The 7th day of the 11th month of Emergence

Misadventures of Deuce and the Hootster

As some of the more astute amongst you know, I live in a kennel!  Well, not really but two dogs and two cockatiel birds come close enough for me.  All we need is a cat to complete the food chain.

To bring you all up to speed, Deuce is the second (Duh) bird to come our way.  The first one flew out the back door by mistake because his feathers had not been clipped in a timely fashion.

Cockatiels are flock birds that need company.  We humans are supposed to be their flock in lieu of a mess of the real things.  This guy is about as paranoid as you can get.  He is the early warning system in our house, screaming when anything even passes one of the windows.  This immediately is the signal for the little dog to start barking and the big dog to bark back-up.  The real big dog then starts screaming at the whole bunch to be quiet.  Must sound good in the spring and fall when all the windows are open.

Thinking that Deuce really needed companionship, and the real thing at that, we allowed the crafty bird saleslady to talk us into giving a home to Hooty (because he looks like and owl?). 

If you want to really be scared, double click on the images for full screen.  Because they are flock birds, they are all supposed to look pretty much the same because there is safety in numbers.  Somewhere along the line, this guy got a pair of jeans messed up.  His coloration just is not right and hence he is treated as an outcast. 

I am sure that Deuce thinks that the Hootster is just plain weird.  Hooty also has a much sharper beak (hole punch if you will) and is not afraid to use it.  One is primarily but is not aggressive to the other bird, but people are a whole nuther question.  Go figure, but he can bite and he can draw blood.  So much for devotion and gratitude to tender loving care.

This weekend past, we allowed them both out of the cage to sit on the kitchen window and talk to the real wild birds on the feeder.  They seemed to enjoy it no end.  Neither bird talks, like in human baby talk for instance, but Deuce does do a wolf whistle.  The chickadees and cardinals have no idea what that's all about, but Deuce apparently feels that they should.  I don't know, it never worked for me either!

 I guess from the wild bird's point of view these two just did not make the cut, and hence the communication was pretty much one sided.  But they did have fun, I took a mess of photos and they got their dose of vitamin D from all that sunshine.