The Glendessary Jammers had a party today in Carpinteria. We sat outside in the deck overlooking the lemon and avocado orchards and the ocean. The sun was warm and felt real good. We had a potluck and played music while chickens pecked around in the yard and took dirt baths.

I was able to find something to eat at the potluck: sashimi and a greek salad that had cucumbers instead of lettuce. I was still hungry though. I could have eaten the pesto pate I brought but people were in the way and I couldn't reach it and by the time I thought I could go get some, it had melted in the sun and there were flies touching all the food. I threw it out.

I got sleepy in the sun. I talked to Steve, a guitar player. He wants to run the Red Rock Ultra next year. He said I should run it too next year. It's 50 miles! I can only run about 5. The furthest I walked in one day on the PCT was 36 miles.

This morning at breakfast we saw the wild parrots of Santa Barbara flying overhead. They are mostly lilac-crowned amazons with at least one double-yellow head amazon and the hybrid offspring. It's fun to hear them screeching overhead as they go by. They flew by twice.

Cow-eating bird

My parrot always wants some of whatever I am eating. She'll eat almost anything. Since I've been eating more meat, I've given her meat. She loves it. When in nature would a bird ever eat a cow? A fish I can understand, but a cow or a pig? She loves beef and pork. Today she got eggs. She ate it all up.

She has a fatty tumor. She has been eating one of these supposedly healthy extruded pellet diets, which is largely corn, along with some fresh corn, apples, grapes and other fruits like bananas. The vet said that was too much corn. I tried not giving her the fresh corn but I thought that was silly to withhold the fresh stuff and not the processed stuff. So I switched her to birdseed instead, which I've always been told is junk food for birds. I'm starting to wonder, like with the dietary advice we get that makes us fat and sick, if it's the same for parrots. Unfortunately I do not know what Aratinga acuticaudata actually eats in the wild. Let's hope it's something like cows, pigs, eggs and salmon, birdseed, nuts and fruit.

Sick bird

My parrot is very sick. She may not live through the night. For some reason, birds only get sick on the worst possible days. I drove 200 miles trying to see an avian specialist in Calabassas only to find out he went to Spain. There is nothing I can do now but wait until the bird clinic opens tomorrow.

I called a bird breeder who said my poor bird is probably egg-bound. She has not laid an egg for a decade. Why try to lay one now?

I've got her in a humid, hot place. I do not think she can pass the egg, however. Her abdomen is all blobby and grotesquely distorted. I hope she will live through the night. My eyes are tired from crying. People have come and gone in my life these last 19 years but my bird has always been there with me.

I found an injured sea gull today

I found a bird today while walking home. It was sitting on the curb. The poor thing was tangled in a fishing lure. It was a seagull.

I picked up the poor bird and tried to use the pay phone at La Bamba market. I didn't have my cellphone. I had a really hard time calling 411. I guess their operators get paid to process calls quickly, not to actually help anyone. So two out of three times I got the answer "no listing" and they hung up on me. The first time I called I got the number but I couldn't remember it because I had to go inside and get some change to make the call and by the time I got the change I had forgotten the number. Then the next two times the operators hung up on me.

I ended up asking a lady walking by and she surfed the internet with her phone and found the number for Wildlife Care Network. I waited for almost an hour. I couldn't get anybody inside the market to help me with the bird. I needed to put it in something so it wouldn't struggle in my arms. I'm sitting there with this giant white bird in one arm and nobody would help me get a box. I could only use torn up boxes out of the trash to put the bird in and I had to dig them out of the trash myself while holding this giant, struggling bird.

I finally got the bird into a couple of broken boxes and it finally calmed down a little bit. Finally the lady from Wildlife Care Network came with a real box and she took the bird.

The poor bird had a fishing lure that looked like a fish stuck in both its beak and one foot. There was a three-pronged hook at both ends of the lure, so one hook in the beak and one in the foot. It couldn't fly or do anything except struggle.

I wonder sometimes about the people in my neighborhood. They never seem to care anything about animals. This is the 2nd time I have tried to get them to help me with animals and neither time did any of them show the slightest interest at all. I blame the Catholic Church for telling people that animals don't have souls. I believe all creatures are sentient.

People are slow and stupid

People move too slowly. Even cars are too slow. Birds are so much better at getting somewhere fast.

