Beer Can Hill

My interview with Erik Sprague The Lizard Man will be up!

GrrlScientist found this one.

Jinxi found this one.

If I sent Jennie to the store with a backpack she’d probably shoplift and cuss everyone out. Rusty wouldn’t even make it to the store because she’d have to stop and ask every rock and flower, “HIWHATDOING?!”

Trina is my albino cockatiel. She was hatched on May 14, 2006 at For The Birds in Bakersfield, California. She came to live with me in August of 2006.

Trina enjoys swimming in her water bowl and hanging upside down like a bat. She’s an easy-going little bird and gets along with my other three cockatiels and sparrow Wally.

Jennie is my yellow-collared macaw. She was three years old when I adopted her from For The Birds in Bakersfield,California.

I had gone in there to buy cockatiel supplies and she decided that I belonged to her! She talked to me non-stop, pressed her beak to my face, and refused to get off of my shoulder! I consulted with the shop’s staff on what kind of care Jennie needed.

I’d taken care of large parrots when I worked at a zoo and decided that I could deal with her. I don’t mean to be a hypocrite, but parrots should generally not be an impulse buy.

Jennie has an impressive (if not unpredictable) vocabulary. She started calling me “Waka” during our first week living together. When she’s mad at me I am “BAD WAKA.”

It hasn’t always been easy. Like most re-homed parrots, Jennie (formerly known as Giggles), has behavioral issues like aggression towards other birds, biting, and feather picking. She has to be housed alone and eats a special diet to regulate her hormones. She broke my finger last year when I stopped her from trying to attack my Illiger’s macaw Rusty.

No matter what kind of problems I’ve had in my personal life, Jennie never fails to make me laugh. She’s the Captain Spaulding of parrots and I hope that we get old together.

Jennie spends the majority of her time shredding and decorating cardboard and wood toys, and dancing to rap music. She refers to her “art” projects as “Wocky Box”, and when a “Wocky Box” gets too nasty to stay in our house there is hell to pay. She throws a huge tantrum, yells in both parrot and English, and then sulks under the newspaper in her cage. See the clip below for a SFW example of a Wocky Box tantrum.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6234815658481845054&hl=en]

Learn more about hemp.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoKZbOSvVa0]

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Filmed an hour ago…before the memory card filled up and cut it off.

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I filmed this a couple of hours ago. It has been a very lazy day on Beer Can Hill because I am getting over a cold.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFGq0j4u15s&eurl=http://amog.com/entertainment/best-superbowl-commercials/&feature=player_embedded]

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NjwFU6Fn7Yk]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq1xWuBIXDg&eurl=http://holy-cuteness.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-am-walrus-and-i-play-sax.html&feature=player_embedded]

Found by our friends at Holy Cuteness.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Ynlp7sxZs]

Today I finished reading The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw by Bruce Barcott. It is about Sharon Matola’s crusade to save a population of wild Scarlet Macaws in Belize. Sharon Matola founded and runs The Belize Zoo.

I’m going to admit up front that I am not a science or history buff, and this book was full of information that would appeal to either crowd. I checked the book out of the library because I live with two macaws and wanted to read about how they live in the wild. Chapter 8 of this book was the only portion that talked about that topic and I was disappointed.

According to my macaw book, there are two distinct populations of wild scarlet macaws (Ara macao) in Central and South America. The only visual difference is the yellow wing band is less pronounced on the southern flocks. Neither population is considered a subspecies.

Barcott’s book, however, claims that they are separate subspecies. He states that ornithologist David Wiedenfeld named the northern Belize population Ara macao cyanoptera in an article published in Ornitologia Neotropical in 1994. Wiedenfeld noted that the scarlet macaws north of Costa Rica had no green band in their wing feathers and he felt that this was a striking difference.

I’m not a scientist of any form, but it seems to me that color variation is common in most parrot species, particularly when they are kept in captivity. I am also wondering if perhaps the scarlet macaws had intermingled with the green-winged macaws (Ara chloroptera) in their regions. Green-winged macaws are also red macaws, but they are larger and have no yellow in their wings. Here is a YouTube clip of scarlets and green-wings munching on lava rock to break down the toxins found in native seeds.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c56-CUXc7g]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGJrlFH_qTg]

He was the author of Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, television series ER, and more.

Here are some highlights from PBS’s ‘Parrots In The Land Of Oz’ Nature episode if you missed it Sunday night.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWZpXuJ4-Ys]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xk8pCTLMNw]

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Jennie watched this with me and kept announcing “NOT A PIGEON!”