Birds We Have Known

I love birds as well, and have been enjoying most of these stories.

As a child we had a few rescued birds including some young pigeons and a pheasant. If memory serves, they stayed with us for a season while they recuperated, and then departed. I do remember the feeling of the pigeons resting on my hands, amazed by their soft grey breast and warm feet. They are quite lovely.

Hello again.
Thank you all for your splendid stories. I haven't read them all yet.

Sue - no I haven't seen that before!
Thank you so much, I'll really enjoy that

Fanny have you seen this thread about Stephen Sebastian? We were all so invested in a seagull! ❤️
www.gransnet.com/forums/chat/1281141-Well-now-I-ve-got-a-dilemma

All my birds are all wild these days. If you've read my Bluey story you'll understand why .

I totally love my birds and spoil them rotten. Are they grateful? Not on your Nelly. If they've gorged on all the seed, fat balls, suet and peanut they sit on the fence and complain until I refill all the feeders. One or two extra brave/bossy birds have been known to sit on the storage box under the kitchen window and look sad.

Then to prove they've eaten well they sometimes leave me little gifts on my clean washing.

But I love them all from my little Jenny Wren all the way up to my magpies, jackdaws and crows. I even love my sparrow hawk even if she does take the odd pigeon or two.

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202101/medium-934126-img-2489.jpg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202101/medium-127072-9c7rroasfq08c6woi6rq.jpg

We have had robins around the garden for years and they visited the table from a very young age. Had a family visit the garden 3 years ago but mother or father (hard to known the difference with robins) fought with the two youngsters as they started to mature. We had names for then all.
One youngster, we nick-named "dippy" would sit on hand and DH's shoulder quite often. Have a lovely photo of it. My daughter's friend drew the family that summer.

We had robins last year but none onto the table.

When I was small, an injured pigeon was found by my dad. I think he was a racing pigeon, but we didn’t get him re-united with his owner, don’t know why.
He recovered, think it was his leg, we called him Pretty Billy, and he lived happily in our shed at night, and flew around outside in the day. Cannot remember what happened to him, I suppose he went to the Great Aviary In The Sky.

More recently, we used to have a tame pheasant in our garden. We called him Cocky. He disappeared for a short time, when he returned, oh dear, he was limping, all his beautiful tail feathers were missing, he no longer strutted round like a proud cock of the walk. Must have been in a fight. We fed him and kept a close eye on him. Gradually, his leg recovered and his feathers grew back. Sadly, we haven’t seen him for several months now, perhaps he’ll return in the spring. Hope he hasn’t been shot.

Thank you Sue , that was exactly the thing that I was thinking of.

Such a lovely thread! I adore birds, always have. As a child we had occasional holidays with an aunt who had a blue budgie called Monty. He had free-range of the house. He used to sit on my uncle’s head while he (the uncle, not the bird!) read the newspaper and would perch on people’s forks at the meal table, stealing tasty morsels he fancied - hygiene wasn’t a consideration for us. He had a lot of words, including Monty wants a cup of tea and Monty wants a kiss.

Later on, an elderly couple offered my mum two green budgies, as they couldn’t care for them properly any more. My brother and I were delighted and we had them for some years. They also had a lot of freedom within the house, which was why the wallpaper was missing from the top six inches of the walls. Strangely, my mum, who was v houseproud, didn’t seem to mind these two vandals wrecking the joint. My brother and I wouldn’t have got away with ripping the wallpaper!

A wonderful book about wild birds who come into our lives is Corvus by Esther Woolf. It all began with an injured rook, called Chicken. www.waterstones.com/book/corvus/esther-woolfson/9781783784486

Maybe being trapped in our homes during lockdown should give us an insight in to the feelings of a caged bird. Let them go, let them soar freely.

I once looked after a neighbour's budgie when they went on holiday and got the biggest fright of my life----as you do when it's someone else's pet you've been left in charge of.
So far as I'd known, the bird had never had a millet spray so I decided to treat the poor thing.

The bird loved it and didn't leave it until all the seeds had gone, but then I could see it choking and having trouble dis-lodging some husk so I quickly whipped it out of the cage, forced its beak open and held the bird under the running cold tap. Family in the background laughing and shouting " you're going to kill it mother ".

Bird was drenched, but it perked up back to life again and was happy to continue tweeting. Needless to say I didn't buy any more millet sprays and it seemed none the worse for its scary event. I didn't let on to the neighbour.

We did have a canary for a number of years which had been passed on to us after its owner, an old lady, had died, so the bird was already ancient but sang beautifully all the time.

D has a parrot, Jasper, an African Grey who's hilarious and also very clever. Drives them mad with the phone---as it's him. Miows like the cat and screams like the children. Talks over my D when she's on the phone and laughs inanely.
Honestly, the family's crackers hahahaha.

When I was about 12 my mother rescued a seagull with a broken wing that was fluttering around in front of her car.

We put him in the largest birdcage we had, called him Peter, and fed him on bits of the cats' fish, to the great annoyance of my mother's cat.

After six weeks his wing had mended and we moved the cage outside and opened the door. For a week he flew short flights and came home to roost, then he flew off.

There was a bare patch on the injured wing where the feathers never grew back so we could recognise him when he came visiting all that summer. The following year he came back once with his mate who was hesitant about flying down low in the garden.

After that we never saw him again, but were pleased he had returned to a natural wild life.

I had a canary for years when I was a child - he sang loudly if we had the radio on, or where hoovering. Perhaps your old bird wants a little encouragement in his old age.