I took my big bird to the vet today. On the way home I could tell she was very impatient about how long it was taking to go home. She's very aware of geography and can tell when she is getting close to home. I kept thinking, as I had to wait every block for another traffic light, how my big bird could have been home by now with just a few flaps of her wings. I needed oil sucked out of the ground, processed into gasoline, and wars fought to do what she can do on a few pieces of fruit and some nuts.

People are really inefficient. Birds do it right.

I am tired of living this life

I am so tired of my life. It feels hectic and stressful. People at work communicate so poorly. Emails are literally a game of "can you spot the differences?" That's how hard it is to find the part of the message to respond to. Some emails are literally mind reading exercises. Can you tell what this blank email was supposed to say? Verbal communication is frequently even less clear. I get yelled at for not knowing something nobody ever said anything to me about. Sometimes I feel like crying or throwing up because of the stress. Nobody at home cares. It's like living with my dad. "That's why they call it Work."

Coming home should be a place of peace and relaxation but it is not. I only get a few minutes a day to myself. Most of the time spent at home is spent having to pay attention to the TV so that I understand what the heck The Man is joking about or arguing with. I don't want to watch the TV. I want to read my email. But I can't. I rarely can read through an entire sentence without 20 interruptions.

And then there are the birds. Even if I get some time to myself I can't do anything with my hands or a telephone unless I hide in the bathroom or in a back room with the door securely shut. Even with the door shut, birds will follow me and sit outside the door trying to get in. I can rarely type or play musical instruments because birds have to sit on my hands all the time. It's frustrating. I can't read anything because they start to poop on me so I have to run over to the newspaper, or they sit on my reading material like a cat would so I can't see it.

I can see no end to this. In the US you have to work until you die. The age of pensions is long over. 401K savings are a joke. All your savings could be wiped out in one bad day on the stock market. I read somewhere that you can retire in Nepal with $50,000. You'd be living extremely frugally, but they say with $100K you can live comfortably. All I need is something between the two and I could escape this unending life of constant frustration. I could work a little here and there to supplement. It would be so much better than doing the same thing, enduring the same frustrations, day after day after day with no end in sight. I'd never get to hike the PCT ever again, which would be sad, but they have good hiking in Nepal.

Big birds are bad

Picture from M.C Bird and Exotic Rescue/Adoption Services, yeah a bird rescue because that's where they all end up eventually

We have an umbrella cockatoo. It seems that recently she may have finally gotten her full allotment of cockatoo hormones. She has suddenly become impossible for me to live with.

She chases me around the house trying to bite my shoes. I know it is because she watched me make them and she's now completely obsessed with my shoes. She also cannot stand it if I wear a hat and I wear a hat every day. She cannot stand my glasses. First she didn't like the leopard print glasses but now she doesn't like any glasses. Her whole life is organized around how she can get to me and bite my shoes, bite my hat, rip off my glasses and bite them. Sometimes she bites me instead, and her bite is very injurious.

I don't know what to do anymore. I hide in the bathroom each evening as it's the only place I can be safe.

Birds are bad news. Never get a big bird. If you must have a bird, get a little bird. My littler birds have all been very good. They don't pick their feathers, they don't run around biting me, they don't plan and scheme. Cockatoos are big birds and they should never be kept as pets.

Cute parrot movie

Really fun bird movie featuring the bird sanctuary where I worked briefly last year. Parrots talking, dancing and singing.

Making better use of the "disposable" plastic in my life

I reuse bags as much as I can. I used to buy pre-made frozen bird food for my pet birds. The bags it came in were so heavy-duty I started buying the ingredients instead and making the bird food myself. I also reuse other bags that stuff comes in as much as possible. Recently I learned that you can fuse plastic bags together with an iron and sew the pieces together to make things. I use a cloth bag for grocery shopping, but as I walk to work I find plastic bags in the street every day. I'm going to sew a backpack out of plastic bags and be the envy of all my environmentalist hiking buddies.

I also reuse plastic bottles. Instead of Nalgenes I use Gatorade or similar bottles. I've got a Naked Juice bottle I was given for free in Stehekin Washington while I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I drank the stuff inside and still use the bottle. I also found a nice 1-liter bottle on the trail. I washed it and used it on my trip and still have it. I rarely buy plastic drink bottles myself since I don't like caffeine or corn syrup.

I'm going to start carrying a set of eating utensils with me and I already bring a cup if I'm going somewhere for coffee. A lady came on one of my Sierra Club hikes with her sandwich wrapped in an air-tight, reusable wrapper. It was some kind of red-checked cloth coated in plastic. I might try to make something similar, minus the coating. I might make some cloth produce bags, too, for the farmer's market and bulk foods at the grocery.

