I’ve started a group on flickr, the online photosharing service, called I love my bird. It’s for people to share photos of their pet birds, and it’s free to sign up to flickr.
If you have a pet bird and have photos you want to share, please join us and share pics of your fids.
(The model in this picture is Vic, one of our two cockatiels.)
The Organization of Professional Aviculturists in Florida is raising funds to help save the birds of Howard Voren’s aviaries. His aviaries in Florida were hit very hard by Hurricane Frances–almost all the trees at the aviary were uprooted, and many landed on the cages. From the site:
Almost every tree on the property, including a canopy of jacaranda trees Howard planted 20 years ago, have been uprooted and they have fallen on top of cages. Hundreds of birds are still trapped in damaged cages. Virtually everything has been crushed and is standing in muck.
The site has some very sad pictures of scared parrots stuck in their cages. Also, the parrots who have already been rescued are in temporary shelters that are not suitable for long-term use.
If you can spare even a small amount, please consider donating through the site. They take PayPal, as well as other methods of donation.
[Thanks to Teddy of parrotlink for posting about this to various parrot lists.]
Today I took some photos of fur and feather textures. I was inspired to do this by the Textures group on Flickr, since this month’s theme is textures that are soft to the touch.
This is one of my favourites of the photos I took today. It’s a close-up of my cockatiel Fred’s neck and shows three of the four colours on a standard tiel. It isn’t obvious at first what it’s a photo of, unless you know cockatiels well, and it really shows off the feather texture.
I have other photos I took today in my Textures photoset. One of the ones of Vic will be used in the CD art for the forthcoming Sol Invictus release, The Angel.
Recently both Wired News and BBC News have published articles on the two latest cloned kittens, Tabouli and Baba Ganoush. Unlike the first cloned cat CopyCat, a.k.a. Cc, these cats look remarkably similar to their genetic donor Tahini and even have almost the same coat pattern. This improvement in copying the original is mainly due to a new method called chromatin transfer that is supposedly more efficient and safer than earlier methods.
The company that performed this cloning, Genetic Savings and Clone, are now offering their cat cloning services to the public. For only $50,000, you too can clone your cat, but you’ll have to hurry as only one space is left for 2004.
Seriously though, even withstanding the fact that no one knows yet if this new cloning proceses is safe in the long term—animals cloned by the earlier method often had problems in later life—it’s hard to understand why anyone would actually want to clone his or her pet. A pet’s clone will never be the same as the original pet, despite being genetically identical, as the clone will have been raised in a different environment from the original.
Also, I have to wonder how emotionally satisfying having a clone would be, especially if the clone was a “replacement” for a beloved pet who has passed away. Whether the owner meant to do so or not, he or she would constantly be comparing Fido-Two to Fido-One, and any differences between the two could be seen as shortcomings of Fido-Two as opposed to just personality quirks of a different pet.
Part of the appeal of having pets that have personalities, such as cats or dogs, is the fact that all animals differ from each other and each pet is unique. None of my pets could ever truly replace another, and I wouldn’t want them to. I’ve enjoyed meeting and getting to know various animals, both furred and feathered, and my life has been enriched by all of them.
On the somewhat related subject of baby animals, congratulations are due for Miško & Ciuffo, the two resident cockatiels of sashaDesign, whose babies are beginning to hatch out. Unlike the two kittens in the picture above, these babies were definitely conceived the old fashioned way.
The number of wild parrots in England is growing at 30% a year, according to an article on BBC News. For example, the parrot population at Esher Rugby Club’s ground in Surrey grew from 800 to 2,500 in the space of three years, and 3,000 are estimated to live there now. There may be around 20,000 wild parrots in England, the majority of them living around London and in the South East.
Most of the parrots are parakeets of some sort, the most common being Ring-necked Parakeets and Quaker parakeets (also called Monk’s parakeets). Project Parakeet run by Chris Butler, a post-graduate researcher at Oxford, is studying the growth of wild parrots in the UK to see if the rate of growth will continue. If this growth does continue, groups such as the RSPB are concerned what impact this will have on native wildlife and whether parrots will become a pest for farmers. Parrots have no natural predators here, and they are both bigger and bolder than the native birds.
