mediaphage posted:

SuperKlaus posted:

Only cool kids may sit there.

I am thankful for the advice received in PM about the bird rehoming. At this point I want to ask some exploratory questions about the idea of taking her myself. I am very leery of this; I had never really given much thought to a second bird. I would rather find her a loving home with someone else.

But let's say, tentatively, I consider adopting her. She is a roughly 25-year-old Senegal parrot. Sinbad is a roughly 27-year-old male Senegal. The risk of egg is a big reason I am leery of taking her. Besides more info regarding that, I would appreciate thoughts about what I should consider about being ready for a second bird, and how life for me and Sinbad might change with a second bird around.

T I A bird thread.

LonsomeSon posted:

I need everyone in here to know that when a bird in a posted video chirps or squeaks I reflexively whistle back through my teeth like I do with my parakeets.

GotLag posted:

https://i.imgur.com/cNa4M71.mp4

mediaphage posted:

ahhhhhh



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa-hcUyLP58

bee posted:

What lovely photos, and birbs I too, am interested in birdy pancakes.

We decided to go with a cockatiel! Meet Sunny



She's currently a bit anxious about being left alone, so I've got her up here with me sitting on my shoulder as I work. So far she's only flown onto my partner's head once while he was on a zoom so, so far so good!

Jerm324 posted:

Lol, well they are regular pancakes without butter or syrup. They eat pellets and fruit/veggies normally so this was a little treat.

bee posted:

What lovely photos, and birbs I too, am interested in birdy pancakes.

We decided to go with a cockatiel! Meet Sunny



She's currently a bit anxious about being left alone, so I've got her up here with me sitting on my shoulder as I work. So far she's only flown onto my partner's head once while he was on a zoom so, so far so good!

Captain Log posted:

Oh my goodness, what a little adorable thing.

If the bird is already acting that way around y'all, it is in a good spot. A know plenty of people who take weeks to months before their little doofus is on their shoulder or flying to them.

mediaphage posted:

(two birds aren't really much more effort than one).

Kenshin posted:

I am (very slowly) starting the process of looking for a new home for Auri. No, this isn't due to any issues with her--this is something I've known I'd need to eventually do for a while, because I'm finally at the point where I'm getting ready to buy a cruising sailboat to live on, a life that as romantic as it would seem, is not really appropriate for Auri (nor very feasible in a legal sense in many places in the world).

I brought it up today with someone at the local bird store & hotel that she has a special connection with. She is interested, though her living and financial situation may not be appropriate for a second parrot, so we'll keep in touch, and I'll also keep asking around a little bit. Right now my goal is to find her a new home by March 2022, which I think is plenty of time to find the right person.

SuperKlaus posted:

I could really use some help on that point. Things are confusing at the moment, and understandably the family is focused on a lot of things that aren't the bird's fate, but it may be the case that the little female Senegal needs a new home soon.

Let's say I take her in, meaning to just hold her temporarily until I find a home. This would be only if the family really can't commit to keeping her fed and comfy while a new home is found. Am I looking at trouble with Sinbad? Are they gonna like spend all day screaming at each other like "WHO IS THAT WHO IS THAT WHO IS THAT" or what.

bee posted:

What lovely photos, and birbs I too, am interested in birdy pancakes.

We decided to go with a cockatiel! Meet Sunny



She's currently a bit anxious about being left alone, so I've got her up here with me sitting on my shoulder as I work. So far she's only flown onto my partner's head once while he was on a zoom so, so far so good!

gnn posted:

The tweets of a little song sparrow and its ‘bird brain’ are a lot more complex and akin to human language than anyone realized. A new study finds that male sparrows deliberately shuffle and mix their song repertoire possibly as a way to keep it interesting for their female audience.

The research, from the lab of Stephen Nowicki, Duke University professor of biology and member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and colleagues at the University of Miami, shows that singing males keep track of the order of their songs and how often each one is sung for up to 30 minutes so they can curate both their current playlist and the next one.

Song sparrows are a common songbird throughout North America, but only males sing. They use their song to defend their turf and court mates.

When wooing, song sparrows belt up to 12 different two-second songs, a repertoire that can take nearly 30 minutes to get through, since they repeat the same song several times before going on to the next track. In addition to varying the number of repeats, males also shuffle the order of their tunes each time they sing their discography. However, a big unknown had been whether males change up their song order and repeats by accident or by design.

