Sunday (Sunny) Bird Bloggin

I confess. We got another bird. Actually, it's mostly Mary Ellen's doing, but I have to admit I was won over as soon as I saw the baby sun conure. A couple who bred and hand-fed the conure brought it over to our house last week so we could take a look, and that was that.

We don't have any photos of Sunny yet because we left our camera with someone at yesterday's SCC meeting (much more on that next week). Instead, I thought I'd supply a couple of generic shots of sun conures so you can get an idea of what they're like. Sunny, at about three months old, looks alot like this:

He or she still has many of its downy gray baby feathers, and its much more colorful adult feathers are coming in willy nilly. There's alot of color variation in sun conure feathers as they age, and also between individuals, but here's what young adults generally look like:

Sun conures usually get more orange feathers as they age. Including their tails, they're about 12 inches tall at maturity. Quite beautiful, don't you think?  At the moment, Sunny is still quite shy and defensive in his/her new environment and tends to hiss at us and make loud growly sounds when we approach its cage or try to get Sunny to "step up" onto a stick or our fingers. This reaction should fade quickly as Sunny gets grounded and begins to trust us.

Sun conures are highly intelligent, curious, inquisitive, active and playful. They enjoy spending the day outside their cage, romping on a play gym or stand, swinging on ropes, playing with humans, cracking nuts and nibbling fruit. We'll be working with Sunny many times a day to gain the bird's trust and demonstrate that interaction with the new humans can be fun. Awk! We'll keep you posted.