Not my carry-ons…

I have next week off. Not that I didn’t pay for it with a mind-bending schedule of flying one hell of a lot in order to align these days off. It was just a lot of trip-trading with friends and shuffling days off around in order to accomodate the need to work with the desire to get a string of days off. It was a hard month, but I did get to meet this man. He’s a hundred years old:

A hundred years-old!

Due to this, I was flying 4 days on, one day off, 4 days on, one day off, one on, one off, etc. in order to string some days together so I could work on a project.

The project? I am flying to South Carolina to make a whomping big batch of Chop for some friends and colleagues. I doubt I’ll be able to fill this tub, but I’m going to make as big a batch as is feasible. And just to give you some perspective, 2 people could fit in here.

Whompin’ Big Tub…

It’s a Chop Party of a sort. Irena Schulz of Bird Lovers Only Parrot Rescue and Judith Archer of The Parrot Posse a loosely organized, yet dedicated and effective group that donates to rescues and emergency situations are joining me to make the single largest batch of Chop I’ve ever made.

Irena and I are the two in the photo without a position at Harvard…

Janet Hilton is hosting the event and with any luck at all, both Irena and Judith will leave with pounds and pounds of Chop for their feathered charges. I believe Judith cares for 22 macaws, mostly all special needs rescues.

Judith is the one sans bunny ears…

I’ve sent the shopping list to Janet and she is busily scurrying around gathering all of the items needed for this batch of Chop. We’ll do some preliminary shopping on Sunday after I arrive for the items that need cooking and do the cooking on Monday. Monday afternoon we’ll shop for the fresh items. I’m hoping to go all organic on this batch. And on Tuesday, the Chop-Making Festivities begin.

Janet and Judith

With any luck, I will be returning home with some great video footage and a story to tell. I’m quite happy to be doing this for them. They are all wonderful and generous individuals and I am quite happy to lend my expertise to aid both worthwhile causes. I just hope they bring enough coolers.

Janet’s Portuguese Water Dogs Looking Ahead

We’re wrapping up what I referred to in an earlier post, “An Eventful Year.” Yes it was. And not just for me, but for the Avian Community and the world. Not all of it was positive. Not all of it was a step in the right direction. But the learning that went on even during the worst of times was a positive thing.

I always like to look forward to the coming year in hopes that it will be better as a result of what I have learned and experienced. I like to be able to say that I know more now than I did a year ago. And I hope you all can very safely say the same. But what can we as an Avian Community do to make things better? How do we improve our lives and the lives of our flocks? Susan Friedman has a quote that she placed on the bottom of her emails by W. Edwards Deming:

 “Learning is not compulsory…neither is survival.”

I love this quote and while I find it astute, I find it humorous as well.  Even in Susan’s emails, she is forever the teacher. But if you think about it, in order to survive, animals are constantly having to shift with their environment, to adapt to what is happening around them or they perish. We should really follow their lead because they’re the ones getting it right. We’re the ones who are constantly trying to bend things to suit us and our lifestyle. We really need to become more “Gumbyish.”

If we began the new year learning more about diet, behavior and training, general care and enrichment, this will not only improve the lives of our birds, but in turn, our lives as well. And God knows I’m all for upgrades!

I’m not one for making any resolutions but I am one for thinking about stuff I want to accomplish in the coming year. One thing I’d like to do is take the American Federation of Aviculture’s “Fundamentals of Aviculture” online class. I think it would be very enightening and I know I’d learn a ton.

I also want to get more writing done. But then, I always want to get more writing done. 

I want to get my office straightened up. It used to look great. Now? Not so much. And no I’m not posting a photo…

I want to try and save more money. I’m pretty tight with a buck now as it is, but I could probably get tighter. Unfortunately I’m ruing the day that I discovered the “Kindle App” for my iPad. Amazon has never sold so many books to anyone since I did that. I warn you, it’s addictive.

But more than anything, I really want to get ahold of my life and really live it. Yes, I do that now, just as most of us do. But I’d like to get some things moving in the right direction and that is going to take a chuck of time, something I usually don’t have much of. So, I’ll just have to crowbar it in somewhere.

More than anything, I want people in aviculture to learn more about feeding their birds well. That is my hope for next year. I fully support positive reinforcement training, foraging, enrichment, great health care and Vet visits.

