Those Messed Up Male Psittacines
April and I agreed to take in a four-year-old male Yellow-fronted Amazon named Kahuna, ostensibly that he might befriend and perhaps bond with our 12-year hen, Tasha Lyn, who has been rejected by her mate in favor of a younger female Amazon.
Kahuna and Tasha were introduced in a large 20ftx12ft planted aviary with lots of diversions and secluded foliage places to get away from each other if necessary. Like many Amazon parrots, they were tentative in their early friendship and of course, slept in different preferred spots at night.
What soon became apparent, however, was that Kahuna is an obvious human impressed former hand-fed pet - one with a huge slate of odd behaviors and dysfunctions. He screeches like a cockatoo, laughs like his former lady keeper, sings, “You Are My Sunshine,” all the way through four verses, and babbles on daily in humanspeak whenever he wishes to express himself. Tasha, meanwhile, is not particularly enamored of all this odd vocalization, since she is one of our third generation Yellow-fronts with over ten years experience in Amazon communications gleaned from role models who are her ancestors. She has free flown some, knows the appropriate warning calls and joy expressions of her kind, and to put it bluntly, seems put-off by Kahuna’s inability to commune with her on a parrot level.
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A truly exceptional show - by Tony Pittman
The end of October is Ornithea time for me. This extraordinary unique show organised by Vogelfreunde Porz, the aviculturists’ club in Cologne, Germany, never ceases to amaze, and this year was no exception. In fact the members’ surpassed themselves as they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the club’s formation.
The club was formed in 1961 and has at present some 55 members. It has a club-house in a suburb of Cologne and the members meet regularly there to exchange information on keeping and breeding birds of all types, eat a communal meal and drink some of the popular local Kölsch beer. Sometimes they also invite a speaker and that is how I got to know them many years ago and then became a member of the club.
The show is held in the hall of a local high school, which they take over for two weeks for a small fee. The layout is very carefully planned and then virtually all the members become involved in build-up and break-down. This year the show was open to the public from Saturday, 29th October to Tuesday, 1st November, which is a public holiday in Germany.
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by Robert Alison
The Rosellas (Platycercus sp.) comprise an extraordinarily colourful and intelligent complex of Australian psittacids whose evolutionary development is compelling and complicated. Sophisticated genetic sequencing research at the University of New South Wales indicates all Rosellas probably derived from a single ancestral type 18-143 million years ago. The divergence was apparently quite slow.
Eventually, geographically distinct sub-populations developed. The inter-relationships among those sub-groups have been the focus of substantial scientific investigation that, so far, has disclosed some perplexing anomalies.
One of the most intriguing findings concerns the so-called ‘ring’ species - the P. elegans group whose rare evolutionary path has sparked a great deal of scientific scrutiny. “Ring species are reproductively isolated forms connected by a chain of intermediate populations,” according to researchers Daren and Jessica Irwin and Trevor Price.
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… and 70 other ‘companion’ parrots!
Angela Kemp from Murray Bridge, South Australia is disabled, and parrots are her life. But, although her birds have brought her great joy, she and her husband Frank have suffered much heartache too. They had a brush with the PBFD virus, after dealing with an unscrupulous, but well-known breeder, who keeps huge numbers of parrots in filthy conditions, near to where they live.
Pat Pat, a male Galah, Emi a female Jendaya Conure, and Favouri a male Cinnamin Green-cheeked Conure, came to us in that order as hand-raised babies over the last four years, and are known in our house as the Rat Pack! The two males, Pat Pat and Favouri, both love Emi, and jostle for her attention, but generally they all get along well, go around together in a threesome, and get themselves in all sorts of mischief, which is how they got their name!
Pat Pat has always been a quiet and loving Galah, who loves nothing more than to make friends with the other birds, especially the girls, and when Emi our Jendaya came along, he was so excited to have a new friend to play with! Emi actually helped bring Pat Pat out of his shell, as our Jendaya is a real people person. In the mornings she is particularly cuddly, and loves snuggling up with us, and now when Pat Pat doesn’t immediately get what he wants, he flies to one or other of us, and nibbles our ears, as if to say, ‘Pay attention to me, will you?’
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Denise Catt tells us about Basil, her ‘Agility Mascot’ parrot
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