Wednesday, February 14th, is Joey's 22nd birthday! As most of you know, Joey the Umbrella Cockatoo is our mascot and Lori's bird. He has been with the Center for almost seven years and Lori adopted him over five years ago.

Joey was surrendered to the Center in October 2000. Lori's sister-in-law ran into a friend of hers at Tosafest that year and asked if she wanted another cockatoo. At the time, Carmen was being fostered by Lori's brother's family. Deb said no, but that Lori was running an exotic bird rescue if they had a bird that they needed to surrender. It was this person's aunt's bird. The aunt called the Center and asked if we could come and pick up her "naughty bird". We took and van over so we could also pick up his cage. Lori told her she's have to sign a release form - and the woman said she would sign it and have Lori sign a form to say she'd never bring the bird back.

What we found out from this woman's caretaker was that Joey's cage was just out of sight of the kitchen, and this woman spent most of her time in the kitchen. Joey would scream for attention and when she couldn't stand it anymore, she would beat him with a fly swatter.

When Joey came to us, you could pet him but he didn't know how to step up and did not trust people at all. It took Lori 1-1/2 years to get him to that point. As soon as he could step up, Lori started taking him everywhere with her, always telling him "it's okay Joey" if he got scared. (To this day, he still says "it's okay Joey" if he gets scared.)

When Lori finally decided that he was adoptable, she found a nice home for him. What Lori didn't realize what how much she loved him and how adopting him out was a horrible mistake. Luckily for Lori, Joey didn't like his new home either. After about a month, the new owner called and said it wasn't working out with Joey. Luckily, there was another really nice male umbrella cockatoo at the Center ready for adoption, so Joey came back and the other cockatoo went to his new home. Lori adopted Joey and they've been together ever since.

Joey has a huge vocabulary and can put words into sentences by himself. He's always asking "puppies, want to go outside? Okay, let's go." He loves to be the center of attention and he's great at our PR events.

If you happen to come in this weekend, remember to say "Happy Birthday" to Joey.

Last Saturday, February 10, CARE had a booth at the AWARE show. What a fantastic time! We saw many of you down in Franklin, and made some new friends. We think that we may have found a few more volunteers, and maybe a few adoptive homes for parrots at our Center!

We took Butch (pictured below), Lola (pictured below), Buckie, and Joey (that's right -- two weeks in a row for Joey!) As always, these guys loved being in the spotlight and receiving attention from many passers-by. Lola enchanted everyone with her sweet calls of "Hi Babe!" and "Hi Baby!" Butch waved at people and demonstrated how to exercise a macaw.


We don't have any other special events planned right now, but that's sure to change! Keep checking back to see where else we may pop up around town!

CLICKER TRAINING

We've recently discovered clicker training as a way of incorporating positive interactions with our parrots. This website can provide more detailed explanation of what clicker training is.

We hope to have an Introduction to Clicker Training workshop scheduled at the Center sometime during the next few months. In the meantime, you can read all about clicker training in this book. Additionally, you could join this yahoo group, which has fantastic how-to information in its files, and knowledgeable moderators ready to answer your questions. We have clickers for sale at the shelter. Check back for updates as to when the workshop will be held.

One of our volunteers has been training her four parrots for several months, and they all LOVE the opportunity to do tricks. When they see the training supplies pulled out, one starts saying "Want some!" and they all begin dancing around, excitedly. They do various tricks such as wave, ring a bell, turn around, flap their wings, shake hands, do a somersault through a loop, roll over and play dead, etc., etc. And all of this is accomplished with 5-10 minutes per bird, per day.

Clicker training isn't just for teaching tricks. One of the friends of our shelter has been using clicker training techniques with her african grey for several months. She writes, "I used clicker training to get him to target a new toy. Maybe you remember, I mentioned his phobia of new toys. This doesn't get him to play soon with it, but 75% of the time, he isn't cowering after the new toy is placed in his cage. So that is great progress, in my mind! I have him target the new toy while he's on his stand, away from his cage. After I hang the toy in his cage, while he's perched on my hand, I have him target the toy as I put him in his cage. After a few days, or so, he then does play with the formerly scary new toy."

If you're looking for a new way to bond with your bird and help channel some of her intelligence towards positive means, clicker training may be for you!

Reminder: AWARE show on Saturday, February 10

Just a reminder that C.A.R.E. will have a couple of booths at the AWARE Pet Expo. We will be speaking at 2:30 on stage 2. Please visit AWARE's website for more information.

We will have limited toys and food for sale, and will be there with several birds.

We hope to see you there!

Saturday, Feb. 3rd, we were invited to attend the Wehr Nature Center's First Annual Bird Day Festival. Chris, Pam and Lori (me) attended along with Joey, the Center's Umbrella Cockatoo Mascot, Lucky, one of our Moluccans who is up for adoption, and Chris's bird, Cricket, a Senegal Parrot with a crippled foot. We had been hoping to take our plucked birds, but it was way too cold to do that. I went out and purchased several microwavable disks that you put under the towel in the pet carrier and they hold heat for up to 12 hours. They worked very well and made me feel much better about taking the birds out in the cold.

We had a great time and met a lot of wonderful people, many of whom had never heard about us. It's always nice to get to a new venue to meet new people. We had a display of food and toys to match the different types of birds, and talked to many people about cockatoos and also about the fact that birds are not necessarily a good pet choice for many homes. We also sold a few calendars and lots of candy bars!

Next Saturday is the big AWARE Pet Fair down at the Milwaukee Sports Complex. You can find out more info about that on our website at www.centerforavianrehab.org. We will be there and John and Lori will be speaking at 2:30 on Stage 2. Hope to see you there!

BUDGIES! BUDGIES! BUDGIES!

Towards the end of December, we had around 40 budgies released to us from one house. Most of these guys are tame, or will be easy to tame down.

For traveling, they were placed in 2 travel cages of around 20 birds each. When we opened the travel cage door to do intakes on the birds, several came shooting out to land on us!

If you've been thinking about adding a budgie or two to your flock, now might be the perfect time, as we've never had so many nice, tame ones at the same time before!

Often overlooked and sadly considered disposable pets by some, budgies are a delight to have around. Their chirping sounds brighten up a sad day. One of our volunteers has a budgie who loves playing in her foraging bucket and throws pinecones out of the bucket that are as big as she is! They are intelligent problem-solvers and savor attention from the human members of their flock.

We recommend that budgies be fed a high quality seed mix, fresh vegetables, greens, and sprouted seeds. They require toys to keep themselves busy -- they love chewing on wood and playing with bells. If you'd like some help picking out the perfect toys for your budgie, stop in our store and our volunteers can show you some of their favorites!

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.