But as I once explained my zeal to someone who asked why I was so interested and enthusiastic about bird diet, “You can’t train a deceased bird.”

There’s other things I want to learn, to improve upon, to get better at.

Or as the Mad Hatter said to Alice, “You used to be much more… ‘muchier.’ You’ve lost your muchness.”

http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/alice2a.html

I don’t want to lose my “muchness.” I simply want to be “Much more so.” Well, here’s to 2012 and “much more so.” May we all become “Muchier!”

http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/alice2a.html

Oy! I’ve been meaning to post again for a week now, but I’ve had my hands full. I’ve been doing a lot of flying. It’s all been out of Miami Airport so the drive is kicking my keester. It’s been fun flying out of there but driving on I95 twice a day has been a killer.

I made this ginormous batch of Chop that’s going to last me until hell freezes over, or five months. Whichever comes first. I got a bit carried away at the market where I shop for Chop ingredients and ended up with enough Chop to fill my Big-ass stock pot twice. I was bagging the stuff for five hours. But I got some pretty cool ingredients in it:

Wheat Grass anyone?

I found some pretty kinky stuff to put into it. Can anyone tell me what this is?

It’s a black radish. And it’s about the size of a tennis ball. I thought it was cool, so I got one for my Chop. It’s chewier than a red radish and spicier. I really liked the flavor and I thought the “woodiness” of the texture would appeal to my Greys. And get a load of the collard greens I had to chop up and throw in!

It was like trimming  a hedge, there was so much of it. But collard greens are REALLY good for the birds, so I didn’t mind doing it. And it all went in, stems and leaves alike.  But I wasn’t done with the weird stuff:

Yup, that’s okra. If you live in the south, that might not be weird to you, but I grew up in an Irish-Danish household in the suburbs of Chicago. In the 60′s. Okra might as well have been sushi to my family. No okra, no grits, no raw fish. I grew up in a typical white-bread, middle-class family. We ate broiled chicken, potatoes, roast beef, oatmeal for breakfast and peanut butter sandwiches. But my parents did manage to have some fun with food. I am embarrassed to report that we had an orange fondue pot with those idiotic long forks.

My Mother enjoyed making the old Jewish standby, Chopped Liver and sending that along with some matzoh in my school lunches so she could freak out the nuns. She loved getting a rise out of the penguins.  I also recall beef tongue sandwiches. On white bread. With mustard. I think about eating that now, with white bread and mustard and I want to heave. But at the time, I thought it was just fine. And of course, the nuns would have a coronary. So that always worked out.

My father was a bit of a food elitist, and ventured out with some fairly outrageous food items for the time. I remember him making stuff like pots de creme, which is a chocolate pudding-like desert, and he liked cooking roast goose on the barbecue outside. Dad had a recipe for Danish brandy cookies he would make at Christmas. We always knew when they were done because he put so much brandy in them, the oven door would blow open:

Ka-Blam!

“Dad! The Cookies are done!”

So the idea of putting okra in my chop is a fairly novel idea to me. But I digress…

Let’s see, let’s see. What else did I throw in this el mondo-grosso batch of Chop? Oh yeah!

Radicchio

Yup. Radicchio. It’s colorful, a member of the cabbage family and it has a snappy taste, so what the hell…

And this? This is swiss chard. Leafy, colorful and crisp, this stuff is a must have in Chop. You want to look for really colorful, leafy stuff to throw in there.

And by the way, almost every vegetable I bought was organic. I have no idea how I managed that, but I did. So it was a very successful batch.

I got lentils, quinoa, brown and wild rice, spelt, whole wheat pasta, cooked up and tossed in there. I also have a new find:

Isn’t this whole grain cereal cool? And it’s got 4 grains in it. Anything to add variety as far as I’m concerned. It goes in uncooked. And these?

These are the tops of the red jalapeños that I added. I told you it was a big batch! I also found the organic dandelion greens again. I’m always happy to see that go in.

And another standard I like to include is zucchini:

All in all, I got 280 meals for my three birds. It cost me about 34 cents a meal. I can live with that. And my birds are going to be eating well for months.

Baby Picture of Parker

Why am I such a freak about diet? Well, let me explain something. You can take your bird to the Vet 90 times a year, but until you make sure their diet is healthy, no Vet is going to be able to do a thing. And it always comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it?

“What are you feeding your bird?”

