Wednesday, January 31, 2007

It's taken us awhile to finally get this blog off the ground, but we're hoping to update on a more regular basis.

2006 was a very busy year for us! We took in a little over 400 birds. Although this is a smaller number of birds than we have had surrendered to us in the past, many of them came with more severe health and behavior problems.

We've been focusing on improving the selection of parrot items in our retail store. During the past year, we added some new food lines, such as Goldenfeast and Harrison's. We're also constantly adding new toys up for sale. We hope to grow our retail sales, so that we don't have to rely so much on your donations to keep offering outstanding care to these birds.

During 2007, we plan on focusing even more attention on the "E" in our name -- Education. There have been many developments in parrot keeping knowledge in the recent past, and we are excited to bring this information to you! Examples of this include foraging and clicker training -- two ideas that we've started implementing with our shelter parrots. We plan on offering seminars on these topics this year so that you can enrich your parrots' lives with them!

We are also working on getting our name out there in the community! Several parrots this year were almost released into the wild, to their certain death, until a neighbor spotted them and convinced them to release the bird to us instead. Also, many people looking to add a companion parrot might not think to check us out. To that end, we are planning on doing many of the events we've done in the past, plus more! These include: Bird Fest at the Wehr Nature Center (February 3), AWARE show (February 10), Rainforest Night at the Domes, State Fair, and so much more! We hope to see you at some of these events! We will update our upcoming events on our website and in this blog.