Although I think the idea of seeing wild parrots in England is quite cool on the surface, I have mixed feelings about their population growth and the impact it may have on native birds. This wouldn’t be the first time that a non-native species displaced a native one in the UK, the most famous example being the the native red squirrel, whose numbers have declined sharply since the importation of American grey squirrels. Also, parrots are not native at all to England, unlike the US, where the extinct Carolina Parakeet used to be common, and it could be argued that other species of parrots that have become established in parts of the US are just the closest replacement possible to their extinct cousin.
On the other hand, I have to admit, I really like parrots, and I would love to see them in the wild. If I do see them flying around somewhere in London or elsewhere in England, I will be marvelling at the site of them instead of worrying about what they are doing to the local ecology. From the feedback to the BBC article I linked to in the first paragraph, I don’t think I am alone in my admiration of these beautiful birds.
As I mentioned in my previous post on World Parrot Day, we bought the Pollyvision—Strictly for Parrots DVD, the first ever DVD created for pet birds. I’ve now shown it to our two cockatiels Fred and Vic twice, so I felt ready to write a review of it.
We showed it to the boys on a 14″ TV, not a flatscreen TV as recommended, as we don’t have one. I wanted to show it to them on the computer, since a monitor has a higher refresh rate than a TV, but the DVD crashed my computer. I don’t want to blame it on the DVD, since my DVD-ROM drive has been known to have troubles with discs before, both DVD and CD. Because I couldn’t view it on my computer, I couldn’t make any screenshots, and the image above is originally from the World Parrot Trust Online Store.
Overall, the DVD played fine on the DVD player, except I noticed that some parts of it seemed highly compressed, or at least it looked like it was dropping frames, as the movement in parts was very jerky and jumped about a bit. I don’t know if just my copy has troubles or if it is just how the DVD was mastered, and I suspect that these problems may have contributed to the problems I had with playing it on my computer.
In general, however, the DVD looked really good, considering that for the most part the sources are video and not film, and our birds didn’t seem to notice any weirdness. It’s a great opportunity to watch various wild parrots in action. The parrots featured come from all over the world and the DVD is divided into sections either by geography (e.g., Australia) or type of bird (e.g., African grey). The menu allows the viewer either to select the individual section or watch the whole thing. If the whole thing is selected, the video automatically loops, so that owners can leave it playing for their birds while they are out for the day. I’m not sure what happens when an individual section is selected, as the remote control for our bedroom DVD is broken, and I can’t navigate through the menu without it.
Now for the most important part—what do the birds think? Both Fred and Vic seemed to enjoy it a lot, and they were tweeting along with the birds on TV. It made Fred hyper—not that that’s hard to do—but hyper in a happy way, not an aggressive or angry way. They didn’t react too much when the cockatiels were on screen, but the wild tiels were only on for a few minutes and did not make any sounds. As the boys seemed to react more to the sounds than the images, this could explain why the tiels weren’t as captivating as they might have been. In general, Fred and Vic didn’t ignore the images, but they tended to look at them more right after hearing interesting sounds.
All in all, the DVD is well worth the money for people with pet parrots, since it’s only £9.95 from the World Parrot Trust Online Store and all the profits go to parrot conservation and welfare. I know that both the birds and the humans in this household will enjoy this DVD for many years to come, and if they release a sequel, we’ll be sure to get it.
Today Tony and I went to the World Parrot Day main event at Trafalgar Square. World Parrot Day was held for two reasons: to gain support for banning importation of wild-caught parrots into the EU and to help people understand more clearly the responsibilities of owning a parrot. Along with allowing people to meet various parrots, mainly macaws, signatures for a petition to ban parrot importing were collected, and the petition was delivered to 10 Downing Street. We didn’t get to go in 10 Downing Street ourselves, but we watched as Quentin Blake, a man dressed as Superparrot, a real parrot and a few other people went in.
We took photos of the event—click Superparrot below if you want to see them.
Also, we bought Pollyvision, a DVD of parrots in the wild for parrots in our homes. Fred and Vic, our two cockatiels, seemed to really enjoy it. I’ll post a full review of it later after we’ve shown it to the boys a few more times.
Apparently we were on ITV London News, but we missed it the times it was on, and their website seems to be down at the moment, so I can’t link to it. If anyone saw anything about World Parrot Day on TV or on any websites, please tell me about it and give a link if there is one.
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