Well, they’re not NEW, exactly. The original lovebirds – Oboe’s parents, Billie and Lester – have moved from GC’s house to mine.
It’s really nice to have them here, and they’re adapting very well. At first they squawked like crazy, and their arrival happened to coincide with the arrival of new next door neighbours, so that was a bit worrisome. The revolving tenancy next door usually gives us neighbours much louder than we are, but a nice quiet Asian family just moved in. The only noise they make is someone playing the piano, and we like that. Meanwhile, we’ve got all these squawk hawks over here, screeching obnoxiously. Or at least that’s what it seemed like on the first day.
Our three lovebirds are the smallest of the five birds, and the noisiest by far. Kazoo the Double-Yellow-Headed Amazon can, and sometimes does, call loudly. But most of the time she’s silent. (She loves company, though – if you ever come to visit, she will make a great big noisy fuss over you.) Simon the Grey chatters and whistles a lot, but not loudly. It’s the little guys who have the most piercing and insistent calls.
The thing with Billie and Lester is they’re a bonded pair of lovebirds: they’re like two halves of the same whole. They hang out together all the time, and if they somehow get separated by more than a few feet, they call loudly and non-stop to one another until they’re reunited.
They’re not hand-tame, but they like us. It’s possible that they will become tame if we’re patient. They really like it here. They LOVE the homemade food, and they’re having fun exploring the place. Like any good female bird, Billie is casing the joint for suitable places to lay eggs and raise a family. She agrees with Kazoo that bookcases make excellent nesting spots.
There are few things that can match a lovebird in persistence, but I am one of them. As determined as she is to make a nest and lay some eggs, I am equally determined that there will be no more baby lovebirds.
Speaking of persistence, Oboe is attempting to make Billie and Lester be his friends. They don’t remember that he is their son. All they know is that he’s a lovebird and three’s a crowd. So every time he gets close, they fend him off. Oboe is undeterred. He used sheer persistence to force Kazoo, Simon and GC to be his friends. And now he’s working on Billie and Lester. I have absolutely no doubt that he will succeed. There’s just something about him. He’s so cheerful and exuberant and relentlessly persistent that nobody can fend him off forever. Eventually he just wears everybody down.
Kazoo turned 16 years old on Saturday! Here’s a video of her and the gang after her birthday shower. I know it looks pretty chaotic with birds everywhere, but they’re only out of their houses for an hour or two each day.
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