Well? What are you feeding your bird? If you’re feeding it nothing but a seed mix, you’re down the road to Vet hell. Seriously, diet has a huge influence on a bird’s overall health. If you feed her crap, she’s not going to feel good, and I think we all know what a pain in the keester a cranky parrot is.

There’s tons of information out there. If you’re reading this blog, you are sitting in front of the best teaching tool ever invented. Use it. Listen, I know I’m a nag. I know I harp on this crap over and over again. I harp about a lot of things. And I nag about this particular thing because it’s worth nagging about. Quit. With. The. All-Seed. Diet. And try and spread the word. Share your Chop. Share the concept at your bird club.

Time and time again, I have heard from people who have made “Chop” and seen vast improvements in their flock’s health appearance and demeanor.

 Robert, who writes the blog, Confessions of a Crazy Parrot Person, wrote about a batch of chop he was making:

” …it is without a doubt ingenious because it almost guarantees our birds will get a smattering of everything, it really is a great way to get diversity of fresh foods consumed. I been making Chop now for a few months, and again, I have seen significant improvement in my birds health—significant!!”

Irena Schulz at Bird Lover’s Only  stated that she noticed improvement in a bird’s health when she introduced one of her rescue birds to chop. The bird in question had slightly abnormal values on bloodwork that were spot on after being given the CHOP for about 2 months or so. While there is no hard conclusive evidence that the introduction of chop was responsible, Irena had a hunch:

” …someone could argue that over a year’s time, everything balanced out on their own. But I feel differently…I think it’s the addition of CHOP. Unfortunately, there is no conclusive evidence that it was the CHOP. It’s just my own gut feeling that it had something to do with it.”

Jacque Johnson at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary has birds at home as well as a hundred or so she’s in charge of at the Sanctuary. After my visit to Best Friends, she tried making chop for her birds at home. When she was finished with her second batch,  she sent me an email:

“Made chop again this afternoon. This time the kids knew what I was doing and were dancing in anticipation as I dished up their bowls. I will never, ever feed my kids any other way.”

I’ve heard stories like this over and over. On forums, chat groups and in private messages, it’s the same story. “Chop:” It’s worth the effort.

Bob’s Chop! Gorgeous!

Robert is a bird person in a big way. What I mean by that is that he has big birds. Here is Bob’s bio that he wrote and sent along to me for the post:

“Robert is not exactly a newcomer to aviculture, he has been in its midst for over 30 years. Robert’s passion first took off when he saw the Dr. Dolittle’s companion, a Blue and Gold Macaw named Polynesia in the famous film starring Rex Harrison. From that point, there was no looking back. In Bob’s pre-teen years his parents bought him a cockatiel from a bird studio in the Chicago Old Town area. The store, Sedgewick Studios was owned by an older gentleman from Germany named Erlang—Erlang became a model of what Bob wanted to become. Later on, Bob saw his first Hyacinth and that species became the Macaw he wanted to have one day.

His passion took him through having budgies, cockatiels, Amazons, conures, cockatoos, and finally to his true passion—macaws. Bob currently shares his life with a Hyacinth Macaw named Miss Maggie:

a Greenwing Macaw named Blaze:

and a Blue-front Amazon named Popeye:

Typical of many bird people, Bob’s birds eat a more balanced diet than he does and striving to find a perfect diet for his flock brought him to Chop.  As we all know, getting our birds to eat a variety of foods is difficult and in his opinion, it is even more difficult for those with Hyacinths. In order to maintain these magnificent psitticines we must offer a variety that is packed with healthy nutrients and fats and to ensure that it is done efficiently. Every mouthful has to count.

After reading Patricia Sund’s blog, and discussing Chop with her, he made his first batch. Bob’s Hyacinth picked through it and Chop made her more inquisitive compared to other foods. Now, she will take other foods without them being chopped, but Bob believes Chop initiated her curiosity towards other foods.

Robert is a graphic designer by profession and education, but his true passion is parrots.”

Bob lives in the Chicago area and is very devoted to his flock. So devoted in fact, that for their sake, he did this to his kitchen making Chop:

Compared to what my kitchen looks like Après Chop, this is actually quite neat. My kitchen on the other hand, looks like the inside of a dumpster after I’m done making a batch. I never could get the hang of that “clean up as you go” concept. However, I can assure you, it’s worth it. But I digress…

Bob did some research and settled on making Chop for his crew. The results were astounding as you will see. Bob made about 20 pounds which, even with his crew of jetliner birds, will last for quite a while. Bob chose a nice array of vegetables that seemed to work well together in terms of color and nutrition balance.  He also chose to add beans right in with his Chop instead of making a separate bean mix which is just fine.

