The past 5 years have been an amazing time of change with the addition of three children and an ever-increasing set of work responsibilities. I have recently decided to remove my old website completely and now my website address will redirect to this blog site until I develop a replacement site. That will hopefully happen this year but until then, parrot enthusiasts can keep in touch via my various blog ramblings at this site. To keep things happening my plan is to upload a new blog post each fortnight (twice a month), something that I haven’t been able to allocate the time to do successfully over the past year but will endeavour to do so now. Check in every second weekend and hopefully there will be something new to read or an interesting link to share.
My main distraction over the past few years has been my focus on being `present’ with my family. I take that responsibility as being my most important in life and it certainly gets prioritized over my education work for bird owners. The upside for me is that my twin boys are starting to `help out’ with the bird round. Archie in particular really likes following me around and loves to be given little jobs to do – his favourite being to place the afternoon fruit chunk in each of the lory aviaries.
Parrots and children can be a volatile mix. Whilst I don’t consider most parrot species to be suitable companion animals for kids, perhaps the more appropriate reality is that most kids aren’t really suitable carers for parrots (actually – most adults are probably worse but that’s for another time). There are a few exceptions but my experience definitely suggests that aside from the time period when a parrot is very young and very confiding, most become increasingly less tolerant of the variability in behaviour of small children. Of all of the parrots in my collection, most display aggression towards my three kids as they wander around the aviaries and some; the Amazons and Macaws in particular, are simply dangerous.
My goal is for my children to grow up appreciating wildlife so I want them to have the most positive experience possible and to learn the importance of respecting all forms of life. To ensure that those experiences build confidence, engagement and wonder it’s definitely a `hands off’ situation while the kids are young. As they learn about how animals communicate with us through their body language they will hopefully develop the sorts of decision-making skills that ultimately make the critical difference between success and failure in their animal encounters. What an awesome responsibility it is to guide them through that learning journey!
Parrots and children can be a volatile mix. Whilst I don’t consider most parrot species to be suitable companion animals for kids, perhaps the more appropriate reality is that most kids aren’t really suitable carers for parrots (actually – most adults are probably worse but that’s for another time). There are a few exceptions but my experience definitely suggests that aside from the time period when a parrot is very young and very confiding, most become increasingly less tolerant of the variability in behaviour of small children. Of all of the parrots in my collection, most display aggression towards my three kids as they wander around the aviaries and some; the Amazons and Macaws in particular, are simply dangerous.
My goal is for my children to grow up appreciating wildlife so I want them to have the most positive experience possible and to learn the importance of respecting all forms of life. To ensure that those experiences build confidence, engagement and wonder it’s definitely a `hands off’ situation while the kids are young. As they learn about how animals communicate with us through their body language they will hopefully develop the sorts of decision-making skills that ultimately make the critical difference between success and failure in their animal encounters. What an awesome responsibility it is to guide them through that learning journey!
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| Archie on the afternoon rounds serving up a fruit chunk for the Black Lories - his favourites. |
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