The paper work is back from the Texas Secretary of State and Birdlink Sanctuary Inc., is officially a Not For Profit organization. We will do as we have been doing, taking in pet birds that can no longer stay with their owners. We will be writing grant requests and having small fund raisers to cover our cost of operation.

Donations are welcome, bird toys, cages, food, labor or cash. We can use it all. If you have any fund raising ideas, please contact me. If you have a bird that needs to be placed, contact me.

Can you tell what I am holding? This is an example of what was brought to me to raise. These babies birds can be fed and care for successfully, by people that know what to do. This little guy survived and bit me before flying away as a beautiful bluejay.

The temperature is to drop into the "teens" tonight and not go about freezing for several days. This is actually an infrequent even in north Texas. We tend to focus on the heat rather than cold, which is just as deadly to our outside aviary residents.

Yesterday I frantically searched my aviary for "missing" love birds. I climbed up the tree to look into corners, and fell. I counted my love birds over and over, and two were missing. The aviary is secure, concrete walls, heavy wire, redwood and oak rafters, concrete waterfall with shallow ponds, surrounded by large rocks. Finally my husband came in to help me gentle lift the rocks looking for bird bodies. :-(

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.

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.

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.