News From The Flock

This is my first post to my new blog on WordPress. My name is Ed and I live on the Gulf coast of Florida. I live with my wife and our flock of birds, which currently consists of 37 different types of parrots, from Budgies to Cockatoos. We have:

1 Umbrella Cockatoo
1 Goffin’s Cockatoo
1 White-bellied Caique
1 White-capped Pionus
1 Panama Amazon
20 Cockatiels (plus 5 eggs)
12 Budgies

We have one pair of Cockatiels that have been adding to the flock for a while now, so the number continues to rise from month to month. We are in the process of opening our own bird shop, and are a few steps away from opening the online portion of the store. We plan to run that for a while and eventually fund opening a store locally. Our store will be run differently from the average store, and the birds will not be in the standard cages that you see in the run of the mill bird shop. I believe that we will create a format that will hopefully encourage other stores to follow. Too many shops don’t take the well-being of the birds in mind and put them in enclosures that are borderline cruel to the birds. We have a store that isn’t far from our home that specializes in birds, and while the owner claims to know birds, the store doesn’t care for them in a way that they should be given. She even claimed one of her Macaws was “allergic to birds” when in reality she had squeezed his head so hard will hand feeding him as a baby that a seed mixed in the food was lodged in his sinus cavity. She left him untreated for almost a year until he was sold to a good friend of ours and they took him to the same vet the owner used. The vet told her about the seed, and that the owner knew about it and refused to have it flushed out. This bird suffered for almost a year, until our friend paid to have him treated and now he lives a full and healthy life, a life he would have never had were it up to the shop owner. She is one of those people that should never be in this business, and it is unfortunate that people that patronize her shop don’t know the truth about how she really does things.

As for this blog, it will be dedicated to documenting our journey toward opening our shop, with all the ups and downs that will come down the road. We are especially excited about opening the local shop, and have a clear picture of what it will be. It will be unlike any other store, and will be in a class of it’s own. We hope to build our own building and the plan may grow even more as we get closer to opening day. There is so much we can do with it, and we hope to make as much out of it as possible. We will see what it will be in the end in due time.