Tonight's Dinner and Dessert

It's not time consuming to make a healthy fresh meal for your birds. The picture below is Lucy and Jessie's dinner (meals for tomorrow too). I chopped up fresh carrots, green beans, green peppers, red peppers and zuchinni and threw it all into the food processor. After a few minutes you have a healthy feast for your birds. I find there is less waste because the pieces are smaller and bite size.



Then for dessert, I made homemade nutriberries. The recipe is courtesy of Cory at My Avian Lifestyle Blog - http://www.myavianlifestyle.com/ . She suggests using organic pitted dates and figs, but I couldn't find organic figs, so I went with organic pitted apricots instead. For the nuts I used raw almonds, raw cashews and ran hulled sunflower seeds. Mixed them all up in the food processor and rolled them into balls. Next time, I will roll them into smaller balls, because when I fed to Lucy and Jessie I had to cut them in quarters to make them more manageable for them to handle.

Trip to Exotic Wings & Things

Made a trip to Exotic Wings & Things in St. Clements Ontario today (just north of Kitchener / Waterloo). I always love looking at the birds, but I'm not a huge fan of how they house their birds there, but I'm going to stay off that podium today.

As mentioned in earlier posts, we are turning our dining room into the new bird room. There will be a play area hanging in the middle of the room that Lucy and Jessie can fly to and play while they are out. I was hoping they would have a climbing net there today, but no such luck. So instead I got a boing, atom, 2 new toys and some foot toys today. Here's a picture of everything I got today.

Now I just need some of my husband's time to start hanging things in the room. He's busy doing private reno jobs for friends and family this weekend. Maybe if I'm really nice and make him a big nice dinner on Monday when we get home he'll do it for me :)

Clicker Training - Finally Making Progress!

I started experimenting with Clicker training both Lucy and Jessie about 2 months ago and wasn't having much luck in the beginning. At first, Lucy didn't really seem interested in training. I haven't found a treat that she loves enough to work for yet. Whenever I brought her out to do clicker training, she was more interested in just hanging out to do her own thing. Well tonight, I went back to basics with her and got her to consistently target to a stick. She wouldn't take any treats. It seems like the attention and praise is enough for her.

With Jessie, I don't have a problem getting his attention at all and he'll take just about anything for a treat ... so finding motivation wasn't struggle. The struggle I've had with him is he is a very typical Senegal parrot and he is very phobic of anything new. I tried for weeks to desensitize him to a stick so we could start targeting and time after time he would become phobic and start biting. Not easy to clicker train with a phobic bird showing aggression. Again, I took a few steps back tonight and started by simply showing him the stick. For the first few minutes he would just puff up, which is his sign that he's not happy. After showing it to him a few times he didn't react, so I clicked and rewarded him with a treat. After we had success with that, I started moving it closer. When he didn't react, I clicked and he got a treat. After about 10 minutes, I had him touching the stick without showing fear or aggression.

Sometimes we want something to work that we try to push our feathered friends too far too fast. I'm happy with tonight's progress. I'm home with the birds all day tomorrow by myself, so I'll be sure to do several more training sessions with them tomorrow. Hopefully this is the beginning of something fun for all three of us :)

Time to put Lucy and Jessie to bed. They're both grinding their beaks and making their 'night night' noises.

Playtime!

Lucy being nosy and trying to look under the table

Lucy on the playstand

Lucy very curious about the parrot picture on the wall

Jessie hanging out on top of his cage

Another picture of Jessie hanging out on top of his cage

New Bird Area

We got Lucy and Jessie moved over to the new bird room tonight. It's no where near complete yet. We are getting a second hand carpet from someone this weekend, so we'll be reorganizing once the carpet is in. Lucy's a little quiet and looking around ... Jessie isn't even phased and he's swinging upside down right now in his cage.

This area will enable me to let them spend A LOT more time outside of their cages. I can keep an eye on them from the living room while they spend some time hanging out doing their own thing. For now the table can stay between them and the playstand can stay on there. I'm washing an old table cloth that can cover the cage and I'm not so worried if they poop while they are out.

Eventually, we'd like to hang a net in the middle of the room and maybe even have something going from the table to a play area in the middle. Stay tuned while the new bird room evolves.

New bird area

New Playstand my husband built

Jessie's cage

Lucy's cage

Lucy on Playstand today

Here's a picture of Lucy on our playstand today

Jessie on Playstand today

This picture was taken of Jessie today while he was playing on our playstand