Pet Bird Magazine, Ezine January 2000Magazine

---

Avian New Years Resolutions

by Carol Highfill

---

As the new millennium begins, hubby Ken and I have made a few resolutions to ease our future lives with our birds. Perhaps some of them will be of use to you, too. So here goes.

1. Take out two subscriptions to the Sunday New York Times, to ensure that there is sufficient paper in the house to change our birds' cage bottoms.

2. Spend at least one half as much time, money and effort in choosing and preparing our food as we do for our parrots.

3. Teach Ashley, our male umbrella cockatoo, to say 'Ashley is a good boy' instead of 'Ashley is a girl'. This may require convincing him that he is a boy.

4. Join Bird Toys Anonymous to start a 12 step program to deal with our addiction to buying tons and tons of expensive bird toys.

5. Add some videos to our video tape collection which are about something besides birds.

6. Buy stock in some cleaning products, furniture maker and clothing manufacturing companies to share in the profits which these companies are making from bird owners.

7. Enroll in a 'tough love program' to increase our resistence to giving in to our birds each time they start sweetly begging us to come out.

8. Find the impossible - someone we will trust to take care of our birds for a few days so that we can finally take a short vacation together. (Sane enough to do the job and crazy enough to do the work!)

9. Limit the things we impulsively buy for our sweet little monsters and stay within an affordable budget.

10. Renew our efforts to find clothing that will not show bird poop and buttons that will stand up to birdie beaks.

11. Teach all the birds to be quiet when mommy and daddy want to think.

12. Find and cultivate a market for bird poop as a fertilizer so we can buy more birds.

13. Take more pictures of the parrots to show when other people pull out pictures of their grandchildren.

14. Invent and patent a fool proof lock that cockatoos can't pick.

15. Write a book about the 2000 joys of living with a parrot for the year 2000.

Winged Wisdom Note: Carol and husband Kenneth have owned pet birds for over 13 years and are co-creators of the Birds n Ways, Winged Wisdom and Cockatoo Heaven websites.