Felicity Sophia - the happy and wise one

I'm going to spend a little time blogging today. I don't know how much I'll get done but I have loads of books to talk about. However, this one is going to be devoted to my newest baby. As my mother says, I am quickly on my way to being the old lady in the shoe, only my children are animals.

I wasn't planning on another animal and this wasn't an impulse buy but here she is anyway...my newest love:

I'm not a very good photographer and I was standing under her, so while these show what she looks like, they don't show her personality. This little girl is a handful. I remember Aurora being a handful when she was a puppy (she still is sometimes) but not like this! WOW! It's like I brought a human baby in the house. Except you can't lock a human baby in the cage when you leave or get mad because it's bedtime and she's snippy (the main reason I don't have children! hahahaha). Of course, she'll never take away the crown from the Queen of bedtime snippiness: Lucina. The only difference is her beak is much bigger! She didn't draw blood last night, I don't think she would have unless I pushed the issue, but she sure did bite me. "What did you do to this beautiful creature?" I hear you wondering. I tried to cuddle. I swear. She loves to cuddle, most times. But it was 9:15 and obviously that is past bedtime. I was late getting to cleaning last night and she was on top of the cage playing with toys (or destroying with amazing ferocity, I should say) while I cleaned and got them ready for night-night. I picked her up to cuddle a little before covering them for the night. She reached toward me like she was gonna give me kisses (she gives the sweetest kisses) and bit the fire out of lip, then turned and did the same to my hand. Little bitch. In you go. hahahaha. Certainly not happy at night time and obviously all wisdom on my part has gone out the window. I'm lucky she's not a Cockatoo or a Macaw. I might have lost my bottom lip.

"What is she?" I hear you asking. She is a Black-Headed Caique (KI-eek). They derive their name from their white breast and belly which has a ruffled looked. A ruffled, white dress shirt is called a caique. They are little birds with large personalities. They are like a large parrot stuck in a small body. However, their small-ness is misleading too. Here's a good comparison. Cockatiels, like my Lucina, tend to be 10-14 inches long. This includes the amazing tail. Lucina was weighed this week and is 110 grams (about average for cockatiels). I haven't measured her because unless I have help, it's impossible but I'm sure she fits in this category. Caiques, like Felicity, tend to be 9-11 inches, but they don't have that extra long tail. So, she kinda looks as if she's the same size as Lucina but get this: Caiques weigh 150-160 grams! That's a huge difference when you're that little. And I can certainly feel it when I pick them up. Her head is also much larger than Lucina's (and therefore a much larger beak). I'm not sure exactly what Felicity weighs, but as a good birdy mom should, I'll be getting a scale soon. I'm trying to figure out how I can rig a perch on a kitchen scale because birdy scales are seriously overpriced. 

"So how did you come by your newest bundle of joy?" Well, like I said, I wasn't planning on getting another bird just yet. I had thought for awhile that I would love to have another, but I had been thinking of a Green Cheeked Conure. I loved my conure and have wanted another one for a long time, but parrots are expensive. I didn't really want another cockatiel. As much as I love Lucina, and she apparently only has eyes for me (seriously dislikes everyone else - except an unnamed person she hasn't seen in awhile, apparently we both have bad taste in men) I wanted a bird I could interact with more. Lucina is not much for playing. She just wants to cuddle and explore. So my bestest friend, whom I call sister, Andrea decided this past spring that she was going to get a bird, only she's not really a bird person. She did tons of research to determine the type of bird that might be best for her and came up with a Black Headed Caique. Then she found a wonderful breeder who sent weekly updates with pictures after the birds hatched. She also sent pics to me to show how the birds were growing. I don't have them all because at the time I thought this was going to be Andrea's baby, and while I loved living vicariously through her and seeing the babies grow up, I didn't save all the pics. I have found a few though that are apparently still in my inbox. Here's the first baby picture:

Ok, if you're not a bird person (and so few of us are) then I know what you're thinking, "OMG what an ugly creature!" They don't have feathers yet and so little of the down, and apparently her sibling there is so young he can't even hold his head up! Felicity is the older one. I love this picture. One, because I think they are adorable and two, because they look like little baby dinosaurs. It really gives credence to the theory that birds descended from dinosaurs. 

I must have deleted the next few because the next I have is a month later:

You see how slowly they develop? This is similar to how the larger parrots develop. Most other birds their size would be close to weening by this time. Lucina was only about 1 1/2 - 2 months old when I brought her home. 

And here they are again a week later:

Personally, I'm starting to think there's something wrong with that other baby. Why is he never standing up straight? I'm glad Andrea got the one she did. Although, maybe the pictures are misleading. Maybe Felicity pushed him down so she could be the star!

I'll stop boring everyone with parrot baby pictures and get on with the story. 

