This is the story of Manzi and Maui, my Congo African Grey parrots. Eventually, Manzi is going to become a famous flighted parrot, so check out his blog. I tell about day to day activities, continual trick training and about the quest to become a free flighted parrot. Maui is the newest addition and I also tell about their acclimation to each other and techniques to improve their relationship.
So, their cage is dismantled and now my poor guys are residing in their sleeping cages. Those cages are only 20" x 20" x 30" each. As soon as I get home from work, I let them out. Manzi is still not doing great. He is scared of everything. Manzi has even begun to fly around after being frightened, then not know where to land. He circles and circles till he gets tired. I call to him and usually he'll come back to me, otherwise he eventually lands on the ground seriously out of breath.
Well, tonight we're leaving my apartment for good. I'm going to keep the cages completely covered during transport and hope that they do okay. We'll stay with a friend, then leave MN on Friday!
This weekend was another long weekend of packing. I had some help, so I kept Manzi and Maui in their cages while others were around. They seemed content and usually don't want to come out if there is too much going on anyway.
Still, Manzi is adapting. He went from not wanting to leave his cage last week, to landing on a box today. Sometimes I want Manzi to be brave, but then other times it is really nice not to have to chase Manzi off boxes. I'm glad Maui isn't as mobile, because if she made it to one of the boxes, it would be nicely shredded in no time.
I have been thinking about the cross country trip. I'm really concerned about Maui and her potential for seizures. I'm going to travel the first day at night. Hopefully the darkness will keep her calm. I'm doing the trip in two very long days, but that will really limit her time locked up in her travel cage. I am also planning on keeping a sheet over her travel cage to really reduce external stimuli.
The trip is still two weeks away. I'm already getting anxious!
Quick update on Maui:
She is totally healthy again. She recovered about one week after visiting the vet. She had a clostridium infection and within a couple days she began to recover her appetite. By the end of the week, she was back up to her normal weight. All her blood work came back fine. She does have a heart murmur and is not in the prime of her life as I had once thought. She may still be only 30, but the vet thinks she is on the downhill side of life and will not last too many more years. I thought she'd live till 60 or so, but the vet thinks 40 would be optimistic. I went from treating her like she's in the prime of her life to now treating her like she is a geriatric patient.
Manzi has been a bit stressed lately. I am moving back to the West Coast. My place is getting full of boxes, which to Manzi, appear to be parrot eating monsters. Maui doesn't even give them a second glance. I got married and now we have another guy in our lives. The birds are doing quite well with him. Hercules is taking a mini-vacation from my place and is in the yard of a kind neighbor who has lots of space and absolutely loves him. I still have a couple weeks left till moving day. I don't have a new place yet, but I'm looking for something with a yard so the birds can go outside during the day along with Hercules.
I've been wanting Manzi to dance for years. Sometimes he'll move his head a small amount, but finally he put some of his body into it. Maui's great and she'll dance away, so one day when she was dancing with me, Manzi was watching from his perch. When I turned my attention to him, he began to move. We're still a long ways from him being a talented dancer, but I'm happy with these baby steps.
On a side note, Maui's not doing super great. She's been losing weight. I took her to the vet and they think she has some kind of crop or digestive tract infection. I started her on antibiotics. Next week I'll get back the lab test results. She dropped from 490g to 425g while I was away on vacation. She's never been that low. I weigh her at least once per day, but lately have been weighing her more like 3-4 times per day. She is quite happy to step on the scale for me. Now her weight is back up to 450g, but she is still underweight.
She was a trooper at the vet and they absolutely loved her. She was so sweet and begged for scratches from both the vet and her assistant. They took blood, which required restraining. Maui freaked out completely over that, although she didn't go into seizures. Still, as soon as they let her go from taking blood, she went back to ask for more scratches. She doesn't hold a grudge.
I used the new box technique to take her to the vet's office. She was pretty irritated to have to ride in a dark box and spent the entire ride chewing it as fast as possible. The box will not last another trip to the vet, but on the plus side, she didn't have any seizures. I was quite happy to have her irritated with the box rather than freaking out from over stimulation.
Maui has been watching Manzi play dead for several months now. I know she is paying attention, so then when I picked her up and gave her the cue, she knew exactly what to do, albeit with some hesitation.
Manzi is to the point where he falls backwards quickly, with some gusto, whereas Maui is pretty tentative. She impressed me with her ability to pick up this trick by merely watching.
