Sir Chirpsalot is my English Budgie. He's green and yellow, mostly yellow, and a very mellow happy bird. Today when I was picking up some millet sprays for him, I saw that the pet shop had dropped the price on parakeets and so I picked up a female partner for him.

They are sooooooo sweet together! She is sky-blue with grey stripes on white head and wings. She is about half his size right now and will grow to maybe 2/3 his size. She doesn't have a name yet.

(They won't try to raise any young unless I put a nest box in, and I don't plan to do that.)

Right now the cage is  covered with a cloth and they are sleeping, he is on the swing and she is up on a high perch. When I put her in the cage this afternoon, she just stayed very still while he looked and looked, made a few noises and pecked at her feathers and I was a little worried he might just not be willing to accept her because he is so into his mirrors, which he thinks are other birds... sometimes parakeets don't accept birds from other flocks, or so I've been told.

She seemed to ignore him. He tried to groom her feathers then she suddenly made one "chirrup!" noise and he ran over to his favorite mirror and had a long excited conversation with it, then came out bopping up and down and fluffing his head and cheek feathers out, dancing like a fool  

So I put some jazz music on and he really got into it while she just cocked her head ever so slightly and watched. Eventually he got tired of trying to get a reaction out of her and he went over to the millet spray that I had wound around a branch. She finally showed some life and went over to the far end of the same spray and they both began eating seeds and glancing at each other aqnd away again. Then she approached him and he fed her.  It was so sweet! They almost should have had a little candlelabra in there, they were acting so much like a human couple at a romantic dinner with the saxophone jazz in the background!  *LOL*

Lady Guini-beak

Ah, nice name Iuvanalis, but she is very small and shy, and another name occurred to me: Claudette, Lady Claudette, because she is sky-blue with those cloudy white wings and a white head.  

Hi Elizabeth, they are fun aren't they? You could get a female and then she'd pick a mate to raise little ones. They are flocking birds, so the other male should still be ok. You have to put a nest-box in or they just abandon the eggs, unfertilized.  I'm not going to put a box in because I read that they actually breed continuously, raising chicks of differnt ages all at once, and you can't stop them except by separating the parents and handraising some of the babies.  This might be ok if you have time for the daily routine, but I know myself better than to think I would have the self-discipline to keep up with it for the weeks it would require. Also I read that they can be very upset about being separated. As it is, I might see an occasional egg left in the bottom of the cage and I will remove it.

Littlerose, wouldn't it be fun to create an artistic habitat for a little flock of parakeets, though?  If you KNEW you were not going to move, that is.  I can imagine a really creative space as a mini-aviary, a little Stations of the Cross and St. Francis thing going on with little gardens, something easy to keep clean.  I love making little spaces...budgies are really little instruments of God's mercy, so pretty and cheerful.

Wow, have you been reading my mind? *LOL* I would not want a whole flock of them, but I am working on a corner habitat in my small apartment which will include a canary and possibly another member of the parrot family. I have about a dozen orchids on a baker's rack right now in the corner near a big window with the bird cage.  I part of the roof off the cage during the day and Sir Chirpsy and Lady Claudette have been hanging out among the orchids. They seem to like the mist, too because they come towards me when I am misting the plants.

I want to get a corner aquarium that I saw, and also grow a small indoor tree, and have this entire 4' x 4' x 6' triangle set up as a little environment with the canary cage in the upper part among some hanging plants.

I want to include a statue of St Francis with the hands out as a feeding station in the corner.