s Kong, we have a peanut holder for the birdies, that stimulates them and they play around with it to get to the yummy nuts. Pepper usually tries to reach and grab with her beak, and uses one of her legs to hold it steady, while she works her way through.

Nikko gets really excited when he sees peanuts even before I get to put them in the toy. He runs around the cage, trying different ways to get to them. His best shot on it is by hanging upside down. I will go for anything that keeps him busy.

The birdies are not too happy that all of the recent posts have been about Amy. So, here is a short note on Pepper!

Pepper is scared of water, other than whats in her bowl for drinking. She can me a running water sound, like gurgling and will do it when she sees us drinking liquid stuff or when she wants more water. Sometimes when she is really excited, she will stir her water with her beak, thats about all her fun with water. Any other time, she hates to come in contact with water.

Due to her feather plucking behavior, however, we try to get her wet, at least once every few days, to moisturize her dry skin and reduce whatever irritations she might have. Once a week, she gets to jump in the shower with one of us, and either get wet from the spray or have a full bath, with a misty spray. In the first instance, she just freezes and waits for us to get done. Leave her alone in the tub, its worse than dealing with a kid, who doesn’t want to take shower! Oh, and then there is the arch enemy - spray bottle!

Once she is done however, she like to be wrapped in a towel and held tight.. its one of those I am holding a baby in my hand moments.. Here she is all snuggled in..

It is also a lot easier for us to keep track of her feathers when she is wet - like the new ones that is coming out and those that she has pulled out.

We are hoping that as summer sets in full swing, she might get a little more water friendly!

We have pet names for all our pets. Amy is ‘My Girl’, Nikko is the ‘Sweety Pie’ and Pepper is ‘My Baby’. During the holiday breaks of last year, I came across Ollie’s Parrot Perch when searching for bird boarding places. I was impressed by her Parrot Rescue - A Place to Call Home and wanted to help. By this point, Nikko had been with us for about 4 months, and we have been working with him pretty well, doing clicker-training with him and gotten very comfortable handling and living with a bird. We were thinking about adopting another Conure, especially one needs to be rehabilitated. As we browsed through the site, Miko, caught our attention. Miko was a male blue crowned conure who has cage aggression issues and needed someone to work with him outside his cage. He was pretty much naked and will remain so, due to the continuous feather destruction.

When we went to check him out however, Sandi, was holding Pepper, a 11-year old Nanday Conure on her hand and he was all too excited. Though he had his wings clipped, he was so full of energy and fluttered around. He was also mostly naked, from plucking out his feathers due to separation anxiety and had been at the center for about a month. We fell in love with him immediately and decided to bring him home. We had already spoken to Sandi and since we did not want to spend a lot of money in adopting the bird, Sandi allowed us to ‘foster’ Pepper for a lot less. For all purposes, he is our Baby now. Though we weren’t sure we always thought that Pepper was a boy. Well, we recently found out that Pepper is a baby girl, and she started to lay eggs. We have been working on her and she is not plucking out her feathers anymore. She has two new tail feathers and a few more on her shoulders and the back. Pepper is easy to work with, sweet and is sooo adorable. She is not as needy as Nikko, but enjoys our company a lot. We can’t wait for the day to see her covered in feathers!

The above picture was taken when we brought her home - she was not happy that only I was typing on the keyboard and wanted to join in the fun! It is so hard to get pictures of her, as she thinks that the Camera is a ‘Pepper-eating-monster’ and attacks it with all her might!

Thanks to Gomer & Opie at Dogs Aye View, we got tagged to write about 8 unusual / funny / secret things about our kids - Amy, Nikko and Pepper!

Since we haven’t introduced Pepper yet, the list starts with her. Pepper is a 11-year old Nanday Conure. Here are some tit bits about her and Nikko.

• We always thought Pepper was a boy since we got her - till two weeks back, when she started laying eggs. She is now sitting on two (dead) eggs.

• Pepper doesn’t like to take a bath - she freezes when wet. However, she likes to put her beak in the water cup and stir it and play. Nikko on the other hand, will jump into a pie plate with water!

• Pepper is good with mimicking. She makes the sound of running water, when she sees us drink water from a glass. Pepper also imitates the sound of our laughs and laughs with us!

• Pepper is also a fearless climber - she figured out to walk on the window sill, climb down the curtain to the recliner and get to us on the couch. She is glad that Nikko cant make it farther that the window sill.

• Pepper likes to shred - we cover her cage bottom with shredded paper and her sleep cage with newspaper, and she is content to be busy for hours with them.

• Nikko is so protective of us (mostly Shankar) and has attacked me when I got too close to my husband! He has dive-bombed Amy and attacks almost all of her toys. He doesn’t like stuffed animals especially.

• Nikko loves our bed. He gets sooo excited when he comes into the bedroom, and runs around / inside the sheets, making these cute sounds, like talking to himself.

• Nikko knows when Shankar comes home from work. He will sit on top of the cage or inside and watch the road for Shankar. The moment he sees him on the other side of the road, he will start his joyous screaming and run to the spot on the top of his cage closest to the door. He secretly thinks he is a dog

We are tagging Spencer at The Adventures of Spencer blog. We will soon write on 8 unusual things about Amy! Thanks Gomer & Opie!