In case anyone was wondering where we’ve disappeared off to the past few weeks: we went on a seemingly ordinary vacation to visit family and then returned 2 weeks later with an extremely traumatized foster bird in tow.
He’s an anxious little nanday conure named Dusky and we love him with all our heart! He’s rather camera shy, so the only picture we have of him features him hissing at the camera from the shadows -- we stopped trying after that because we didn’t want to cause undue stress:
Long story short: a family member didn’t want him, but the nearby parrot sanctuary had no space for more birds. We were alarmed by the conditions he was living in and worried for his safety, so we offered to take him back home with us and care for him until there’s an opening for him at the parrot rescue near us.
I wish we could just adopt him ourselves, but this just isn’t a good time for us to adopt a parrot. We’re not in a stable enough health or financial situation for that. Still, we’re doing our best to socialize him a bit and introduce him to some new foods and toys during his stay with us. He’s still got a long way to go, but he’s already improving in leaps and bounds now that he has toys, attention, and a humidifier and air purifier helping him breathe!
He came to us with nothing but a cage and food, so we’ve been doing our best to get him the toys, perches, treats, hygiene, and medical care he deserves! Which is very expensive and we are “buying basic groceries makes us want to cry” levels of poor. So if anyone would like to help us out, we have an Amazon wishlist for Dusky Stuff! Or, if you’d like to help us get some nice, safe perches and toys for him (he’s a chewer so he goes through them fast), we would make good use of gift cards to the Lil Monsters Bird Toys shop -- you’ll need our email for that, which you can get by dropping us a DM or an ask off anon. Thanks in advance to anyone who does help out!
We’ll probably continue to be scarce on Tumblr for the duration of Dusky’s stay with us, but we do still check for notifications regularly! We just don’t have much time to scroll through our dash.
His name is Barry, possibly named after Barry White, and we rescued him from a petting farm. So if he looks like he's missing feathers, that's why. (Poor guy plucked himself because of the conditions he was kept in.) I can't draw with him around because, like any bird, your stuff is his property, and he is free to chew on it as much as he wants.
I was taking a walk on the boardwalk out near Bolstadt in Long Beach, when I came across this western grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis) stranded on the path ahead of me. It looked alert and uninjured, so chances were just that it couldn't take flight off of the hard surface, but I called Peninsula Wild Care anyway to see if they wanted to bring it in for a checkup.
They quickly coordinated a couple of volunteers to meet me nearby, and I needed to get the grebe out of the way since a lot of people walk their dogs there and not all of them are on leashes. I figured okay, this is a relatively small bird, not as big as the muscovies I've carted around on the farm, and it seems calm, right?
NOPE. As I tried to gently reach for the grebe it turned from a calm, if confused pile of feathers on the decking to Stabby McStabberson, and I very nearly got jabbed and nipped a few times by a long, pointy beak attached to a surprisingly agile and very much NOT happy bird. I ended up having to take my hoodie off and dropping it over the entire grebe, and only when the lights were out could I bundle it up and carry it over to the meeting place.
Since it was pretty energetic, not obviously sick or injured, and its body condition felt decent (at least through the hoodie) I'm hoping it's going to get released soon enough after a checkup and a nice meal of fish. Many waterbirds have a lot of trouble taking off from hard surfaces because their feet are so far back on their bodies--which is great for swimming and water takeoffs, but not so helpful on land. If the bird had stayed stranded there they could have been injured or killed by another animal, or ended up dehydrated.
So let's hear it for Stabby the Angry Grebe, and wish them a good release back into the wild!