AFRICAN GREY MAFIA THREATENS PERSISTENCE OF GREY PARROTS IN THE WILD

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/01/african-grey-mafia-threatens-persistence-of-grey-parrots-in-the-wild/

Love African Greys?  I do, too.  I have a naked lady who is older than dirt and so happy with her life now.
My right shoulder is all scratched up - and now she follows me around the house walking and calling me.
This is a very sad commentary on exploitation of all wild birds.  Never buy a wild-caught bird.  They never tame down.  And if you buy a bird, remember, you must plan for their  future.  You will not outlive them in most cases and sadly, they go from owner to owner.  They are all very destructive, noisy, messy and will eat furniture, moldings, and one of my birds ate through paneling...careful cage placement and things to chew are a must.  But they also need YOU; most of all they need their person (actually, it may not be you).  And without love and attention, they become mutilators and vicious.  They are wonderful and so smart.  Bird brains are big and complex.

Ashley usually gets shoulder time in the a.m. and we start up the computer and she watches Ruby the Swearing African Grey or Pierre on Youtube.  She whistles and talks to them and tries to feed my ear.
You can see her naked shoulder.  She mutilated herself - her chest is bare, her legs are bare except for a few small feathers, and so is the area of her belly and butt, but she does have a pretty red tail.  The plucking results when they are left alone, and she was left alone for weeks at a time in her past life.  So please, don't adopt a hookbill if your schedule takes you away from them.  They are quite human.  As I type this, she is on my shoulder making little holes in my blouse.  That's ok - shirts from the thrift store do me just fine.  I go through them quite often.

She has taken up a bad habit which is getting off her cage by sliding down the legs and walking around to find me.  She is so old she doesn't fly.  So apparently, she is fearless and no threat to dogs and cats, whereas Margaret is a valkyrie, and has everyone bamboozled.  I have to wear a hat at breakfast.  And destructive?
Come back later and I'll show you my sacrificial dining room chairs.

HAVE YOU LOST A PARROT? WOULD YOU LIKE TO HELP THEM FIND THEIR WAY HOME?

http://www.parrotalert.com/links.php

Hookbills are wonderful companions, but that birdy on your shoulder can escape through an open door or window, chew out of its aviary or pick the lock on the cage and leave. When I had my Moluccan, Muriko, she would occasionally leave her cagetop playpen and climb the hardward cloth enclosed porch. Regular screen was too flimsy. Then she's start chewing the framing. She could have zipped through the hardware cloth if she had wanted to.

Here's an organization that through geotracking can alert you. You can volunteer. Sort of like geocaching.

Sounds like fun.

Oh. And I also had a blue crowned conure who was Muriko's companion. Ricky shared her playpen and big cage.

One day I heard another conure in the trees in the yard. Then I saw that he was still on the porch, but there was another flying from tree to tree he was answering.

I put an empty cage out on the well house, put him in his sleeping cage, and she came right down and hopped in.

And they lived happily ever after.

So it's not an impossible task to recover a bird. Had I had this resource, I might have located its home.

WANT TO ADOPT A BIRD? A HOOKBILL, A DOVE, SOME FINCHES?

eI love exotic birds. One of my great loves was my Moluccan cockatoo, Muriko, who died in my arms. Muriko, whom I rescued from a cold, damp outside aviary with no shelter in Empire, OR. At that time, the owners thought she was about 50 years old.

Whatever her age, Muriko was a sweet, gentle and affectionate companion for 25 years, and I am instantly drawn to cockatoos of any kind. I've also had Amazons, conures, and even canaries, but there's nothing like the cockatoos, at least, to me.

Today I was thinking of her and I looked up bird rescues. To buy one from a pet shop or a breeder is an expensive venture. But this rescue has some lovely birds and their adoption fees are reasonable.

I thought I'd post this because I really miss my big, pink girl. There are many, many rescues. Look for a parrot/hookbill or whatever species you're interested in a search on your favorite search engine. Today, I used Google.

http://floridaparrotrescue.com/index_files/BirdsForAdoption1.htm

Lizard treats and hissing cockroaches...

From Alan Salzberg's excellent newsletter, HerpDigest:

Cockroach farming, anyone?


Lizards' Treat A Recipe For Foreign Invasion (Cockroaches)
By Christine Evans, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer, Friday, November 21, 2008

People are feeding exotic cockroaches to their giant pet lizards. This is not a good thing.

That's the latest from the bizarre world of entomology, where, up at the University of Florida, a renowned cockroach expert dropped a bit of a bomb in the bug world when he and a colleague published a paper that said, basically, that the 3-inch-long Madagascar hissing roach could soon be living in your kitchen cabinets.

If you doubt the scenario - which, in full, involves a bearded dragon lizard, a timely phone call, a roadside rescue and an entrepreneurial group of cockroach farmers who sell the crunchy little critters via Internet - you might want to flip through the September/October issue of Florida Pest Pro magazine.

There you will learn that four types of exotic cockroaches - the Madagascar, the Turkistan, the orange spotted and the lobster - are practically leaping off the Web to the plates of hungry lizards everywhere, including, presumably, here.

"People are sharing their cockroaches with other people all over the place," says an incredulous Philip Koehler, the UF entomologist who coauthored the Pest Pro piece with colleague Roberto Pereira. "There's kind of an underground trade. I had no idea."

Neither did some pest controllers, until Koehler, an expert of some note who once appeared on Nightline with Ted Koppel to discuss the discovery of the Asian cockroach near the Port of Tampa, enlightened them.

The article, which drew dozens of press inquiries, describes the global trek of the Turkistan, which apparently has set up a nice little home for itself in the American Southwest, after arriving, it is thought, on the gear of soldiers returning from the Middle East. The Turk since has become one of the most popular lizard foods, and the authors warn pest companies to be on the lookout for little Houdini roaches who escape before going down a lizard's gullet.

What does all this mean?

"You don't want an invasive species or a non-native species of any sort coming into the state," says Liz Compton, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. "And obviously, we don't want more cockroaches."

The problem, Koehler says, is that people who keep lizards as pets have figured out that roaches provide a relatively cheap, easy and un-smelly way to feed them. Crickets used to be popular pet-lizard food, "but crickets are noisy. People don't like them chirping about in their homes."

Roaches, on the other hand, are quiet, unless they're hissing, as a Madagascar is prone to do when angry. "It thinks it's a snake."

Koehler and other insect experts are careful to point out that no official sighting of any of the four exotic species in question is on record in Florida - yet. It could be just a matter of time, "and then we have a problem ... because roaches can be mechanical vectors of disease. If they make it into your house, they might climb onto your hamburger meat."

Importing roaches to the state without a permit is illegal, but as Compton points out, "the packaging doesn't exactly say 'exotic roaches inside,' so we can't tell when it's coming or how many. Short of going door to door, there's not much we can do."

In other words, a hungry lizard's meal is only a Google away.

This summer, as Koehler was typing up his Pest Pro piece, the phone rang.

"I was just thinking it would be really nice to have a picture of a bearded dragon lizard to go with the article when somebody called to say he found a bearded dragon by the side of the road and it was hungry.

"Never in my 33 years here have I heard from somebody who had a hungry bearded dragon, so I told him to come over and we took the dragon's picture and then we gave him a meal of crickets and cockroaches."

Cockroaches? "Nothing exotic, of course." American-style.
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