Tiamet the African Grey  

She is my best friend. The one thing about a Grey is that they are not a tape recorder. They actually think out what they are going to say. She argues with me like a teenager. In fact, she is just about through puberty and it has been just like it was with my oldest daughter except I could never put a cover over my eldest and say "go to sleep"! A Grey lives to be about 70 years old.

A macaw is a very large parrot. They have a huge beak and a very loud voice but they are very nice. Their tail feathers are a couple of feet long and they come in gold or blue or red. They are awesome but they are heavy to carry around!

I love all critters and I too am against killing. However,I am in favor of preventing a mosquito from biting. My great uncle Jack died of a virulent strain of Malaria in a matter of weeks during WWII. He dodged all the bullets and died of a mosquito bite. I have a cousin who's Mother worked for the Peace Corps and took her son down with her when he was a teenager and even though he was taking the pills he got malaria also. To this day out of the blue He will come down with the fevers and shakes and be down for a week or two at a time. I don't know where you live, but here in FL. we still have some of the kind of mosquitoes that carry malaria. You don't have to kill them; you just plant all kinds of plants in your yard that ward them off. It does work!
Shoot we have every kind of bug you can think of. We have cockroach races on Sat. nights.lol Tiamet even says BUG! She won't catch one; she just watches things go by!

Hi Adoniah,
Thank you for replying to my response which was absolutely out of context to your question. I guess my visit to the hospital was necessary...

However, your solution with the plant is very good.

Here (in Australia) we have some repelling plants too and they work fine, if you have enough planted (not just 1 or 2).

I grew up in Germany and the mosquitoes there just leave you with an itch.
Here they can make you seriously ill too (but I never met anyone getting that ill here). So I guess I'm just lucky.

To your Parrot, I think it must be great to have a bird like that. We once had a budgie who could say a few sentences...

I'll see you around

What you wrote was interesting though and I did enjoy it. No apology needed when information is transfered.

What a cool story! You did right giving the bird to the one it Chose. Birds choose by taste and smell. Weird huh. You can be as nice and gentle and friendly and too bad. They are going to make the choice. Tiamet is in love with a friend of mine that lives in Germany. She says almost every day "Wolfgang went bye bye to Germany". Every once in awhile he will write a letter and he always puts a blank piece of paper in the envelope that he has carried around for awhile just for Tiamet. He makes sure that it smells and tastes like him. She will keep that in her cage and hold it and taste it for days until it finally falls apart. To her he is her mate I think.

ooh "wolfgang went bye bye" that must sound so sad! talk about a long distance relationship!
thats sweet that he sends her a special piece of paper though!

It is not sad. She really has no concept of time. So she does not know how long it has been. Wolfgang does come to visit every once in awhile because he writes cruising books in German for Germans. So he cruises through and sometimes I cruise with him. In fact, we just finished a book together and I just got my copy a month ago. In German of course, but I have finally translated the parts that I contributed.

Best Response! I think your story was almost better than mine!
Shalom

He was probably never trained to go on someones hand. A lot of people stick train a bird with a spare perch. If you ever get another bird, you might try that first. Its easier on the skin!

He was really lovely... people who knew where we got him couldn't believe what a little love could do. There had been talk of 'getting rid' of him, which was why we took him.
No one had any idea how old he was... after we had him for 7 years, he acted listless for a couple days, then died quietly on my chest. He's in our side yard, with a nice big chunk of petrified wood for a headstone. He was a great 'guy'!

My kids and I have a special place where we bury all of our loved critters. It is on protected land by this huge and I mean huge old live oak tree. So far we have never been caught doing this. We have a "special burial cooler" just for this purpose because you can picnic out there in the boondocks. This way, since we lived on a boat we always had a safe place for our loves.

We have a sweet little cockatiel out there, too... Lucky was found in similar circumstances to Wewt, the dove... looking an awful lot like a cat snack! Its funny how when we lose a birdie, within a few years we have another... we've never bought one! We keep the cage in good shape in between cuz we know we'll need it!

By the time Tiamet was 5 she stopped doing her native call completely. The first time she did it it scared the wits out of me but now I feel bad that she seems to have forgotten it. I have been looking for someone who has a Grey who still does it so that she will hear it and maybe do it occasionally. Its kind of like someone coming from another country and living in America so long that they lose their native language.

We have a Ring-necked Dove that we found in the side yard one 4th of July... she was too close to the neighbors cat, so I picked her up. It turned out that my sister's friend had her outdoor aviary vandalised... someone thought all these hand-raised birds should be free! Many died... she was grateful we saved this one, and let us keep her.
Everyone knows the lovely cooing sound that doves make... she's wonderful for keeping the blood pressure down... but about twice a day, for no apparent reason, she laughs like a lunatic! Its very loud, very human-sounding, and enough to give you chills up your spine!

I have a friend who has one of those and I have heard it laugh too. They can make sounds very much like human speach too, but sing song like. When I lived in a marina, there was a lady that raised cockatiels for breeding in an outside aviary and when there was a bad storm it would blow sideways and some of her birds would escape. I always had spare cages and ususally caught a few for her. One in particular was fond of Tiamet (White Feather). She would always show up and get to visit for a few days before going back home. Finally, when she got too old to breed, we got to keep her.

It is wonderful to hear about the other birds. I think birds all know wild sorts of sounds through nature. But then they live with humans and therefore learn to talk. They carry on remembering the same words but don't learn any new words. In Australia there are many lovely birds like playful cockatoos. Which part of Africa does the African Grey come from I wonder. When I was in Mexico and Belize I saw postcards with a photo of a bird the same as Bingo. So White Fronted Amazons come from there no where near the Amazon River in South America.

African Greys come from the central part of Africa. From the south east portion of the Ivory Coast to the western end of Kenya and Tanzania and Angola. Greys from the Congo are larger than any of the others and Greys from Nigeria have darker wings. Of course this applies to wild birds. Once they have been interbred here in the states, I assume they lose these characteristics. Greys are the 3rd most commonly traded wild bird in the world. They are one of the few birds that use tools in the wild and they immitate the creatures around them even in the wild. They have even been heard immitating bats. Weird huh. Now you have the rest of the story!

I don't know. I cannot find anyone around here who has a Grey except a lady who owns a parrot shop and her Grey is older and clumsier thatn mine.

ive heard a number of ppl call Greys "flying footballs" cause of their general clumsiness. its often like they arent paying close enough attention to where they are stepping and miss my milimeters instead lol.
the one i had wasnt overly clumsy, but he certainly couldnt be considered graceful by any means!

I like that! Tiamet does not fly. Even when her wings are not clipped, she barely gets off the ground. (She is not fat, just chicken) But if she did fly, I am sure she would be a flying football. And she is definitely clumsly!

I think the first thing I have always done with every bird I have ever had is checked to see if it was willing to dance. It was like a test to see if it could make a home with us . They all passed the test so maybe all birds like to dance. Tiamet dances but she cannot sing worth a hoot. She dances and makes me sing. We get along that way. Glad your bird passed the test too!! They are so much fun!

Play tapes for him so that he learns to talk more. I got CD from the library of kids songs and made copies and I put them on befor I leave to go to the store so that My Grey has something to do while I am gone. She loves her CDs. They also make CDs that teach parrots little sayings, but you can just make tapes your self with a tape recorder. Just repeat things over and over into a recorder and then play it for him when you go out.

Just make sure that no one teaches him bad words. They are very hard to unteach. You can but it is hard.