Jacqueline Johnson, the Parrot Garden Manager at Best Friends does the same thing. But you can always mix things up with an assortment of toppings to get more of a taste variety.

Bob used kale, collards and other greens, a very nutritious and important part of Chop.  He selected brown rice, quinoa, and whole grain pasta as his starches and carbs; all excellent choices.

His other vegetables included carrots, zucchini, broccoli, red and green peppers and cooked pumpkin. This batch is dead on for a nice smack of Vitamin A and calcium!

Bob also did something I used to do and is still a good alternative if you like what you see. He used 2 five pound bags of mixed frozen vegetables. He used cinnamon as a spice which world with the pumpkin addition:

Some carrots for the crowd:

All in all, Bob did a great job with his Chop and I believe that he’s gotten the hang of making it in short order. Sometimes people have an issue with getting it dry enough to freeze fresh. If it’s too moist, it has a tendency to thaw out with a mushy texture; something you don’t want. So undercook the rice, quinoa or pastas a bit so they can readily sop up some of the moisture from the vegetables.

I’m curious to find out how long Bob’s Chop is going to last. Which reminds me, I’m getting a little low myself. So soon it’ll be time to haul out my big-ass stock pot and make another batch. Stay tuned! Many thanks to Bob for allowing me to profile his Chop making efforts.

Most birds are a luxury companion animal. They’re usually expensive. (If you don’t get one for free or at little cost in an adoption situation.) They’re pretty expensive to keep. (If you don’t  know how to make toys for them and make your own food for them.) And they take a lot of time. (If you don’t have some dandy shortcuts and quickie ways of doing things.) And they need a lot of attention. (They’re not exactly short in the “Demanding” Department.)

I know it sounds like I’ve been wailing away for the past few months, writing about what pains in the keesters they are. Well, I’m sorry, but they are. And I’ve discussed how expensive they are. Well, aren’t they? I’m not lying about any of this. But you don’t see too many of us devoted human types rehoming our feathered families, either. Now I realize many people do give them up. If they weren’t doing this, Phoenix Landing wouldn’t be in business. Nor would Foster Parrots, Bird Lover’s Only or a myriad of other rescue and adoption services. I happen to have two birds that were given up by two different families sitting in my condo as I type.

But I don’t consider the blog readers (or “Bleaders”) here to fall into that category for the most part. “PN” has mostly fairly savvy and devoted parrot families. While I’d like to get more of the novices, it’s kind of tough. And you’ve heard me rant about that too. I guess the one thing I like to do here is to face the realities of having parrots in your family. Once you know what you’re up against, you can work with it. But you have to recognize what that reality is. It’s not all sweetness and light. But it can be an absolute riot at the same time. Despite the mess, the noise and the constant bopping up and down to right some wrong, adjust something askew, or fetch a parrot that has wandered off, I simply love the little dudes.

I suppose the best way to keep a good attitude about your flock is to think of them as a luxury automobile. If I’d thought about it more, I probably should have named my Greys “Ferarri,” “Masarati” and “Alpha Romeo.” But at least my Greys aren’t always in the shop.

Get a “Furrari” here!

People occasionally ask me how they can get their parrots to eat something that’s  good for them when their parrots look at them as though they were serving them strychnine.

I always tell them the same thing. The answer lies in your refrigerator. It’s made by Wish Bone or any of the other salad dressing companies.

Yup. Salad dressing. Now I’m not saying it will work with everyone’s parrot, but it works on mine. Anytime my birds get that “up-your-bucket” look when it comes to their food, as they occasionally do, I take out the salad dressing and do a bit of a “schmear” onto their “Chop.”

I think parrots are just like us. We tend to like the rich stuff, the french fried stuff. I don’t know anyone who would pass up the jumbo shrimp at a free buffet unless they’re allergic to shellfish.

Who doesn’t like a nice, fresh doughnut? Who can pass up crab legs? Or lobster? Or really good french fries? This is all rich, not-so-good-for-you stuff. But we love it. Crave it. Gotta have it on occasion. Be as virtuous as you want, occasionally we all break down and stuff our faces with this kind of stuff.

