How does one get twenty birds?

Someone recently asked me this question and here's my reply:

Well, I started with a single cockatiel from Wal-Mart. Then I got a hand-raised one. (I still have both of them after nearly 20 years.)  After I raised my first female bird, Skyler, I soon graduated to parrots.  Yang, a male senegal, came along.  A female senegal, Yin, arrived soon afterwards.  They didn't like each other ... at all ... for the decades they spent in close proximity of one another.  It cured me.  I never tried matching parrots again ... although my suave little moon conure did a fabulous job of consoling Yin in the years to come.  They bonded.

I began collecting multiples soon after I bought my third parrot.  I acquired some very tame lovebirds from the same clutch.  My affection for birds was just starting to blossom.  After seven parrots, four parakeets, ten lovebirds, and ten cockatiels,  the breadth and depth of my appreciation has expanded exponentially.

When people hear I have so many birds, they don't mind giving me theirs. I don't have much resistance to that so I mostly keep quiet. 

Doing the math ... I bought fifteen, six are offspring, and ten are adoptions.  One kinda rescued me on the day he found my house.  He was lost in the wilds of Southern Illinois  ... on the same afternoon a bird I'd been nursing every four hours for several weeks passed across the veil from one world to the next. 

Skyler was aspirated by the veterinarian.  In the good old days she'd fly around the kitchen, catch the string from the ceiling fan in her beak, and hang there on the end it twisting while we all laughed.  Dad called her a one trick pony.  She liked the attention.  

LIttle Feat,  the miracle bird who replaced Skyler, gave up his ghost last summer after raising a family and spending many years in my flight cage.

I got an african gray from a woman who moved to Alaska.

A sun conure came from some friends of friends who thought he was too loud.

A pregnant lady gave me her macaw just before the baby was born.

Three parakeets found me through a friend who rescues animals.  Another one I accepted from a stranger who took my number at the chiropractor's office in a moment of synchronicity.  The  family who inherited her had enough on their plate.

Oh, and the ringneck lived in someone's kitchen a town away. Once they saw how lllllooooonnnnnggggg she was going to be around, they called me. It was just beyond their ken until they tried it.

One lovebird got traded because he was a different species and he didn't get along with the ones I had.

The female lovebirds lynched a baby male lovebird who got tangled in some netting.   He was the one who used to swing from my bangs while I washed dishes.  His sister died soon after.

Five females and one male lovebird died after being around for several years.

Males generally live 3 times longer than females due to the physical stress of laying eggs. Minimizing egg laying is a big deal.  I kept old eggs and put them under my females when they started laying them again.  Better yet,  I learned how to rearrange the cages to discourage it. 

When I saw the signs, I'd first try moving things around inside the cages--perches, toys, bowls.  And if that didn't work, after a few days I'd move the outside of the cages--changing their relationship to one another and the door.  Subtle?  Yes.  Effective?  Yes! 

So if birds are THAT sensitive, imagine what they must go through living as pets to capricious humans. Not that I'm thinking you should keep everything the same all the time!  Oh, contrare!  I change the cages and their relationships often to keep my birds flexible and engaged.  I think you should get right in there and learn everything they can show you.

(It's a strange dialectic, I must admit.  Keeper and kept.  It's that cage thing, isn't it?  Well, all I can say is it doesn't feel like a cage when we touch.  That's why I think of  pet birds as ambassadors charged with the sisyphean task of reconnecting humans with their wild hearts.)

I had no idea how far a territory dispute could go until now.