Bandit And Spazy Play Head Games
… Plus, When Mom and Dad Are Away, Sweetie Plays!
Bandit is our Blue and Gold and Spazy is our Military Macaw, Sweetie is our little Rose Breasted Cockatoo. When you spend 24/7 with your birds, you see many interesting things. Last month I wrote about how I work on their aviaries to make them more exciting for our feathered kids. One of the things I do is place plastic beads and toys with holes in them on branches that they pull off and play with. Bandit and Spazy both play with them, but Bandit seems to have more fun with them. They have some beads and toys they like more than others and that get carried off and played with almost every day and sometime they rearrange them. Bandit’s favorite beads are two _ inch purple ones.
Well last week one of the purple beads went missing when I went to clean the aviary. I looked all over the aviary, checked the food dishes, then checked inside any of the open toys, in the fountain, under anything it could have rolled under and of course their toy box. I could not find it anywhere, so after three days I came in that third evening and told Bandit he had me stumped, I couldn’t find where he hid the Purple bead. The next evening after I brought the boys in I went back out to clean the aviary and there was the missing purple bead. I immediately came back in the house and told Bandit I found it and he just looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about, yeah right.
Then I started putting the purple beads on behind another toy. One of them is a red stretchy silicon thing; I think it had been the torso of one of their little people (they love to play with little “People” toys). Well one night when I went out there, the bead was off and the red stretchy thing was back on the branch. Then it finally happened, one of the purple beads was chomped in two.
Bandit has another new trick he has started using the computer. The boys Nite-Nite crate is in my back office/computer lab and sometimes in the evening, I work back there and the boys watch. Bandit often climbs down and comes over to watch me just like a kid likes to watch their daddy. The boys do the same thing to Susan at her desk in the front office; in fact, Bandit was on the floor in the back office opening up the pocket doors so he could go see Susan. Back to the computer, I had been working on a friend’s computer and left the keyboard drawer out without thinking any thing about it. When I came back in later, I find five or six keys missing from the keyboard and both the boys are on their crate. Well you think I would learn from this one incident, but it appears that after all the years I have spent around these birds I have not learned yet that once they do something and get away with it, and many times even if they do get caught, they’ll do it again.
A couple of nights later, there were four keys missing. I noticed that the computer was in screen saver mode and when he hit a key, the screen came on, so he WAS really operating the computer. Oh, in case you were wondering, he removed the Enter key on the number pad, the 1, 3, 0, and 2 Cursor keys, plus the Microsoft key, and yes I found all the keys undamaged and I put them back on the keyboard and it works fine. This is one way I know it was Bandit; he generally only dismantles things like this. By the way, the keyboard is now closed when I’m not at the desk, next thing you know Bandit will be searching the internet for Birdie porn.
I mentioned Sweetie and what she does when we’re away, well we have a toy box for her at the bottom back corner of her cage and we never see her in it but she always has toys scattered all over that half of the bottom of her cage. She plays all over her cage when she is in there. She climbs on everything, whenever we get close to the cage she starts showing off and talking. I do not think I have ever seen such an active bird. So the other day Susan had just finished cleaning Sweetie’s cage and all the toys were back in the toy box. Then we had to go out for a few hours and low and behold, we check the cage when we came home and the toys from the toy box were scattered all over the bottom of the cage. So, she definitely entertains herself when were not home and does not just set there on a perch. Hint, a busy bird is a happy bird and not a plucker.
Until next time,
Cliff Steele