My birds are the same way. And their diet is good but they occasionally get picky and cranky and want something other than their usual stuff. That little schmear of light blue cheese salad dressing from the back of a spoon onto their Chop isn’t going to kill them. It might get them to eat their dinner. And that’s the important thing. Don’t worry about it. If they’re eating the good stuff, that little bit of salad dressing isn’t going to do any damage every once in a while. Just like us, they need a bit of the sublime. And if you have them on a good diet in the first place, that little treat isn’t going to hurt them. And if you do it right, even salad can be fabulous.

I’m showing my age. I remember all of these. And if you don’t know what I’m referring to, you are younger than me. I used to dial phones because that’s what everybody did. And you were wired to a wall while you were on the phone. There was even furniture made for just the purpose of keeping a phone on; it was a little chair attached to a small desk with a shelf underneath for the phone book.

Telephone numbers began with a two-letter prefix that stood for a word. My phone number growing up was Sherwood 2-9250. If you wrote it down for anyone, you wrote it out as “SH2-9250.

My father was a lover of technology, (for what it was at the time) and had the first reel-to-reel tape recorder in the neighborhood. The man didn’t hang out in bars or pool halls, he spent all of his spare time building stuff, designing stuff or whooping it up with the guys at Radio Shack. Yup, Dad was a real partier….The only guns he owned were a soldering gun and a staple gun.

After he got the first small tape recorder, he decided to build a stereo system. And he succeeded. He bought a cabinet, built everything into it and designed the turntable for the records that pulled out of the cabinet on a track. The record player played 45, 33, 78 rpm records. The TV drove him nuts unless it was a documentary on World War II or the news. But he liked music.

Image from Here

We had a small house, so he built shelves for the speakers and hung the shelves using chain anchored up through the ceiling into the attic beams. You would have needed a battering ram to pull the damned things down. In the sixties and seventies, bigger was better. Bigger cars, bigger stereos; the bigger it was, the more costly it was.

Since then, almost everything in technology has shrunk, except the accessibility of information. That accessibility has exploded with the force of a nuclear bomb. You can find out about almost anything now. Anything!

Some of my friends on Facebook are from all over the world. Just look at the revolver map in the lower right-hand corner of the blog and you’ll see people who have visited here from countries I’ve never even heard of.

The information available about practically everything is rampant and Google has changed the world. If the internet had existed when I was in school, everyone probably would have gotten a better education. (And I sure as hell would be a better typist.) I’m not sure kids even know what the Dewey Decimal System even is.

Google went from being worth zero to twenty billion dollars in 400 weeks. Their reach is phenomenal. You can find out about almost anything on the internet.

With all of this technology and free information floating around, could someone tell me why in the hell there are companion parrots still on an all-seed diet? This makes me even madder than the excessive and incorrect use of apostrophes, and the misuse of “there, their and they’re.”

What in the hell is going on? I could get upset at the seed companies and I do. I could get upset with Petsmart, Petco, Pet Supermarket, Pet Land and all of the rest of the big box pet stores for promoting grit for every companion parrot, but they wouldn’t listen. I’m just so tired of having to say, “An all-seed diet for a parrot really blows.”

But I will until I’m blue in the face because apparently I need to. I truly wish the all-seed diet went the way of the dial phone, the reel-to-reel tape recorder and the typewriter because it simply has to change.

I have an idea. But I can’t do it by myself. If we all reached out at our social networks at our bird clubs, on our blogs and on our websites, we might be able to make a small dent in the crappy, unhealthy, ridiculous, archaic, obsolete, outdated, outmoded, extinct, defunct, antediluvian, antiquated, all-seed diet. (Mom! She’s using the Thesaurus again!)

And here’s how we can all get involved. Do you remember the film “Network?” Perhaps not, but you might remember this classic phrase:

“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Here is the scene:

We can do the same thing on the internet: Put up a post on your wall, at your website, in an email and type “An all-seed diet for your parrot really blows!” Tell your friends, your club, your “Parrot Peeps,” your internet buddies, anyone who will listen about this. You never know it just might make a small scratch on the diets of birds everywhere. And in the words of a viral hit: “Tell err’body!”

Put it on other people’s walls. Graffiti the internet with it. I’m even thinking of creating some bumper stickers. How would this look on the back of my car?