As a backpacker I have been wondering if perhaps a woven reed mat would work as well as a foam pad. I've been thinking about weaving one myself out of cattails or tule someday. It might be too heavy, but it wouldn't hurt to try. I once took a basketry class. I might be able to figure it out.

But I'm only one person in a sea of 6 billion people. The amount of plastic everywhere in Mumbai alone -- knee deep in many places -- is very depressing. I wish more people cared and not just sensitive white American bird-lovers like myself.

Birds should have rights

I've been thinking about this picture since I saw it on Saturday in the Los Angeles Times. You see, I have never had children. Instead I have shared my life with birds. Right now I have two budgies, a conure and a big white umbrella cockatoo.

Birds always look at you with one eye, just like the one in the oil spill (you might click to see the picture full size). They are also incredibly human-like and intelligent. I believe a blazing intelligence is apparent in the pelican's eye just as much as it is in the eyes of my own birds who peer at me with their little wheels cranking as they figure out ways to lie, cheat, manipulate and steal from me. This bird, of course, doesn't want to steal anything. It just wants to get away but cannot.

I think that birds should have lawyers. If they had lawyers, the lawyers would be able to argue that they have the right to full bodily integrity, that they should not have their lives and homes ruined by oil spills, that they should have real food to eat, not plastic bags, caps and lighters, that they should have clean water to drink and fresh air to breathe, and that they should have clean wetlands and intact old-growth forests to raise their babies. If lawyers argued for the rights of birds, we'd all be better off.

If birds had access to lawyers, they'd probably succeed where environmentally-minded humans have failed. Because the compensation a bird would want is not financial but simply their natural birdness fully intact. It's what we humans should want, but we've long forgotten what our natural humanness is and can no longer ask for it. I believe hiking a long trail gives you a glimpse of what that might be, and that might be why it is so hard to come back to a world that as a matter of routine produces such horrors as the image above.

Bad dog

Yesterday I was out walking, on my way home, and a big dog came bounding up to me. I was scared by it. It had all its manly parts. The dog looked kind of wild-eyed and I thought it might bite me. I've been bitten by dogs before.

The dog jumped up on me, but didn't bite me. He bounded all around, panting loudly and running up and down the street, kind of charging me, trying to get me to play or something, then running ahead, then stopping and lunging back at me with that wild-eyed look. I was afraid and annoyed by this dog. It followed me all the way home despite my efforts to get it to leave me alone.

When I got home, my downstairs neighbor who has a tiny little chihuahua, opened her door and the rude, manly dog burst inside. Soon he and little Cheeto were having a growling and sniffing thing going and I was afraid this rude big dog would hurt little Cheeto. Finally my neighbor was able to grab the dog's collar so we could read the tag. I hadn't been able to do that because the dog moved too much and I was afraid to touch him because I have been bitten trying to grab a dog's collar before.

I phoned the owners, who were not home, and left a message. I tied the rude dog to the fence in my yard since I don't have an enclosed yard. The dog wasn't happy with that and barked. My bird, who sits outside on nice days, was not happy about that either and yelled at the dog.

So I took the dog on the rope and walked it back to the address on its tag. The dog was very ill-behaved. When I used to have a dog as a child, all you had to do was say HEEL and the dog would walk by your left side. Whenever you came to a stop, the dog would sit down. This is the way dogs ought to behave. This dog did none of that. He pulled at the leash so hard the slip-knot nearly choked him to death. He attempted to run over and fight with other dogs. One of these dogs was also loose and I feared there would be a big fight. Why so many loose dogs? I felt like calling the pound. Maybe they could come and give this rude beast a little snip-snip.

When I arrived at the address, it was not the house I thought it might have been. There is a house next to the dog's house where there are often little puppies that look kind of like this dog. There haven't been puppies for a while. But it wasn't the puppy house he belonged to. I tied the dog to the house on a railing with some shade and left a message with the owner where I left their dog.

This morning as I walked down the same street, more dogs came chasing after me. Different ones. Also loose. I decided on my way home to not walk on that street anymore. Too many bad dogs.

I guess I'm just not a dog person. I'll stick with birds. Even when they are bad they aren't as bad as bad dogs.

