September 2, 2010Polly wanna witness protection program
Dominican Today reports that an Amazon parrot has been "arrested" and placed in protective police custody as a possible witness to a murder in Santiago. Relatives of the victim claim the bird is repeating the names of suspects. Police say they're questioning people but deny they're getting tips from the bird. In the meantime, the parrot has changed its name from Ricardo to Michael Smith and rented an apartment in Miami where it will start a new life.
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September 1, 2010Parrot poachers bird-napping Quakers?
Somebody is trying to steal the wild monk parakeets of Brooklyn. For what purpose nobody is quite sure, but residents have spied two men with nets and long poles skulking at night around the birds' huge nests built at the top of light posts. It's against park rules to trap animals, but then Quakers are invasive species not protected by state law - though BrooklynParrots' Steve Baldwin is trying to change that, according to BoroPolitics.
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August 30, 2010Chuva's road trip
Did you hear the one about the macaw that hitchhiked out of the Greater Vancouver Zoo? This Cracked.com run-down of great animal escapes features Chuva, a blue-and-gold whose wings were clipped - but that didn't matter. She strolled off zoo grounds, into the parking lot and up the steps of an open recreational vehicle. The RV owners had no idea they were driving off with a live souvenir aboard until 20 miles down the road. Busted, Chuva was returned, this time presumably to an enclosed aviary.
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August 27, 2010Parrots star in 3D movie
A macaw named Blu headlines the new 3D animated movie Rio due out in April. After meeting another macaw, the beautiful Jewel, Blu abandons the comfort of life in a cage to visit Brazil. Rio is directed by Carlos Saldanha of the brilliantly animated Ice Age trilogy, but TDB is already annoyed by the music and bad species info. (Blu looks like a hyacinth macaw but has the crest feathers of a cockatoo.) Then again, it's a parrot movie, so what are you gonna do? Parrot flicks, good or bad, are about as common as decent musicals, so, alas, we are required to watch this trailer, and, eventually, go see the whole thing.
August 26, 2010Australians map magpie attacks
In Australia, spring is just around the corner, and that means "swooping season". Magpies defending their nests can be so aggressive that this year, Victoria officials have mapped hotspots where people should wear protective headgear outside, especially when biking.
The Department of Sustainability and Environment even provides a "swoop-off" kit on its Web site, including downloadable images of human eyes that can be pasted onto the back of a helmet, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
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August 25, 2010Highest flying bird in the world recaptured
If you were flying over Scotland last week and happened to see a giant bird out your window, don't worry, you weren't tripping on your business-class cabernet. An African vulture called a Ruppell's griffon escaped during a bird show and went missing for four days, prompting the World of Birds to warn commercial aircraft: The Ruppell's holds the world's altitude record for birds at 36,000 feet. It's not known whether this particular vulture buzzed any pilots; it was recovered from a telephone pole using a dead chick as bait.
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August 24, 2010Don't ask, don't tell, but some birds are gay
Nearly a fifth of all greylag goose couples are two males, says a scientific paper due to be published this fall in the journal Animal Behavior. More than 130 other species of birds are known to form same-sex unions, say researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Gay behavior ranges from courtship displays to nesting to going through the motions of mounting and mating, with some same-sex birds even raising young together (with a little help from outside partners). Birds most likely to swing both ways are males who fool around with lots of females and do less than half of the chick rearing. Females that experiment with lesbianism, if you will, tend to be monogamous. No word yet on whether any rainbow lorikeets ever fly the flag. (Photo of HBO's Queer Duck.)
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August 23, 2010Donahue on birds
Phil Donahue - remember him? Iconic talk show host, Mr. Marlo Thomas, and, now, bird watcher. Donahue will "share some of his birding wit and wisdom" at a clambake next month at the Great Stratford Bird Festival.
Donahue is also honorary chairman of the Connecticut Audubon Society's annual eagle festival in Essex, Conn. Donahue's favorite bird reportedly is the purple martin, a member of the swift family prized for its appetite for mosquitoes. He maintains his own colony of martins, monitored with webcams seen at Gazebophil.com.
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Our first-place winner in the September-October 2010 shootout is Rudy, a red-bellied parrot who loves to play on his back. His owner, Saroj of Florida, picks up $50 in bird supplies from the Windy City Parrot online superstore. Our second-place winner is Charlie, a cockatiel, owned by Cheryl Yashar of Los Angeles who receives a $25 gift certificate from Windy City. Congratulations, Saroj and Cheryl!
It might still be sweltering outside, but the November-December 2010 Your Birds competition starts now. To enter, please e-mail your entry by October 10 to yourbirds@parrotchronicles.com. (But first, please see the complete contest rules.)
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August 18, 2010Leave the owls at home
A UK man has "walked" his seven pet owls around the town of Plympton for 10 years, drawing admirers and donations to wildlife charities. According to The Telegraph, Russell Burt has a license to keep and display wild birds, which he has rehabilitated over the years. Good thing local officials reacted swiftly and cracked down on the practice this summer, claiming the owls could run amok and attack someone.