To get some data on whether or not the birds intentionally shuffle and mix their tunes, Nowicki’s long-time collaborator William Searcy, the Maytag Professor of Ornithology in Biology at the University of Miami, loaded up the recording gear, trekked out to the backwoods of northwest Pennsylvania, set up mics pointed to the trees and patiently waited for five hours a day.

Nowicki says that fieldwork like this isn’t for everyone, “I would never use the word boring, because it’s relaxing if you like being out in the field and it’s a nice day and you’ve got your parabolic microphone and you’re pointing it at a song sparrow for hours. Some people would find that boring. I and certainly Bill would find that meditatively relaxing. The only thing that happens is sometimes your arm gets tired.”

After recording the full suite of songs from more than 30 birds, the team pored over visual spectrographs of the trills and analyzed how often each song was sung and in what order. The first clue that males keep tabs on their tweets to avoid repetition was that much like a Spotify playlist, males generally sing through their full repertoire before repeating a song.

The researchers also found that the more a sparrow sang a given song, the longer he took to get back to that song, possibly to build up hype and novelty once that song was played again. For example, if a male sang Song A 10 times in a row, he’d sing even more renditions of his other songs before returning to Song A again. Alternatively, if Song A was only warbled three times during a set, then a male song sparrow might recite a shorter rendition of the rest of his repertoire in order to return to the still novel and underplayed Song A.

Taken together, these findings demonstrate that song sparrows possess an extremely rare talent with an equally uncommon name: “long-distance dependencies.” It means that what a male song sparrow sings in the moment depends on what he sang as much as 30 minutes ago. That’s a 360 times larger memory capacity than the previous record holder, the canary, who can only juggle about five seconds worth of song information in this way.

While impressive, the implications from this work for humans are less clear. It does suggest that the order of words in human language, which is similarly impacted by long-distance dependencies may not be as unique as once thought.

It remains to be seen whether better shuffling ability gives males an advantage at finding love. Perhaps females maintain interest in a mate who mixes it up more, and are less likely to sneak off with another male. As with daytime talk shows, paternity tests are a good proxy for monogamy in birds, so counting how many chicks are sired by a female’s nest mate versus another bird in the neighborhood may be a future project for Nowicki’s team.

For now, Nowicki emphasizes it’s just speculation whether these shuffling song sparrows give Spotify a run for their money to keep a female’s interest, but does highlight our similar approach at the gym.

“You’ve got your playlist for running and the reason you’ve got that is because running is kind of boring. You know that these 10 songs are going to keep you motivated, but if you are going to run for 20 songs long, why not shuffle it so the next time you don’t hear the same songs in the same order?”

mediaphage posted:

yeah i wonder if she was especially well reared

bee posted:

The woman I bought her off was your stereotypical crazy bird lady. The back sunroom of her house was where all the birds lived, she had about six cockatiels and about a dozen budgies. Some of budgies were rescues and had their own closed cages, but the cockatiels were all tame and were going in and out of their cages as they pleased.

Everything looked clean, all the birds had fruit and veg and fresh looking water. Bird lady was talking about the all the different birds she'd kept over the years while introducing my daughter and I to the ones she had for sale and asking me questions about whether I knew how to look after birds. When my daughter picked out Sunny, bird lady let her two kids who had been helping to rear the birds come and give her some goodbye pats before she went into the travel box.

So yeah, I think she's had a pretty good start to life

Captain Log posted:

BEWARE!!!

Pookah posted:

Do you know who is just the sweetest, nicest good girl?
It's Pookie, the African grey.

She has valid reasons to be jealous of Henry the dog, since he arrived many years after she did, and gets attention differently from her.
But she loves him too, she gives him snacks, she wags her tail when she sees him getting cuddled, she makes her happy sound when she sees him being comforted.
African greys are good, kind, gentle, thoughtful people.
I know they are a bit weird and stand-offish, but they really are extraordinarily sweet, loving and kind people to the ones they love.

They are dicks to outsiders, and, unfortunately, have a stringent standard for what counts as an outsider.

quote:

Captain Log posted:

BEWARE!!!

bee posted:

Aaaa parrotlets are so cute, such fluffy little nuggets!

Derpalert!

Youth Decay posted:

Mediaphage has lineolated parakeets, not parrotlets