Now listen. I don’t have to tell you guys this. You know. You’re here. You put up with my incessant ranting, my videos, and my repetitious hollering about vegetables in a parrot’s diet. You already know all of this. But you might have friends who feed mostly seed to their birds. Maybe they just don’t know better.

Do you have any idea how many parrots still get just seed? Well, I don’t know either and it chills me to the bone even thinking about it. It’s just not right. It’s not right to feed dirt cookies and lead paint chips to your kids. And feeding an all-seed diet to a parrot is harmful and isn’t right either.

I guess until I can figure out a way for the big box store to make more money on pellets and stuff to make “Chop” than they do on seed, the parrots of the world are going to have to suffer the consequences. And that’s what really blows.

I did a “quick and dirty” version of my cooked bean mix for my birds. I wanted to make them today and I had to go to the store for beans so rather than soak them overnight, I did a “fast cook” version of my usual method, drained and rinsed them and then added the other ingredients. Normally I soak them for about 8 hours in cold water and rinse repeatedly. But you can do it this way if you don’t have the time or did what I did and forget to soak them.

I would like to thank and acknowledge Shari Mirojnick for her knowledge and influence on this bean mix recipe. It was her input and method that the bean mix I made has improved. She has been making a bean mix for her birds for over ten years now.

Here is the nutritional low-down of some of the ingredients. :

Lentils:

Pure and simple, lentils are a powerhouse of nutrition. They are a very good source of cholesterol-lowering fiber. There is no cholesterol content in lentils, yet at the same time, they are very low in saturated fat. Another important nutrient that lentils are rich in is thiamin. Lentils are also high in folic acid, contain antioxidants, calcium and are rich in vitamin B. They are good sources of important minerals like iron, magnesium, and zinc.

Quinoa:

Quiona is high in protein and includes all the nine essential amino acids supplements. It is a popular choice for vegans, as it helps them take in the adequate amount of proteins, a sometimes tricky thing if you are vegan. It is gluten-free and it a wonderful source of phosphorous, magnesium, zinc, copper and manganese. It contains vitamin B6, niacin and thiamine. It has lysine for building proteins in the body, also contains riboflavin, (vitamin B2) an extremely important vitamin for producing energy.

Barley:

Barley is absolutely loaded with fiber. It provides insoluble fibers that help feed friendly bacteria in the digestive tract. This helps maintain larger populations of friendly bacteria. What this does is crowd out disease-causing bacteria and prevents them from surviving in the intestinal system. Barley is also a source of niacin, a B vitamin. Barley is also a good source of niacin, a B vitamin.

Beans:

High in fiber, high in protein, Beans contain no cholesterol, Most beans contain at least 20% protein and are quite high in carbohydrates. This provides longlasting energy.  Beans also provide essential B Vitamins and Iron.

Wild Rice:

Wild rice is actually an aquatic grass. It contains more Niacin (also known as vitamin B-3), than brown rice and it’s an excellent source of other B vitamins, such as calcium and potassium. It is a good source of fiber, it’s high in carbohydrates which is great for boosting your bird’s energy.

Yesterday, I had a Flight to San Juan. I had to be at the airport at eight a.m. for a nine a.m. departure. Out to San Juan, sit for a couple of hours and come back. Land about five and with the rush hour traffic, I’d be home by about 6:30 or 7:00 in time to play with my birds and get them to bed at a reasonable hour. No problem, right?

Well, sometimes life in the real world doesn’t work out that way. Especially if it involves air travel. We ended up with a mechanical problem and didn’t leave until 1:25 p.m. This created a delay, but not too bad because we had all that time in the airport in San Juan. What nobody counted on was a line of thunderstorms, lightning and major rain that developed over Florida and shut down Miami for a few hours. We ended up in Nassau to refuel. Then the Pilots went illegal due to a duty day over fourteen hours. But we had a couple of pilots dead-heading on the flight and they just switched seats, so that worked out. Long story short; I got home at 1:00 in the morning. You might have noticed that I have African Greys. And a dog. But I’m lucky enough to have a friend that I had pre-arranged to look after the birds for dinner.  I managed to get ahold of him on a cell phone when I was sitting in the Bahamas and had a break from trying to explain to one of our customers that this wasn’t a conspiracy to keep him from getting to Richmond, Virginia that evening. And that there really was a huge thunderstorm in Miami despite the fact that the “American Express Travel Desk” said they had no reports of anything amiss at the Miami Airport. (Never mind that there were planes scattered around like tinker toys all over the airport waiting for refueling…) And no, we don’t “make this stuff up.”

