ARTICLE BY: KEVIN PICKUP “I


’m Pregnant!” announced Karen, my wife. Well, after trying for several months this was fantastic news. But that meant the house we then lived in was no longer big enough. We would have to move. A daunting process at the best of times without the added complexity of expecting a baby. As the mind began to tick a little faster a bigger house would mean a bigger garden, a bigger garden meant bigger and more aviaries – not so bad after all then. That was how phase II of my bird keeping life began. The aviary I then had (and still today) was a smallish (8 x 4 x 7ft) single flight walk in aviary with an airlock style double door arrangement, fully covered roof and part solid part mesh walls. This meant the number, specie and size of birds that I could keep was extremely limited. My aviary flock consisted of 4 love birds, 8 cockatiels, a GM Rosella and an Indian Ring Neck. In addition we had 2 cockatiels and an IRN as pets – this IRN was bought as a companion for our other IRN but she turned out to be more human than bird, so had to come live with us in the house. With the variety of specie I kept in the aviary together, I found life to be quite harmonious, with only the occasional squabble, more often than not involving one of the love birds – small they may be, but big in character they are.


12 BIRD SCENE


I was taken by the whole package of these parrots, a quiet, inquisitive parrot with eight (sometimes debated) specie in the genus. Their moderate size, 10 to 12 inch, meant that I wasn’t going to need large aviaries, although I would give them all I could, and they didn’t appear to be too many of them about.


PHA


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