So once Felicity is weened, Andrea and her husband head down to Houston to pick her up. That's about a 5-6 hour drive one way. They go down and back without stopping except to pick her up. 2 days later the bird is mine. :) Andrea has discovered she is truly not a bird person. Poor thing, I feel bad for her. She knows this is a wonderful bird but for some reason can't make herself look past the mess and scaliness and all out birdiness of a bird. She tells me if I don't want this bird it's going back to the breeder. Wait, I can HAVE the bird? Because I certainly don't have the money to buy one and she's adorable and wants so bad to play and cuddle in my hair. And I get this amazing cage with a divider that both birds can live in? Sold! My first thought is, maybe she'll teach Lucina to eat real food. hahahahaha. Lucina was not raised by a good breeder. I got her from a local pet store. While I don't normally like pet store animals, especially birds, they do hand feed their birds at this store which is so important for good pet birds. In the 6 1/2 years since I've gotten Lucina, I have revised my position on this store but at the time I thought they were fairly wonderful. They do hand feed the babies, but once they're weened, they get no human interaction except the customers and they are weened onto seed and millet!! That is the WORST diet for a bird. It was all I could do to get Lucina to switch to pellets, and I still have a hard time getting her to eat fresh fruit and veggies. Felicity was weened onto a variety of foods and loves veggies and fruit. Within 2 days, Lucina was trying the food I made for Felicity! She still doesn't eat much but at least she's nibbling at it. Of course, I'm crumbling Nutriberries (a mix of flavored pellet, grain, and seed) on top of her bowl. Whatever, I have to do to get her to try it! Then at "family breakfast" on the 3rd day I shot this:

 Felicity is happily munching away at everything in sight, while Lucina is as far she can be without falling off the table, happily ignoring even the food I put directly in front of her. Then, viola! She turns and tries the apple and orange. She appears to like the orange better and a few minutes later I shot this:

Success!!!

Memorial Weekend

This past weekend I spent a couple days at my mother's house. The plan was only to spend Sunday night with her and then go to work from there and then stay Monday night too. However, I found out ELVIS COSTELLO was going to be in Dallas playing with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Now I understand that not everyone in the world is as much of a FREAK for ELVIS COSTELLO as I am but you would think if I offer to pay for the tickets, people would want to go. No one. Seriously people? Free concert (to you anyway!). I finally convinced my mother to go by promising to come Saturday afternoon and staying the weekend. It turned out to be a wonderful plan!

I wish, wish, wish I had at least one picture of the concert but, alas, I do not. My mom was freak out about someone seeing me and us getting kicked out. Then, at the end she said, "You should have taken a picture at the very end like those other people did."
"But, mom, when I said I was going to, you about tackled me in order to make sure I didn't."

I paid $200 for the tickets. That is the price I didn't pay last time he came, because he came with the Police and I swore I was not going to pay those outrageous prices just because some 80s band got back together. Yes, I like their music too, but COME ON people. I guess things are different when I'm thinking about where I'm going to sit and the fact that my entire two hours will be staring at ELVIS COSTELLO! I love him.

I could have paid for a seat in the chorus loft. If you've never been to the Symphony, then you should know that is the place behind the orchestra. If I was going to the listen to a symphony that'd be great. Cheap seats right behind the orchestra are pretty good, even if you can hear too much of the percussion. Besides, I've always liked the drummers (hehehe). But for the guy I love more than all other singers in the world EVER...it's not good enough. I want to be looking in his face. I couldn't get seats on the floor at all but I could get box seats practically over top his head. So I did, and stared at ELVIS COSTELLO all night! It was grand. My mom was a little unnerved by the fact that we could drop to our deaths if we moved wrong, but I figure it's all in the price of seeing ELVIS COSTELLO.

Now before my grand adventure seeing my music idol, I had to bring all the animals to my mom's house. Poor Lucina. I knew she wouldn't be getting much out time there since my mom also has two dogs and they're not used to being around a bird, so I made sure she got to spend the whole morning having momma time without the dogs. They got to be locked up for awhile.

She loves to cuddle up to my chin while I scratch her neck. One of these days I'm going to get video of her bumping my chin with her beak. This is how she asks for me to scratch her neck. BTW, she doesn't have "red eye" from the flash, she really does have red eyes. The flash freaked her out and she flew away before the next shot:

A few years ago I bought her a wonderful cage, which you can partly see in these pictures. All the bird experts say you have to get your bird acclimated to the new cage, that they'll freak out if you just stick them in before the used to it. So I brought it home and placed it beside the old and let her out to explore on her own just as they say. She went right to it and sat on top and never went back to the old one. So much for experts. To be fair, the old one was TINY. When I saw them side by side, I felt so bad for making her stay in there for so long!

Poor Lucina! Her old cage is at my mom's house so I don't have to lug that huge thing around when we go to visit. This is right after we got there on Saturday afternoon.

She looks so sad!

"Won't you let me out?"

Later the dogs got to go out. If you missed the story I told about Loki and the mouse in the house (my old house, thank goodness), then you just won't get how crazy he is for other other creatures. I'm not sure if the breed or simply because he practically lived on his own for the first two years of his life. Aurora's not like that. In any case, my mom's neighbor is the cat lady. Not only does she have an absurd number of cats, but none of them are fixed so of course she gets a new one every day. Loki HATES cats. He spends the entire day staring at the breaks in the fence waiting for a cat to bark at.

