It has been a beautiful fall and I feel like cooking. Not for people but for my birds. I buy Jiffy cornbread mix and follow the directions. What makes it "Birdy Bread" are all the goodies you add. I chop in fresh jalapenas, sprinkle in bird seed and some fresh herbs from the garden. I bake according to directions and serve up when cool.

Jean,

One of the very cool new features I have added to "Get Your Bird Back" is immediate help. I realize some folks may have lost a parrot and not have the video in hand. If they were to buy the video in most cases they would have to wait a week before it would arrive in the mail.

To get around this dilemma, I have made it so that whenever you buy Get Your Bird Back, an email is sent immediately with useful resources. In the email is a link to download a two minute video clip from the DVD. This clip tells you what to do in those first moments after your bird flies away.

One thing I discovered about having a lot of birds and an outside aviary, was exotic birds that have escaped from their owners, find you.

Barbara Heidenreich is a very dear friend and an expert animal trainer. I have attended several of her classes on parrot training, read her books and shared her DVD with people that could not attend Barbara's classes.

I met Barbara several years ago when we were volunteers cleaning parrot cages. I urge you to check out her website, www.GoodBirdInc.com, read her magazine and attend her training programs.

Believe it or not, I once had my own parrot (Tarah, my blue fronted amazon) fly out a door. I NEVER thought it would happen to me. He rarely flies and I had always been so careful. Fortunately I was able to get my bird back right away.

Rehabbing wild birds or taking in unwanted exotics, is expensive, and not tax deductible for us, according to the IRS. So we had to economize as much as possible. Fortunately, Jim can build anything. He built the muse, flight pens and cages to hold my rats. Raptors need meat and buying rats at a pet store was too expensive. We were often given frozen chicks to feed but ultimately we had no choice but to buy a few rats and breed our own. At one point I had over 500 rats and was able to supply other rehabbers.

The best part of being a rehabber of wild birds, was getting them healthy and able to care for themselves, and release them. I was an operating room nurse for a lot of my working life, so I often sutured and bandages the birds myself. In fact I remember being brought a peacock with a clean cut of the belly. I sutured it with bright blue skin suture. I thought that would be the easiest suture to find again and remove. I clipped the peacocks wings to allow it free run of an open pen but contain it until it healed. That bird took flight, clipped wings, suture and all!
That was very unusual.

This is one of my favorite pictures, take many years ago. We seemed to get more screech owls than any other. They are tiny owls as you can see from the picture of this baby. When the golf courses around us would put out poison for the mice and rats, the unintended victims were screech owls that ate the mice. Often we were brought the babies that lost their parents.

We were staying in a very nice "home stay" that had rice fields behind it. We had a habit of taking our morning coffee outside to watch the sunrise. (For twenty five cents you could get a boy with a long bamboo pole to keep the monkeys from stealing your food.) We started watching what appeared to be a very old man planting rice in flooded fields. For many days, he spent hours, bent over plugging rice shoots. One morning he was not in the fields and we spotted him at a distance herding a small gaggle of geese to his newly planted rice fields. Geese are grazers and prefer new growth.

Jim and I were on a walking tour of the island of Bali in Indonesia, which is north of Australia. I heard there was a bird market and could not resist. There were birds there from all over the Indonesian islands and many I had never seen before. The exchange rate, when we were there, was 10,000 to 1 US dollar. To say things were cheap is an understatement. Chickens and pigeons were sold as food and the rest as pets. It was a crowded dirty market but surprisingly the birds looked healthy. I would imagine they were all wild caught, but the language barrier prevented me from asking questions.