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August 16, 2010Officer Connie
A nice thing happened on the way from a bad scene to a new home for a Congo African grey named Connie. The police officers who rescued Connie and 70 other parrots trapped in the home of a woman who died of carbon monoxide poisoning took pity on the orphaned bird and adopted her. Now Connie is the new mascot of West Linn Police Station in Oregon, strolling around the office and keeping cops company as they do paperwork. "When she starts making a noise like a siren we'll send her out on patrol," joked one.
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August 13, 2010Stella, homeward bound
Stella the homing pigeon might have lost her way, but she had the good sense to land on the sidewalk in front of a day spa where an animal lover worked. The woman, Danielle Bucchieri, noticed how tame - and tired - the pretty pigeon was, took her home and researched the bird's band number. Stella apparently was on a 600-mile flight between Ohio and New England when she took a detour. Her owner still hasn't been found, according to the Taunton Daily Gazette.
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August 11, 2010It's a bird, it's a moth
The summer I turned 10 I witnessed something amazing in my mother's flower garden. One evening around dusk, a hummingbird arrived for one last meal. It hovered and darted among the zinnias, but something about it didn't look quite right. I ran over to get a closer look and that's when I saw it: where the long slender beak of a bird should have been was a big coiled proboscis. I couldn't believe my eyes: it was a freak of nature, a bird with the face of an insect.
The bird-moth was one of the great unsolved mysteries of my childhood. I saw the creature two more times, always at twilight, and never when there was anyone else around to corroborate. Adults I questioned said they had never seen or heard of such a thing. It was long before the Internet would have made identification easy. Decades passed but I never stopped wondering. Then the other day I stumbled across this blog item about sphinx hummingbird moths.
Now that the entymological Big Foot of my youth has been explained I have to say I'm kind of sorry. My giant moth wasn't a hybrid bird. It wasn't the tooth fairy, the result of secret government tests or a flight of imagination. It was just a sphinx, which happens to fly, act and eat like a hummingbird. I sure hope I see it again.
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August 10, 2010And what are you staring at?
Always depend on Trend Hunter for a fashion guffaw. Take this poor Kabuki model, forced to pose in one spot for so long that an enterprising honeycreeper built a nest in her hair and laid eggs. So sad. And we didn't even show you the eyelashes made of feathers.
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August 6, 2010World's only migratory parrots
Most wild parrots are homebodies, living year-round in the same jungles or grasslands or urban areas. But there are in fact two species of migratory parrots: the swift parrot and the orange-bellied parrot, both of Tasmania.
Both species breed in Tasmania in the summer and winter in Australia, where it's warmer. To reach the mainland, the parrots have to fly across Bass Strait, a 150-mile-wide channel. Like all migratory birds, the swift and the orange-bellied depend on certain patches of habitat to help them along each leg of the journey. Unfortunately, these patches are dwindling, especially for the orange-bellied, which is down to 50 birds, according to Australian Geographic.
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August 5, 2010Lame tweets get bird's ultimate rating
As if there weren't performance pressure enough on Twitter, now there's a 99-cent iPhone app that lets others, ahem, poop on what you say. Bird T**d displays real-time tweets along the bottom of the screen while a Twitter-like bluebird flies overhead. Users tap the screen to drop their "opinions" on offending tweets. A public leaderboard shows most-pooped-on tweets with winners awarded bronze, silver or gold t**ds. Now does that seem nice? C**p!
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August 3, 2010Crime-busting birds
The Daily Bird loves stories about bird heroes, crime-fighting parrots who bite the bad guys. Today we bring you Kuzya, an eclectus whose shrieks stopped a home invasion.
The eclectus is a lovely, gentle, quiet parrot capable of screaming like a banshee during times of crisis. Think uber-decible-mind-bending-turn-your-eardrums-inside-out screeches. (Check out the audio clip on the ParrotChronicles.com eclectus species page. Don't be lulled by the dulcet tones in the beginning; plug your ears.)
Of course, the crime fighting-est parrot who ever was is the Dallas, Texas, cockatoo named Bird. Back in 2002, Bird flew at knife-wielding men who broke into his owner's home and bit them, losing a leg in the process. Bird and his owner were murdered, but the killers were caught and convicted based on blood found on Bird's beak.
Kuzya's story has a much happier ending. Thieves managed to steal a wallet by reaching into a window, but when they tried to break down the door of Russian interpreter Gennadi Kurkul's London home, Kuzya's screeches woke the entire neighborhood. The men fled.
A Louisiana woman was sentenced to 15 months of hard labor for selling two children, ages 4 and 5, in exchange for a cockatoo, plus $175 cash. Her lawyer said it was a clumsy attempt at an adoption proceeding. Hey, at least she did her homework on the new prospective parents by getting their names off a flyer. The $175 was for a lawyer to transfer custody.
