Parrot Nation

My apologies for the slow progress of this blog lately. But there have been some issues that have prevented me from moving it forward. I had a death in the family which means I am now able to count the remaining members of my clan on one hand.

My flying career has become tense with the current management team beginning to look like the clown car at the circus. However, things are “adjusting.” Hopefully in a couple of months all will be right with the world and quoting “A Christmas Story,” I will once again be “getting off spectacular hip shots.”  In the next few weeks I’ll be catching up with this site bringing you all the stuff that went on while I was busy not writing here. Again, I’m sorry.

I just hope that clown car doesn’t start acting up again:

And now, back to the blog:

My blog can be found under quite a few tags. Among them, “Parrot Blog,” “Bird Blog,” and ‘Blogging About Parrots.” And I suppose it is mainly of interest to people with birds. But if you take a look at the overall scheme of things, if you look under the bed, and poke around in the closet into the heart of things here, it really isn’t about our little guys. Or our big guys. Not really.

When I began this blog, I suppose I thought it would be about parrots. But I soon discovered that it is extremely difficult to write about nothing but parrots unless you’re Joseph Forshaw and want to write a book of encyclopedic proportions that would keep a door open in a hurricane.

I have always maintained several truths about what I know, who I am in this world of birds, and I’ve also been fairly clear about what I am not:

I am not an expert. I’m a writer. I have ideas, I have thoughts and I have a pretty clear agenda about what in the hell I’ve been doing writing this for close to five years.

Dr. Susan Friedman at the Oasis Sanctuary

This collection of posts is about the people and about experiences in aviculture. If it was just about the birds, I would have run out of fuel a long time ago. There’s only so much you can write about birds if you aren’t a behaviorist, a scientist or a researcher. Dr. Susan Friedman I’m not. I don’t pretend to be Dr. Greg Harrison. Or Dr. Donald Brightsmith. But to be them and to write a blog like this would be out of place. I don’t think it could be done. They all have fairly clear agendas and they stick to it faithfully.

I was at an event where Susan Friedman was speaking. Someone asked her when she was going to “change up” her presentation. And while I can’t remember word for word what she said, it amounted to the fact that “Science is Science. It is what it is.” In other words, Susan’s agenda is behavior. And changing her agenda of what she teaches would be like trying to change the fact that gravity exists. It is what it is. And there’s only so many ways you can explain a scientific principle.

I am not hemmed in by gravity. Or behavior. Or any other strict subject matter. And I couldn’t stick to it if I wanted to. I simply keep my ear to the ground, wander around a bit to see what’s going on and write about it. I’m rarely evangelistic about it, if at all. Again, that’s not what this blog is about. I don’t do a whole lot of screaming. And when I do, it’s usually about stuff most people should already know and I get frustrated by their lack of information when it’s all over the place. That’s when I get a little hot under the collar. I’m trying to get better about that…

My goal is to simply present what’s going on, what I see and hear and what people are doing as they go about their lives that happen to have birds in it. I’ll be doing quite a bit of this in the upcoming year. I have a lot of events to cover and I’m behind on some of the events I already did cover. So I have a lot on my plate as far as catching up here. Some projects haven’t even hatched yet and they have already become controversial. Stay tuned and you’ll see what I mean. Tempest in a teapot? Perhaps…

Her Name is “Tempest.”

But when we continue with our lives with birds, there are some things to keep in mind:

Yes, we love birds. We have birds in our lives and we love them, keep them, dote on them, care for them and talk about them. But being a “One Trick Pony” doesn’t bring anything new to their lives. The more fully you live your life, the better off your birds will be. I think your birds pick up on how content you are. If you’re happy, they’re happy. And vice versa.

I simply believe that life with parrots is still a life. It’s a human life. And I think if you’re doing it right, there’s a hell of a lot more going on than just cleaning cages, making bird food, and trying to be right all the time in various groups and pages on Facebook. And if that’s all you’ve got, then, well, perhaps it’s time to rethink things.