I told my friend giving my birds their dinner to just put them to bed at their normal time as I didn’t know when I’d get back. Which he did of course and I owe him some cookies or something. Mattie the dog, however was another story. I had “piddle pads” down for her which she knows to use if she needs to.  And she did use them; very liberally I might add. (That’s my girl!)  And of course, I took her out the second I got home.

But what would have happened if I didn’t have that back-up? What if I had nobody to feed them their dinner or cover them up? Well, I’ll tell you. Probably nothing. They would have been fine. They would have had their beaks out of joint, and a little ticked off at me, but they would have been happy to see me, and they would have gotten their dinner at one in the morning. They all had big bowls of formulated pelleted parrot food in their “houses.” And they had fresh water. I assure you, they would have been fine. It wouldn’t have been ideal, but they would have survived.

Would I have liked it? Would I have been comfortable with it? In a word: No. I would have been wracked with guilt for days. I would have been worried, concerned and upset. But my birds would have forgotten about it by the next morning. Like most animals, they live in the moment. They’re tougher and more flexible than we are.

We all have times when the parrot poop hits the fan. Life goes on whether you have parrots or dogs or not. Things come up. Life isn’t perfect. If you are lucky enough like me to have “Back-up,” consider yourself very lucky and treat these people like gold. But things happen like what happened to me.  And there’s nothing you can do about it. If I had no backup and had gotten stuck overnight in Nassau, I would have made a phone call and they would have been fed. You can push this “no attention” thing only so far. But as it is, it all worked out.

My birds don’t have a set schedule. There are mornings when they eat breakfast at 5 a.m. and there mornings like today when they weren’t fed breakfast until 8:30 a.m. They have learned to be flexible and aren’t pointing to their watches if I’m ten minutes late with their fresh food full of “Chop,” beans, sprouts and nuts. They know they will be taken care of. Our schedule is a bit wacky at times, but they’ve grown accustomed to our “no-schedule” schedule. They roll with the punches. And they are better birds for it. But there are certain things I do to make my life a little easier to take when it deals you a hand like I got yesterday. And on the other hand, there are days at a time when they spend the entire day with me and I’m sure are sick of having me around.

But there are things I’ve arranged to make life easier for us. First of all, I have four people who are what I call my “Parrot-Troopers.” They are trained up to feed the birds and change their water. They all have a key to my place. They all know where I keep the frozen “Chop” and frozen beans and they know where I keep the nuts and such. They all are at least marginally comfortable with my birds, if not completely at ease with them. They have the basics down on diet, and what they need to do to get them fed and watered. I keep enough frozen food in the freezer to feed an army, or more technically, a “troop” of parrots for days. (Which reminds me, I’m down to about 5 days worth and I have to make more.) I also have many people who are fine with taking care of Mattie the dog as well.  The problem I had when I first got Parker was that I realized I couldn’t do it alone. I was going to have to ask for help. And I didn’t like that, but I had to do it in order to make this life with a parrot workable.

What I’m advising to anyone with companion animals is to have a back-up plan. Make sure someone has access to your home and they know where the food, the leash, the piddle-pads, whatever it is that your animals need is located. Have a list of telephone numbers of the Vets, and other friends who could help in case of a problem posted on your refrigerator. If you have animals needing medication, put those notes there too. Make sure people know if you are leaving and when you are coming back and make sure they have access to your place. Maybe you already  have this in place and if you do, I applaud you. But I just bring it up because of what happened to me yesterday. Occasionally it rains in your life and if you know your “family” will be taken care of, you can dance in the downpour.

So, I do worry when stuff happens, but I know they will be fine because I created a cushion of back-up for myself. And they’re tougher than we give them credit for. Even though my birds, dog and I  are technically on our own in the world, we have people who are willing to help us out if life gets weird. I’ve trained my parrots to be flexible and take life as it comes. Their schedule is not rigid and neither is their diet or their way of life. They have learned to trust that all will be well. It’s just that sometimes it might take a little time; especially if it rains.

Do you have a plan in case you can’t make it home? What are your emergency backup plans? And please, if you have any other suggestions for me other than “Find another job.” I’d love to hear them! I’m sorry, but after 23 years, it isn’t feasible…yet! But I’m working on cutting down.