My canary was finally buried under a tree in our garden too.

When I first moved in with my now husband there was a knock at the door from a small boy holding a bird that had been hit by a car and he found it in the road (dont know what it was). DH said he would look after it and thanked the boy. He went into the garden shed where he was caring for a few other injured birds and a rodent or two. I didn't go in there as at that time I was terrified of all animals and birds. A little while later he came back with tears running down his face - he had had to administer the coup de grace and was terribly upset. I didn't understand this at all at the time. Over the last 42 years DH has taught me to love and respect animals although I am not as confident with them as he is. I wonder how I managed to grow up knowing nothing about and being terrified of animals

Laura!
What a story! I'm so glad that you came back to tell us the tale of how you captured Orlin's heart ?

Thanks for inviting me back Fanny.
I met our paperboy when I was fifteen who apparently fancied me. We went for a walk in the countryside on our first date and I liked him back.
A few days later he invited me to his home where he proudly showed me his aviary full of beautiful budgerigars trying to fly freely in a space about 12 x 6 feet. He opened the door and stepped inside, I closed the door, dropped the lock and went home.
He called on me the following day having been freed from captivity by a neighbour and said that I’d made my point and he would be freeing the birds. A few weeks later the aviary and birds had disappeared.
Five years later I married him. 51 years in July. We fly freely together.
I’m afraid I can’t bear to walk through a pet shop or zoo and hear the sound of caged birds or animals.
We have befriended wild birds that we’ve helped after they’ve flown in to windows and stunned or damaged themselves. One little fat thrush in particular actually stayed about a week while recovering and walk all the way up to my foot, sang for a moment, hopped away, turned around and finally flew off, I cried.

I agree about not keeping caged birds, although we used to many decades ago, which I now regret. Ours were allowed to fly around the house, but of course that is not at all the same as flying wild. To see a huge colourful flock of wild budgerigars in Australia is amazing, that is how they should live.

We do have some wild peacocks now, they wander around our hamlet. They roost at ours, probably because we are very generous with the seed and peanuts.

P.S I forgot to say, Wiggy is a cockatiel

When my sons were young we always had budgies. The one I remember most was Pip because he was very tame and lived much longer than most budgies do. He could talk and told us every day, multiple times, that Pip was a pretty boy.
Some years ago I had a canary called Brian, but he only lived for 5 years. When he died I took his little body up to a quiet part of Dartmoor. It was a foggy day and as I dug a hole in the soil two ponies loomed up out of the mist and stood there. I felt like they were mourning with me. It was really weird. I cried buckets.
And now I have Wiggy. She belongs to my grand-daughter and I was asked to look after her while she was at university.
Several years later and Wiggy is still with me. By now, I have completely gone off keeping birds in cages so Wiggy is free-range. She is out of her cage most of time . I keep a packet of wet wipes to clean up after her. She's quite noisy and good company and asks me every day if I am alright,
When she goes to that big aviary in the sky I shall not have another bird. I prefer to see them flying free. I feed the garden birds every day, there are lots around here.

Shropshirelass that's amazing.
A wild magpie that was able to speak.
They are ridiculously clever creatures, but unfortunately so cruel.
We have them nesting in a birch tree every year despite our efforts to dissuade them.

LauraNorder

Sorry, can’t bear the thought of caged birds, they are meant to fly and be free. I’ll move along.

I hope that you are still here Laura to read this.
I was thinking more along the lines of birds that are wild and become semi-tame.
Like the jackdaw Nell8 recalled who 'adopted' her uncle.
The owls that we had had to be domesticated because they couldn't live in the wild. My parents found them as owlets, they had been dumped in a cardboard box on the side of a motorway.

I used to keep pigeons and white doves. They had a dovecote and aviary but could come and go as they pleased and were only shut up at night. Pigeons are intelligent birds and make wonderful companions - not the flying rats that some ignorant people choose to call them. Too many stories to tell but I absolutely loved all my birds and used to blog about them - faithsdoves

Many years ago my elderly uncle in rural Ireland was befriended by a robin. It appeared inside his cottage door one day while he was sitting by the fireside. He threw a few crumbs of his bread on the floor for it. Robin at the crumbs, walked to the open door and flew off.

Next day, it appeared again. Same routine, ate the crumbs thrown down on the floor and left. This continued daily for many weeks till eventually the robin was landing on the arm of his chair and eating from his hand.

His wife had died a few months before and he convinced himself she’d returned as a robin to visit him. After about 2 months the daily visits stopped. He watched out every day but reluctantly had to accept his little robin wasn’t coming back.

vampirequeen Shouldn't laugh really.... it's the way you tell 'em!

DH had a budgie trained to say his name and address in case he got lost .... "Joey Perks, 22 Acacia Gardens..."

Sorry, can’t bear the thought of caged birds, they are meant to fly and be free. I’ll move along.

The couple I often babysat for* in late teens were once looking after someone’s mynah bird for a couple of weeks.

It kept saying, ‘Where’s Audrey?’ in the tone of a very querulous old woman. I was very tempted to try to teach it, ‘Gone off with the milkman!’ or something ruder, but desisted.

*the bloke used to drive me home in his E-type! They went out a lot, too.

Hello FannyCornforth .. Good to see your new thread. You don't hang about!
My uncle lived on the island of Lismore near Oban. A young jackdaw adopted him one summer and would perch on my uncle's shoulder as he walked around outside. For a child it was magical to watch.
Compare that to seeing a captive magpie in France chained to a stand having had its tail feathers removed.... so cruel.