2011

Another year has gone by.

While a lot of key things happened for me in 2010, 2011 was a bit calmer. The biggest change was the addition of Léa to the flock.

I finally decided to take the plunge and add that last dream parrot, one I’ve been thinking about for years.

With any parrot addition there is a shift in dynamics. Every time I think of adding, the biggest “con” argument I get is “well things are going well now, why change it”. But I do..and I’ve been lucky that things always seem to settle out nicely after an adjustment period of a few months.

The addition of Léa did bring a different dynamic than any of the others – with the little guys, we always tried to maintain taking everyone out together and although my initial intention was to try and eventually bring Léa out with the others as well, I might have changed my position on that.

What made me change my mind? Well, there was a number of factors.

Shortly after I brought Léa home, the smaller guys entered their bi-annual hormonal phase (Fall and Spring). They were a tad more unpredictable and edgy so beginning introductions then was not something I wanted to do. And while the smaller guys have calmed down since then, Léa has proven to be quite an exuberant baby, definitively has more energy than any of the others, is very curious and….well mixing that with my set flock didn’t seem like a good idea either, especially if considering the third issue I have – her size. I knew Capes where bigger. Actually, when I first brought Léa home I thought she should be bigger for some reason. However, after reading many tragic stories of parrot loss to other parrots..the size difference is a big part of my reconsidering mixing everyone together, specially the size difference between my small yet very bold Piper and Léa.

I won’t lie – the adjustment period of bringing Léa over took longer than any of the other additions. There are days where I wondered why I took the plunge. The first few weeks when I first got her were the worst – the fluctuating weight worried me a lot (was she weaned? Did she regress?), the week or so where she would constantly call for us did play with my nerves (and thankfully ignoring her and going to see her when she was quiet fixed the problem)…after having added 4 rehomed/rescued birds that had been beyond the baby days, I did think I was crazy to go back with a baby.

It has been 4 months since we brought her home and I have to say, although it was a difficult beginning at times, it’s been all worth it. She’s very comfortable with us, she loves to play, she loves to fly, she is starting to really make plenty of cute noises, she’s a joy to be around.
As far as the rest of the flock, things have been going nicely as well. Although very few of them are looking to others for friendship, I do believe that they enjoy each other’s company and the flock environment.

Finally, I’d like to discuss about the blog a bit.

My goal this year was to have one post per day, so that each month would have a number of posts which was the same of it’s number of days for a grand total of 365.

With this last post for 2011, I’ll have achieved that goal.

It wasn’t easy. Some months I struggled to come up with something, some months I struggled to hold back and post more. Often I had to tell myself, especially once we were over the half-point mark, that I did so well until then, to just keep going.

And something that I wasn’t planning on happened – while I always intended the blog to be somewhat of a journal of my life with my flock, using it almost daily (as some days I didn’t post but would post more on another) made it more enjoyable. The fact that it became a routine made me look at things differently, capturing things to talk about that I might have overlooked in the past. I definitively want to keep this up.

While I won’t set myself the same challenge, I have been contemplating, over the last few months, of something else to keep me going. And what I came up with is this – to do a 365 picture project of my birds, one picture a day. It’s something I did a few years ago with self portraits – and I have a feeling using the birds instead of myself will be much easier. Ironically, since I have 7 birds it just seems perfectly fitted that each of them would be featured once a week. This would be on top of my regular posts and other pictures. I’m quite looking forward to starting it and see how long I can keep it up!

Happy 2012 to everyone!