Pico's Page

This is the story of Pico, a budgie that suffered from boredom big time for 3 years but who joined and is now a very sociable member of our family. He is now 3 1/2.

When faced with a similar situation of adopting a budgie with little experience dealing with humans, I would recommend doing what we did. That is let him get used to his new environment by talking to him and greeting him regularly so that he can get to know the people, and understand that we would do him no harm. After an adjustment period, we had one of our budgie owner friends take him out of the cage for the first time so that he could discover his new entire world in the house...and of course if he didn't like it, it wasn't us who took him out.

At first he aggressively communicated his thoughts on leaving his cage through the sharpness of his beak. To prevent wearing out the "other budgie owners" we used "the blue glove" to tempt him outside of his cage. He would leap on it and bite the *%*!) out of the thumb. Slowly, we got him used to us and put our hands around so that he would see that they were harmless.... (ouch!). We put his blue glove of fighting outside his cage on the ladder so he got used to going out and then he didn't want to go back in.

The only time he is now in his closed cage is when we are at work. The minute we get home we open the cage door and if we forget, he let's us know.

Our star, Pico, caught on the second step of his morning ritual. He's just leaped down on the table from his cage thinking he was invisible till we took his picture. Ruffled feathers can always be smoothed with breakfast and he was the first to be seated on the table.
Pico can be seen on his favorite perch in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings in the picture immediately below (Dan's view) and next below (Mom's view).	Mom is on record as follows "You can see that I am going to test Tide's advertising claims on the formerly "white-socks"." Pico is very friendly and usually comes to family members in the living room in the morning. His route starts at his cage where when he leaps down to the kitchen table, then to the floor (flying would be too easy I guess, go figure!) and runs to the living room where he yells till Dan or one of us put down one foot for him to hop up on his "tootsie-perch".

This is Daniel with his buddy on his shoulder or Pico with his buddy under his feet. Dan talks to his budgie who answers back. Pico was looking to see where he would go and nuzzle next.

This is Pico's fighting stance. He loves leaping out on his "blue glove of fighting" and chomping on any dark colored tee-shirt, particularly if it's his buddy Daniel who's wearing it.