Here There and Everywhere

Today I read the book Here There and Everywhere, a story about a Lorikeet parrot captured for the pet trade and then released back into the wild. It is a childrens book and intended to provide instruction about parrot conservation and issues of the pet trade and keeping parrots as captive pets. The story is told mostly from the bird's point of view.

While reading it, I couldn't help but feel a sense of familiarity. While hiking the PCT I felt much at home, as though I were living out a truer existence. It felt right to be outdoors in the wilderness, using my body strenuously each day, walking purposefully, and meeting others of my "tribe" along the way. I even had a wild name to go along with my wild way of life. Then I came home. The feeling is much like becoming a captive bird.

It is not natural to live surrounded by noisy cars and freeways with nature so very far away. It is not natural to be so terribly domesticated, perfumed, coiffed and sedentary.

Do we all, somewhere deep inside ourselves, call out to our flocks still living somewhere in the wild?

Being a producer in a consumer culture

I found this interesting article online today. Ten More Quick Ways to Make Money. The article excites me not because it's a get rich quick scheme but because it speaks well to the complaints I have about our culture. Complaints I can never quite articulate well. We are all consumers, not producers. Our consumption not only ruins the planet but it is unfulfilling. I think this article does a good job of shining light on the unfulfilling part of it. Our culture wants to make us dependent and weak. If my hike showed me anything it's that I feel a craving to be strong and independent.

I love Web development, but sometimes it is too abstract. What real value does it provide to society? Not much, really. I enjoy it because it is creative and involves my mind. It pays well, too, at least sometimes. But it is not tangible.

Doing Web development day after day, month after month, 8 hours a day I end up feeling like my life is passing me by without meaning. It's one reason I left my job and hit the trail. When I returned to the trail it was months before I could bring myself to do Web development again. After living in a tangible world, doing something so abstract was difficult. I turned to organic gardening and working in retail. I wanted to dig and sweep and move rocks and dust shelves. It seemed more real.

At the bird store where I work, I recently sold a tree stand. It is a stand for birds made of a manzanita branch stuck on a rolling base so that it forms a little tree for the bird to sit on. The stand cost $250. The builder probably made $100 or so. My boss says the builder is a flake. I was thinking that maybe I could make a tree stand. I need to learn how to use tools to build the base or else find something to use for the base. I have tried to build a tree stand in the past. Using a pot full of plaster of paris works but it does not roll on wheels and the pot gets full of food and poo that the bird drops. A saucer for a plant works as long as it is strong and not too heavy. These can be hard to find and expensive. The tree stands the pet store sells looks like the base is made of kitchen counter top material. I would have to learn to use power tools to cut kitchen counter top material. I am afraid of power tools.

Another thing I've been thinking of making are bird toys. I could find things at Art From Scrap and use papier mache and other items to make fun bird toys. I can test them on my finicky birds. Too many bird toys are made of plastic or just big chunks of wood. Birds need to forage for their food. This activity is called enrichment. The bird store sells papier mache toys that you can hide food inside. I could make those, too. I could make other toys, too, that are more than just chunks of wood and plastic. Art From Scrap ought to have some good ideas for me.

The idea isn't to make a million bucks on bird accessories but to use wasted time spent in front of the TV or the Internet to make a little extra money. I could spend that otherwise wasted time making something tangible. Then I would feel like I'm not just living in my head being abstract all day, depending on corporate nannydom for my livelihood. It would be one more thing to add to my list that makes money, earns me a little more independence from Corporate America and brings me one step closer to the freedom I seek. The freedom to fly the trail again.

Lessons from the pet store

I work at a local pet store that sells only birds and bird-related supplies. They do not sell a lot of birds, and this is on purpose. Birds are very difficult to live with and people often want to buy birds for the wrong reasons or without doing enough research. Then they see how difficult birds are to live with and abuse, neglect or relinquish them. Rather than add more birds to the world, the pet store prefers to support the birds already out there and help relinquished birds find new homes.

The birds that the pet store raises and sells are all small birds, the kinds that are easier to live with. They have a bird sanctuary full of big unwanted birds for those people who think they can handle a cockatoo, African grey or Amazon. People who think they want a bird like that have to go through a lot of hoops to be approved to take one of these large, wild animals home. This ensures the birds won't come back again. Some of the birds will probably live at the sanctuary forever, especially the ones with unpredictable temperaments or the ones who have pulled out all their feathers. The sanctuary will sometimes provide the latter birds with a little sweater to wear.

