The eagle has landed. The Gobester is here. He’s sitting (and shitting) on my shoulder as I write this. He’s a darling little thing. I rub his face with my nose and he gets all fluffy. He said something today but I couldn’t make it out yet. Here is a picture from yesterday.
Bill and I drove north to Manhattan Beach to the breeder’s to pick Gobi up. We had so much fun – this woman Luana truly loves and cares for each bird. She doesn’t really do it for profit but for the love of the genus. These birds are difficult to get in the US since the ban on imported birds, so it’s up to breeders like Luana to keep the lines going here. Anyway, going to her house is like going to Bird Wonderland. We found when we walked through the front door that her house is like an airport for little green airplanes. We arrived during their exercise period and they gaily flew to and fro, chirping and whistling. They landed on our heads, on playpens installed high on the top of kitchen cabinets, on the leaves of a potted palm tree, and on the counter, where Luana had some food in syringes to hand-feed them (Gobi got his last hand-feeding then, now he’s only on “big bird” food). She showed us her breeding areas and you can not believe how deafening 30 some odd birds can be when they sense their space is being invaded! Ouch!
I got a certificate from Luana stating that the bird was checked for sex and is a male. I also discovered that the names of his parents are “Itsy” and “Bitsy”! His hatchday is June 1, 2006. You can bet that went up on the calendar right away, as birds’ birth ahem…hatchdays are celebrated in our home.
The four stooges…
This looks like the inspiration for Hitchcock’s movie The Birds …
Luana and her brood of babies. She is very knowledgeable and loves her charges dearly!
With the new baby comes lots of laundry. I need a little cape like Luana has on, otherwise I find myself changing my shirts several times a day!
Gobi already has several nicknames: “vegemite”, “07″ (his band number), and “flibidip” (my translation of a chirp that he likes to vocalize), and “loose change” because we had lots of rolls of change that we cashed in to buy him!
Love is a new baby bird!
8 Comments
August 9, 2006 at 3:10 am
wow, cool pictures. congratulations on the new live in! He looks great. I hope vegemite is something he likes to eat, not a description of his personality
How is he doing with the transition from tube to bird food?
August 9, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Hooray he is home with you at last …….. such a cutie.
Fantastic pics!
August 9, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Gobi still bobs his head up and down like he wants to be hand-fed, so I feed him reconstituted monkey biscuits with a spoon. He seems to be getting away from that now. He’s vocalizing more, too, trying to say something, I can’t make it out yet.
August 9, 2006 at 6:10 pm
I am amazed how in sync we are (I suddenly had a mental image of Cory as a baby getting his bath in the kitchen sink…). I once sang in a band in WA, we were called Loose Change (and though we were really good, that is about all we ever made on our gigs). How many people realize the amazing things one can do with all that loose change? I once paid my rent and deposit on an apartment with rolls of quarters, and Rick uses them to buy lunch (pennies if he gets a server with a bad attitude!). Gobi has me thinking Star Wars, Gobi-Wan with the universe?
August 28, 2006 at 7:07 pm
[...] New pets sometimes go through phases where they develop a habit which is annoying. Baby parrots go through these and sometimes the results are painful also. I bring this up because Gobi has lately been biting me a bit. It’s just a phase; I have little tiny dot-sized scabs on my fingers, but compared to what Gizmo can do, this is nothing. At the time of this writing, he’s almost out of this oral phase. [...]
June 3, 2007 at 9:54 pm
[...] he’s already one year old, we got him when he was weaned at 2 months of age (see older post “Gobi is Here”). Here is a picture of him and his clutchmate Abner as tiny babies. Gobi is the one [...]
June 26, 2007 at 2:42 am
[...] sent of her three latest baby Orange Chins (they actually came from the same parents that my bird Gobi came [...]
May 22, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Aww, I used to have a Brotogeris
Love the photos! They look so sweet and happy.