Pet Smart had a sale on cage birds today: 2 Parakeets for the price of one! We bought a pair to replace the Budgies that recently passed away after enjoying them for many years. This was a good deal...why buy one Keet when you can get a Parakeets for the same price! Hal
My grandmother always kept parakeets. Our trips to Woolworth's always included a stop in the pet department to visit the fish, turtles, birds, gerbils, etc... A poor kids version of a trip to the zoo, LOL!
We did the exact same thing, @Beatrice Taylor ! Both my mom and my dad enjoyed the parakeets, and we had up to 6 of them at one time. Started out with 2 and then just added more, a pair at a time. The first two blue ones were named Cherokee and Apache , the two green ones were Seminole and some other Indian name I can’t remember right now, and the last two (frosted white ones) were called Chinook and Sleet. When we went to Spokane , we always went to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and look at the pet department. My mom had tropical fish also, so we looked at both the bird toys and the fish. Sometimes, we went out to the big seeds and pets store, and that was a real treat ! They had puppies and kittens, which I loved looking at, but my favorites were the monkeys .......... oh, how I longed for a monkey when I was a little girl ! !
We had a pair of California Condors once, but we had to lease a Blimp hangar to keep them in..... Hal
My late sister had a breeding pair of Solomon Island Eclectus parrots for years and hand-raised the babies (hand-raised babies are much more attuned to humans and bring a much higher price). That was not a job for the faint of heart. They had to be hand fed (you had to stick a syringe down their throats and fill their crops every 2-4 hours). One day I was "birdie-sitting" for the day and had to go out for a few hours so I had to take him along. I wrapped Eggbert up in toilet paper and stuck him down in my cleavage for warmth. Since he was a non-stop peeper, I got some strange looks. Her male was a sweetheart, very affectionate and talkative, but her female was a flaming b!tch who would just as soon bite your finger off as look at you. She had her mate cowed into complete submission. If you gave both of them a grape, he'd just sit there on the perch holding his. She'd drop hers, travel across the aviary and he'd hand his to her. She'd eat it and then give him a good bite just on general principals. It was actually survival tactics in the wild, as the female would go into the breeding nest and not emerge until the eggs were hatched and she had to depend on her mate to bring her food or she'd starve. So if he didn't bring her food and she died, he had to know that she'd come back from whatever afterlife birds go to and make his life a living hell. So it was necessary that the male be completely under her thrall.