So, about a week ago, my Mom says that she is finally getting a dog - a puppy. She has never really paid much attention to my dog training abilities before, but now that she is getting one, she has noticed my dog Jack - Jack is as well behaved as a dog with his energy level can be and he is smart...but mostly, he is trained. He will run through an impressive array of tricks and behaviors and learns new stuff fast. Right now he is working on ringing a bell to go outside, tapping his bowl for food, and barking at the sink for water - it makes it much easier on us when he tells us specifically what he wants.
My Mom, has noticed...and she has noticed that it is deliberate training and that even my 5th grader can get new behaviors quickly using "clicker training". She asked to borrow some videos and books and I gave her a clicker and she agreed that she will let me teach her to work with her new puppy.
It got me thinking, my childhood dream, like all kids, was to be an animal trainer. [My wife says that is not the dream of all little kids - in fact, we have asked several people and none of them ever dreamed of being an animal trainer - apparently their parents didn't take them to the zoo and the circus and the wild animal park and the Sea World enough!] I started to think, "I have been training dogs for 23 years - it is time to move on to ... DOLPHINS!" Actually, my first thought was parrots. We talked over dolphins as a family though - my son had several innovative ideas for keeping a dolphin in the back yard, but in the end, they weren't as practical as they seemed once we did the careful analysis.
So about week ago, I saw a parrot supply store on the way home from church and stopped in to visit the birds available for adoption at Birds Paradise in Hillsboro. We stayed about a half hour - my son and I did, my wife stayed in the car.
My wife and son didn't really want a parrot, but I started taking them to the pet store to visit them anyway and they started to warm up to the idea and I started reading books and researching the web. On Thursday, I went back to Birds Paradise and talked to the owner, Karen, for an hour or so. She told me to decide what kind of bird I wanted and that it would probably be available - there are lots of birds available.
What kind or parrot did I want? Well, I had already ruled out Lovebirds - they almost never talk. Amazons and Macaws and Cockatoos are awfully big - I wanted a medium sized parrot. I told Karen, "Most likely, you will be somewhere and you will see a bird, and somehow you will just know that it is supposed to be mine." We left it at that. She seemed a little surprised, but said that she guessed that could happen - she supposed.
The next day, Friday night, we decided to celebrate the fact the our house did not blow up from the gas leak under the house (it was actually the thought of getting a parrot that prompted me to track down that faint gas smell and get it fixed) and my wife suggested that we go back to Petco and visit this little Sun Conure there. My son and wife both loved it and my son wanted to take it home with us - but it was way too expensive. We talked about it the rest of the night and I decided that a Sun Conure was what we wanted and that I would name him Coco - all I needed was "Attention Petco Shoppers: for the next 30 seconds, all Sun Conures are 90% off with your Petco card!"
Saturday afternoon, my son and I were headed home and I asked if he wanted to go back to Birds Paradise to see the parrots there again. He did and talked again about how he wished we could get the one we saw last night. I thought we really had no reason to go back to Birds today and we had to go to a Petanque dinner that night and we should probably go right home, but I felt compelled to go see the birds - just for a minute. So we went. It took us about 10 minutes to get there.
We got to the store and walked in and the owner was near the back. As I looked toward the back of the store, there was a little Sun Conure - I pointed and blurted out,
"Is he available for adoption?!?"
Karen looked at me and smiled and said, "Well, I am not sure yet."
"That is my parrot!", I said.
"I thought so, " she said, "that is why I wasn't sure if he was still available :-). I thought he was already reserved for you. I was up in Washington picking up more rescue birds this morning and I saw him and immediately thought ' that is Bob's bird'. I told the woman who had him about you and she said, ' I think that is Bob's bird.' Then as soon as you saw him you said, ' that is my bird'. So, I am pretty sure that is your bird. He has been here 10 minutes."
I called wife wife and she came down and the parrot loved her and we decided to put down the deposit.
