My Original Aviary


So along with the requirement of having 3 bedrooms and generally more room, having more space for aviaries was added to the critical list for the new house. I found myself in a much better situation than I had done when I designed the first aviary described above, as that had to be designed with the space I had available, which invariably isn’t that much when all you have is a back yard of a good old fashioned 2 up 2 down terraced house. So to the drawing board I went before we even started looking at any houses. Having sat down with sketch pad, I found I was asking myself rather a lot of questions. Just how big did I want this new aviary to be? How many Flights did I want? But more importantly, what did I want to keep in these new flights? So that is where I had to begin. Possibly the hardest question of all to answer and one we must all ask of ourselves at some point. Having successfully kept and bred the birds in my current flock, I was keen to look to a new specie of Parrot, something that fitted the image of a parrot rather than an overgrown


14 BIRD SCENE


budgie (crude I know, but that’s how it was), size was going to be an issue, as was cost, as the adventure of having a new baby and moving house certainly wasn’t going to be cheap. The books came out and I reread lots of articles from the magazine trying to get an idea of what actually interested me and met the rough criteria. I had been implicitly told by a good friend who kept cockatoos that under no circumstances should I get into Cockatoos and when I mentioned Conures, was told in general, they would be far too noisy if I was to have neighbours fairly close, Macaws too big, Greys I have always liked, but reasoned that there were plenty being bred already, Amazons, we were starting to get close. One of the articles I came across in the magazine was about Blue Headed Pionus, now these caught my attention. “A stocky medium sized Neotropical Parrot” [Stoodley]. I had to find out more. 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. This would be good in terms of being able to sell the young (I may have overlooked the point that it also


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