I do not particularly like working in retail but the pet store offers a unique experience because I get to work with the animals. Yesterday I helped groom the birds. My job was to hold them while my boss did the actual grooming. Holding them involves putting a choke-hold around their necks so they cannot bite me or the groomer. They are not actually choked. I hold them around the neck under the mandible so that they can't tilt their heads down to bite. I also have to hold their bodies so that they won't wiggle too much and accidentally get a toe chopped off. Grooming involves cutting their toenails, trimming their wings (if that is desired) and sometimes using a dremmel tool on their beaks.

Yesterday we groomed an African gray that had had a bad experience with grooming and boarding at a different facility. No one knows what happened to the bird there, but the bird went into the facility happy and came out terrified. It has taken four years for the bird to learn to step up again.

The groomer had to struggle to get the bird out of the cage. The bird saw the towel coming and started screaming a horrible cry that showed the bird was terrified. He fought coming out of his travel cage with all his might, which only made the experience extra traumatic for him. He lost two feathers in the struggle.

He cried the whole time we held him down. Something about his cries were so heartbreaking that my eyes teared up. What had they done to him to make him so terrified? I wished we could communicate to him that he would be ok, that we would not hurt him. I tried to comfort him with my voice, but we are not the same species. How could he understand?

His nails were half an inch too long. Normally only a tiny bit is cut off the nail. We cut a large curly-cue of nail off. He will be able to grasp normally again. We hoped our efforts did not further traumatize him and set him back on his progress toward trusting people again.

After we groomed the African gray, the groomer gave a Moluccan cockatoo a bath in the kitchen sink. My job was to blow dry the bird. Fortunately the bird enjoyed blow drying. Cockatoos love attention so having someone fuss and touch the bird all over and blow warm air was something this bird enjoyed. As the bird became nearly dry, he seemed to enjoy being hugged and cuddled as I dried under his wings. I enjoyed hugging and cuddling the beautiful salmon and yellow bird, too.

Meanwhile, Dolly, the resident Moluccan cockatoo, who has been hazing me since I started working there, could only look on with hatred and jealousy. If only Dolly would quit hazing me she might get attention from me, too. Instead, she tries to bite me whenever I come by. She doesn't really bite. She just tries to show me she's boss by faking taking a swipe at me. So I wave a stick at her to show her she is not the boss. She runs into her cage and we give each other the evil eye. Funny thing is she never treated me like this when I was a customer. She would let me pet her like she lets all the other customers do.

These are the things you have to deal with when you deal with birds. That is why they are so hard to live with. You never know what kind of bird you will end up with. Will it be fearful and distrusting? Will it bite huge painful holes in you (that has also happened to me too many times to count)? Will it demand constant lovey-dovey attention as it tries to suck you into a vortex you can never fill? Even if the bird has a perfect personality it will likely destroy your carpet, doors, precious personal items and more.

At lunch I continued reading the book I checked out of the library called Writing Down the Bones. There is a story in there of a man who worked as a remote backcountry ranger. He was so remote and alone he spent two months not wearing any clothes. One day he was out picking berries and felt a tongue on his back. He turned around and a deer was licking him! He and the deer went back to picking and eating berries side-by-side. He felt he had reached a state of Oneness with nature at that moment sharing a berry bush with a deer.

I am not naked at the pet store, but I get little chances to make a connection to the animals. It is a similar feeling like making the connection to the Earth when I was on the Pacific Crest Trail. My experience out there showed me at a deep level that I am a creature of the Earth like the birds and other animals. We are all one. If we humans would stop seeing ourselves as separate from nature I am certain that nature would provide for us like it provides for the wild birds and the deer. Instead we separate ourselves and become like pet cockatoos: insatiable vortexes demanding more.

We are not meant to be separate, us and nature. That is one reason we try to artificially add animals to our lives. We are seeking that connection to Oneness we've lost. It works on some level, but the animal ends up having to make similar sacrifices to the ones we have made. As we have separated from the great Oneness, we have both become a little diminished, a little crazy with repetitive behaviors, violence and materialism. Our wants grow disproportionate. We both forget how to let nature provide for our needs and in forgetting become destructive. We both become little black holes of need that try to fill up our wants with artificial love instead of the Oneness that is available if only we stay wild. We humans have become captive wild animals.

Ariel the Umbrella Cockatoo Helps Herself to Avocados

It is said just about everywhere that parrots should not eat avocados. I've always been suspicious of this because I believe much of the fear of avocados out there in regards to who should or should not eat it comes more from people's own fear of avocados than from actual studies.