At some point on Sunday afternoon, everyone was outside and a squirrel was in the yard. All the other dogs went nuts barking at the squirrel, trying to get it. Loki was doing this:

And he stayed there.

Home Story: Fleas

I haven't written much on here in the last few weeks, in fact I haven't done much of anything the last few weeks that didn't involve cleaning house. I thought I would share exactly why on here, because, let's face it, everyone else is tired of me talking about it and my readers can simply choose to stop reading and I'll never know!

Let this be a lesson to all of you organic-minded people out there: It is possible to get rid of fleas with natural and organic treatments. However, you will also have to live with flea bites on yourself and your animals for at least a month, maybe more. No matter how much I hate using chemicals in my house, this was simply unacceptable to me after desperately trying for 2 weeks to do everything I could and then discovering that Aurora (the collie) had contracted tapeworm. This is something that can only happen if she had ingested a flea (according to my vet).

So what does the person who is anti-chemicals in the house do in this situation? Get all the animals out of the house, close all dry food inside the fridge (luckily I haven't shopped much lately and there was room), bathe the dogs with flea shampoo (AGAIN) and spray them with the natural flea killing spray that seems to work (briefly, not a week like it claims), and flea bomb the sh** out of the house. At my mom's house I discovered a live flea on Loki (the cocker spaniel). So, off they go outside and off we go to PetSMart where we buy a different kind of flea shampoo and it's related spray (recommended by the trainers at the store). I'm going to place a free advertisement right here because it appears to be the ONLY thing that has worked. It says "Natural Chemistry" which seems to me to be an oxymoron but whatever, it worked and for that I am thankful. That awful "Hartz" stuff didn't work worth sh** and it smelled terrible too. They were at my mom's house for 2 days and were completely flea free.

THEN, I left leave the animals at mom's house while I went home and cleaned EVERYTHING. And I do mean everything. I put every dish I own in the dishwasher (or, that is, washed the few things that can't go in there by hand but you know...) and placed every thing that could be washed in the washing machine in the washing machine (obviously not all at once, what a mess that would be). I vacuumed floors and furniture and wiped counters and cleaned bathrooms and sprayed the yard (yep, more chemicals) and cleaned Lucina's cage and Loki's kennel all in between putting away clean clothes and dishes. I was very tired.

The next day I went to work and then over to my mom's to pick my now flea-free dogs and bird (thank goodness they aren't bothered by fleas!), take them all home where I am happily playing on my computer when I feel a terrible itching on my arm, look down and see a DA** flea on me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I promptly check both dogs. Of course, Loki has one happily crawling on him and I freak out. What can I possibly do at this point that I haven't done? Did I mention that they've already had two doses of Frontline in three weeks instead of four as recommended? I can't possibly give them anymore.

Then I notice something sort of interesting. These fleas are not jumping quite as rapidly or as high. I CAN CATCH IT! That's not right. So, a little theory is forming in my head but I can't be sure until I call my vet the next day (the nice receptionist who talked to me for close to 10 minutes on a busy afternoon deserves an award). Apparently once you've given your animal Frontline, you actually want the flea to jump on him and bite him. This will cause neurological damage to the flea and prevent him from laying eggs. This is why if you only give your animal the Frontline and don't do anything else it takes so long. You will break the cycle but have to wait them out as the already laid eggs hatch. In my phone call I discover (or actually am told) about another wonderful drug that you can give your animals that will kill all the fleas that jump on them for a period of 24 hours. Yes, they got that too. I am simply at my wits end with the flea thing and nothing short of skinning the dogs is too much at this point. As of today (I believe) I am truly flea-free. Just in time for my beautiful nephew to visit me this weekend.

Home Story: Lucina

Lucina is an albino cockatiel. Not that it means anything regarding true albino-ism. It just means that she's an all white cockatiel with red eyes. To get an albino cockatiel, one must cross breed a Whiteface cockatiel with a Lutino cockatiel, making a Whiteface Lutino but referred to as "albino." This may not be very interesting to non-bird people but I find it fascinating!

When Lucina was a baby, she was very loving to everyone. She wanted to be held by everyone and would let anyone scratch her neck (her favorite). Now that she's a little older, 5 years, she's pretty much bonded to me. She'll fly around the house looking for me when I'm not in her sight and whistle for me to come back when I walk out of the room. All cockatiels (and cockatoos too) can hiss (yes, hiss like a cat). Lucina uses her hiss often. When someone comes too close to her cage when she's not wanting them there, she hisses while spreading her feathers in a get-away-from-me manner. I've tried slowly get her to bond to Jeff over the past three years, but it's been difficult since he has a dog that likes to eat birds.

One thing Lucina enjoys is music in a high register. When I play my flute she whistles along, when she hears whistling on a song she sings along, and when Jeff plays the piano she whistles and dances. Genious that he is, he brought her out one day when I wasn't home and began playing Cradle Song by Theodor Kullak on the piano with her on his shoulder. He plays it in the very top octave. Now, whenever he plays it, she yells to come out of the cage, she dances and bangs on bars or if she's out, she flies around the room. Cradle Song is Lucina's new theme song and she and Jeff have finally bonded.