My family

I’ve mentioned my parrots on a couple of occasions and I thought I’d share them with you today, on Christmas.  In addition to my true love, the household consists of two Amazon parrots, Samantha and Alex, and a fluctuating number of parakeets.  For the last few months, the ‘keet population has been a stable nine, but it has gone as high as 16.

My birds are relevant to Kilt in the Kitchen for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m responsible for their health and nutrition.  Preparing their food and paying attention to what they will and won’t eat is an important part of my life.  Another is that, like many of you, the kitchen is the heart of our home.  When I’m in the kitchen cooking, chances are that all of the birds are there with me.  Alex sits on a mobile perch in the middle of the floor, Samantha is usually on a perch at the end of the counter, and the parakeets live together in a giant cage tucked up against the patio window.

For newcomers to the house, the thing that might take some getting used to is the chirping from the parakeet cage.  It is constant.  When there are nine or more parakeets living together, at least one of them is going to have something to say that will warrant a response from one of the others, so there is nearly always something going on.  The two parrots have times when they are active and times when they are resting and so do the parakeets – except they don’t rest as a flock.  Someone is bound to be active at any particular time.  For us, it’s a pleasant background noise.  Their chirping gives the house life – like audio sunshine.

We usually try to maintain the parakeet population around 10-12.  Over time, one or two will die and will have to be replaced so we’ll buy a couple more. We did raise some parakeets a few years ago by putting two nesting boxes on the cage.  Two of the hens had clutches of six eggs each and eleven of the chicks survived.  We’d do it again, but it is pretty labor intensive, not only for the parakeet hens but also for the people involved.  By the way, to give you an idea of the size of that chick, the dowel in the upper right corner is 1/2″ diameter.

The two parrots are different.  They actually spend a lot of time being quiet but when they want attention, they want it NOW!.  Samantha is a female Tucuman Amazon in her mid-30s.  Alex is a yellow-nape Amazon male in his teens.  They are both affectionate, protective (Alex’s mission in life is to protect me from harm), and very good at communicating what they want.  Body language and voice play a large part in how they tell us what they want, but we can tell the difference between when it’s time to play or when it’s time to have something to eat (or when I don’t want to eat what you’ve already given me but I want something else) or when they want some attention. What’s important, though, is that when they want your attention, you’d better give it.  Both Sam and Alex can be loud and insistent and screeching for a long time doesn’t seem to tire them out very much.

Most people think of birds eating seeds and while that’s often true, we try to discourage it because a seed diet isn’t very healthy.  It lacks vitamins, it’s high in fats, and can lead to any number of health problems. Nutritional bird food is commercially available, but the guys don’t seem to care for it when we’ve introduced it.  This means that, just as with people, we have to provide a balanced diet that the birds will eat.

The one universal that all of our birds eat is something called birdie bread.  We got the idea from a film clip we saw at the Philadelphia Zoo, where zoo personnel created massive sheets of enriched bread for some of their animals. We adapted the idea by taking a Betty Crocker recipe for zucchini bread, eliminating the sugar, substituting kale for zucchini (additional vitamin A), red coconut oil for vegetable oil (vitamin A again), leaving the egg shells in the batter (calcium), adding some nutritional supplements and tossing in a few seeds to make it fun.  For the parakeets, this could be the only thing they eat for days at a time.  The parrots require a little more attention.

Samantha and Alex share many of the same foods. They both start the day with hot muesli (thank you Bob’s Red Mill!), grapes, and some other fruit. At dinner time, hot green beans are always on the menu.  Samantha is an omnivore and really likes our leftovers.  She loves beef, pork, chicken, and fish as long as it is in a form she can tear apart with her beak and eat.  Leftover vegetables are also a favorite, as is whatever soup I’m having.    In fact, at lunch she insists on having part of my lunch, either directly from my plate or from my fork.  My true love once labelled her the “Chief Tasting Officer,” although that role really belongs to my true love.  Alex is a vegetarian and prefers his food raw or merely heated.  He gets a big dollop of yogurt every morning and he eats much more than she does, but without the variety or the finesse.

I hope you didn’t mind this diversion but the topic of food has dimensions far beyond what we put into our own mouths.  For me, being responsible for my bird’s health and how they interact with my life are both examples of those dimensions.