Message #6148

[caskur™]

From: Omnipotent888__ Sent: 12/26/2005 5:43 AM


I didn’t have much time for budgies when I first married. I got into dog breeding. I married a man with a Rhodesian Ridgeback called Sabre. I guess I started dating my husband when Sabre was about 6 mths old….by the time he was 4 years old I had Sheebah, his niece. I planned to breed the pair and had 4 litters from that pair over the next 5 yrs….meanwhile; I kept chickens and a cat also, fish in ponds and aquariums.

Kurt brought me home a beautiful blue budgie but it died within 3 days….it had had a heart attack from whoever had it before me….it was only a baby and I suspect it was mistreated….I never had a bird die from a heart attack, only ones brought to me and died within 3 days….what happens to birds sometimes is, they will have a heart attack and survive but die about 3 days later and you can tell this when they fluff up, look generally unhappy, perhaps have diarrhea and when you find them dead on the bottom of the cage, one leg is straight and stiff and the other is folded or curled up. It’s the curled up leg that will give you the clue, that the bird suffered a heart attack, previously.

The baby budgie Kurt brought home kept looking like it wanted to vomit. It gagged every few seconds and all it wanted to do was lay against my body warmth….sweet little thing and oh so beautifully marked. It’s a shame to lose the good looking ones. Then one day he brought home Bubba….what a character she was and she wouldn’t go into her cage, the little pain….she was spoiled naturally but I got her to stay in her cage after a week…..as long as she could come out for a fly, she was happy enough. We made perches all over the place…..I used to laugh when she would jump on the cordless phone’s antenna while it was laying on it’s curved back…..she'd take this huge run up, jump on the antenna and the phone would spin around and around in a huge cycle, then she’d jump off, only to do that over and over again. What a pity I didn’t have a video camera to permanently record it…..she was so inquisitive she’d get into too much trouble.

I loved it when she’d find a piece of paper crumpled into a ball. She chase it around and kick it like it was a football and she’d do this all morning for entertainment.

One time Bubba jumped into a sink full of very hot water and after that she never took a bath…..on another occasion we came home, only to find her upside down in a glass lantern that held a light bulb….still another time and the most serious, Kurt turned on the ceiling fan and Bubba flew into it….I heard the sickening thud as she was flung across the lounge room only to end up on a self that held the videos. Kurt found her behind the videos in the corner and her leg was snapped completely….we took her to the vet and he bandaged it up tightly and glued either side with araldite glue.

Once the glue hardens, it acts as a splint …..it took a whole solid three weeks to mend back together again and in the meantime, Bubba tried to peck the bandage off, silly little girl and it’s not as if you can put a bucket on their heads as some people do to dogs.….When we bought her home from the vet, she slept a whole day in one of the water receptacles [minus water, naturally] with this funny bandage leg sticking straight out in a straight line.

So far she’d nearly boiled herself in a sink of soaking dishes, nearly fried herself in a light feature and tried to lose a leg by doing a Kamikaze into a spinning fan …..still, she loved us and was boss of the house……she was so happy in her environment that she thought it would be a great place to nest…for a week she went mental, trying to chew holes in anything, wood, picture frames ect, but eventually she laid her egg in her cage and then laid one a day for five days…..this went on for months until I got her a male budgie. Up until then, she thought I was the father of her babies, or unfertilized eggs…hehe…every time she go to lay a fresh batch of eggs, the same thing would happen,…..[they get bad PMS just like some women] and very cranky before the first egg is laid…..they are very destructive but after everything, she'd end up laying them in her cage in a container I provided for her, time and time again.

Everything my grandmother told me about budgies was wrong….she used to tell me that if you kept a pair, the males would never talk…WRONG…..and if I got a male, they’d never have babies in the house….WRONG…..

To be continued…later with the story.