The reason I mention this is because recently, Ariel, our umbrella cockatoo, has decided to eat avocados. We have a basket of them on the kitchen counter and she keeps hopping over and taking a bite. Once she sets her mind on something it's rather difficult to get her to stop.

I never allow our birds to eat avocados because it is better to be safe than sorry. I have never seen wild birds, like crows, eat them. But so far Ariel has taken a couple of bites and hasn't dropped dead, despite eating the skin and the dark green flesh.

So I decided to look up on the Interwebs any information about this. I found this excerpt from The Caique Site:

Avocado. There are studies showing avocado (Persia Americana) is harmful when fed to cockatiels (37, 85) . There are a number of cultivars, and toxicity may be cultivar specific. Clipsham has written about the possible toxicity of avocado in birds (24) noting its toxicity in ostriches (18) . However, Smith noted that feral flocks of parrots in Florida partake of them on a regular basis and a Florida aviculturalist who kept his birds in an old avocado orchard where his birds had access to them never experienced any difficulty (88) . Toxicity may be related to bird size or typical diet with cockatiels and budgerigars being more sensitive because they are smaller and seed eaters (106) . To be safe, though, it is porbably best to avoid feeding your parrot avocado, especially their peel, seeds and branches.

I tried to look up her footnote 88, Smith, G. A. 2000. Dogma. Magazine of the Parrot Society 34:25-26., but didn't find it.

In any case, I'm not going to start feeding her avocados, and I'm not going to allow her to help herself if at all possible, but I"m not going to lose too much sleep over it. I have to admit, my 20 year old birds have eaten all kinds of bad things, so a tiny little bit of avocado probably isn't enough to kill them.

Parrots like cheese

Why do birds like cheese? Right now all the birds are happily eating pieces of cheddar cheese. One of them is eating a piece almost as big as her head. When in nature would birds ever get cheese? Why do they all like it so much?

They are just like children. Or dogs. They love food that is bad for them. They snub the food that is good for them. If you don't know what parrots should eat, it is not solely bird seed. In the wild they eat natural things that grow on trees. They'll eat whatever is in season at that time. Some tree is in bloom so they'll eat all the flowers. Some tree is in fruit and they'll eat all the fruit. If they are ground feeders, they'll eat grasses, insects or grubs, or even seeds. Very few birds have seeds as their sole diet.

One thing I like to do is watch the crows throughout the year. When I see them feeding on some tree I look to see what it is they are after. Then I collect it as a special treat for my parrots. I've found pecan trees growing in town this way. Macadamias, too, although the crows don't eat them because you can't get them open without a hammer. One thing they like are the little red seeds inside the magnolia blossoms as they go to seed and fall off the tree. I have to wait for the crows to get tired of them before I can find the "cones" full of seeds. Ariel, our cockatoo, loves them.

It's important to watch what the wild birds do. There are some trees nearby that have these giant seed pods that fall into the street. I've never seen a crow eating these. So I don't even attempt to give them to the birds. We have avocado trees. Mammals eat the avocados but birds never do. It's important not to just give birds whatever looks like food. Make sure real birds eat it first.

I feed my parrots an artful bowl of food each morning. There is a mix that contains cooked noodles and whole grains with peas and carrots (Parrot Pilaf from Menagerie), some fruit, maybe some raw corn, possibly a cut up carrot with the greens, a special cookie (Coconutty Cookies from Menagerie), a nut (either a walnut, an almond or a pecan), a half-teaspoon of safflower seeds, a Nutriberry if we have them, a small quantity of extruded pellet food made for birds (I found some that doesn't have corn as the main ingredient) and whatever else might look good. The food is always good enough for me to eat, with the exception of the Nutriberries and extruded pellets.

Then there is the begging. Squeaky must have pieces of bagel and almond butter or flakes of cereal if that's what we're having for breakfast. Tony picks roses from the garden and when they fade, Squeaky eats them (we don't spray or use chemicals in the garden). Fergie like to beg for dinner. She'll eat nearly anything she can hold in her foot. Ariel doesn't like "people food". I guess she doesn't realize people eat passion fruits, apples and corn, too. These silly birds will drink wine if you let them. I'll let them have a sip but not too much.

My birds are 20 years old, 15, and 12, so I think I'm doing something right. Life with birds is always interesting. After all these years, I scarcely remember life without them.