Hot Stuff

It's been a great weekend with lovely hot sunshine, not that we're all that keen on hot sunny days, but it did make a pleasant change from cold rainy days. Debbie was working on Saturday morning so I got everything done at home leaving us the rest of the weekend free to do whatever we liked. I even washed the car for the second time in 6 months. On Saturday afternoon we had a ride out to a local parrot centre to get a few things for Zippy. They have a huge selection of birds there and it's nice just to walk round for a while. All we ended up getting was a feeding bowl for outside Zippys cage. Saturday night, we decided to clip Zippys wings, I held him in a towel while Debbie clipped away, to say was not impressed was an understatement, but we managed to get the whole thing done quite quickly. Just when we thought the whole thing had gone without incident, Zippy decided to try and fly off, landing on the table and sending Debbies gin & tonic all over the place. When we all settled down again, I got Zippy on his stand and found that he no longer tried to fly off when I approached him, I left it at that, not wanting to push things too far after his ordeal.

We were up at the crack of dawn on Sunday and we decided to checked out a garden centre that we'd not been to before. They had a decent selection of pet supplies at reasonable prices and I purchased a new toy for Zippy, then after queuing for 20 minutes at the checkout, we went off to another garden centre, this time Debbie got some lovely miniature daffodils and I got a couple of small perches to do some step up training with.

When we got back, we let Zippy out of his cage and after half an hour he decided to make an appearance, I took him from the cage and placed him on his stand, left him for a while and then out came the new perch. After a few minutes of pressing against his chest, he gave up resistance and hopped on and stayed on there while I walked around giving a guided tour of the living room and kitchen closely followed by Lucy who was whining away the whole time. Then he decided he'd walk on to my hand so I had him there for about half an hour. During the afternoon I managed to get him to hop onto the perch about a dozen times which is more than the whole of the last year so clipping his wings has really made and improvement.

Paul