This may be cheating a bit...but I was giving her a bath, so she WAS "in the yard"!

Patty, thanks for starting a new thread for March! You are not cheating at all ... she's a BEAUTIFUL bird!

I went to the February thread and posted a link over here!

What a pretty parrot! Love it!

I had to take the apostrophe out of "photo's". Your moderator is also the grammar police.

@SarasotaPatty, please tell us a little about your gorgeous girl, what kind of parrot? She sure has pretty colors and I love that fourth photo of the close up shot of her face peeking through the leaves.

I agree with Lin, that fourth picture is adorable! Beautiful bird! Looks like a patriotic parrot, red white and blue colors!

mellielong said:I had to take the apostrophe out of "photo's". Your moderator is also the grammar police.

Thank you. Grammar matters!

What a stunning bird!

I know that bird personally. (since I live close to Patty and we trade plants all the time) She is a gorgeous thing, with the most piercing screech!

Large Parrots can be very, very loud. We had a small Indian Ring Neck Parrot years ago and although it was a whole lot smaller than Patty's beautiful bird, it was loud. The bigger they are, the louder they can be.

The only birdie pic I got today .... a Mourning Dove that had been feeding on the ground until the dogs startled it so it flew to an oak branch where it perched for a few minutes.

Love the mourning doves.


Sparrows?

Christine, Yes ... those cuties look like the little Chipping Sparrow!

Thanks, everyone! My bird is a hen eclectus. and her name is Pumpkin because when I got her as a baby her head was pumpkin orange instead of red like it's supposed to be.

Eclectus parrots are the only sexually dimorphic parrot---the females are mostly red with a black beak, and the males are mostly green with a candy-corn beak (orange & yellow). Most other parrots have to be DNA sexed to find out gender. It was only in the 1950's that the 'experts' realized that male and female eclectus were the same species, different gender...until then, they were believed to be separate species! They are not huge birds, though there are a number of sub-species of eclectus and some are bigger than others. The glass ball in some of my pictures is 6 inches, to give you a size reference.

I've had Pumpkin for close to 20 years now (since my ex made me get rid of the snakes!), and she will probably outlive me, since her lifespan in captivity is 60-80 years and I am already 54! I finished hand-feeding her as a baby and she thinks I am her mommy, still!

She does "pluck" as her naked neck & breast prove. She started it a few years ago, and no one has ever come up with a definitive reason as to why birds do it. Sometimes something as simple as moving their cage, or changing their diet can make it stop...or start! It's a mystery.

Yes, as Elaine knows, Pumpkin does have quite a loud screech...although not nearly a loud as a macaw or cockatoo can produce! I call her my "watch bird"--most of the year her cage is on the front porch and she will screech whenever someone shows up, or leaves the area!

Yes, she does talk (when she wants to, and never on command!) but does not have a huge vocabulary. She says 'HI' in a number of different ways, especially "HI Pumpkin"! She says "night-night" every once in a while. She can say, 'What are you doing, Pretty Girl?" because I've said that to her for years. She does the 'wolf whistle", she laughs like me, and occasionally she coughs like me!

It wasn't until I had owned Pumpkin for a few years and saw a scarlet macaw flying above our car one day on the way to the beach that I realized how horrible it is for us humans to take a creature as beautiful as a bird that is supposed to be free enough to FLY anywhere in the sky and stick it in a cage for our own amusement. If I could set Pumpkin free I would, and I will never, ever buy another bird, though I would be open to rescuing them.

In the meantime, I just love my red bird! She IS quite the little character!

Lin, what color were your ringnecks? Ever see a ringneck dove in your yard? I get a pair here quite frequently!

Melanie, thanks for catching the apostrophe! Usually I'm better than that!

Patty, I just love your Pumpkin, she is so beautiful! Our male Ringneck "Sandy" was a green Indian Ringneck Parrot: https://www.google.com/search?... We got him from a pet shop in Bradenton back in the 1970's. We used to vacation on Longboat Key every summer and visit our favorite ice cream shop GD Ritzy's ... oh how we miss their ice cream! Anyway, we were out for ice cream one afternoon and there was a very long line in the restaurant/ice cream place so we decided to go into the pet shop next door and look around while waiting for the lines to thin out at Ritzy's. My husband had always wanted a Cockatoo or large bird and he fell in love with the young Ring Necked Parrots. We were led to believe they were cracking seed already but within 24 to 36 hours of purchasing Sandy, we learned otherwise so we had to get a syringe and mix up food and hand feed him for awhile. Sandy was more my husbands bird and didn't like me very much. He would bite me every chance he got. He hated being in his very large cage and would screech and screech and screech when we put him inside. He liked to sit on my husbands shoulder while he was watching t.v. and we had a cat named "Crazy Cat" that would sit on the arm of the chair. Even though cats and birds are not usually friends, those two got along great. Sandy was with us for the first 9 years or so of his life and then we found him a new home because we were both working very long hours and felt it wasn't fair to him to be alone so much. The lady we gave him to raised birds and she had a younger female Ring Neck. We visited a few times and Sandy loved his new girlfriend/wife and they ended up having babies. Sandy would say hello and pretty bird and did the wolf whistle too.

I've only seen a Ring-necked Dove once, a number of years ago in our backyard in Daytona Beach.

Isn't it funny how birds tend to pick their human? More than most other domesticated animals I think.

I was never much into birds at all, though my mom had a cockatiel and some zebra finches (which I ignored totally!). When I was pregnant with my son (24 years ago) a couple moved in next door with their 20 parrots...that started it all! They bred peach-faced lovebirds and green & blue ringnecks but also had a blue & gold macaw, a shamrock macaw (cross of a scarlet & a military), a male eclectus, a timneh gray, a double yellow headed amazon and a few other small parrots....I became addicted to their birds. I even wrote a monthly column for the Florida West Coast Avian Society, which they were the president and secretary of.

I managed to hold off getting a bird of my own until the club was getting ready to host the Great American Bird Show one year...and Pumpkin was supposed to be the grand prize raffle bird. They were finishing up hand feeding him and I was over there all the time playing with the new baby. They wound up returning her to the breeder because they were afraid she wouldn't molt out to the right color in time for the show, and got one that was colored correctly. I was heartbroken. After talking with my husband (at the time) and my mom (who financed buying Pumpkin) we went back to the breeder the very next day and brought her back home! She's been my baby ever since!

I love your 'Crazy Cat'...I have a psycho cat myself! Her name is Katrina though, because she was a hurricane Katrina rescue. I think her name should have been "Hurricane" instead...or "Psycho" would have worked too! It's not really that unusual for cats and birds to get along...my mom's cockatiel loved to preen our cat, and my dad liked to take pictures of them together!

When was the last time you visited Sandy?

Martial eagle (Kenya) - I like the spotted tum!

Pumpkin is really beautiful. The neighbors behind us have some kind of exotic bird that they put outside in the evenings for fresh air. It's so funny to hear it, makes me feel like I live in the Amazon rain forest. I've never seen it so don't know exactly what it is.

Nice shots of the doves and sparrows. I used to have two doves living in my garden, but the moved away once I stopped putting bird seed out.

Mika, the Martial eagle is an interesting looking bird.

Mika, beautiful shots of the eagle...he's got an interesting 'hairdo' there!

Sherri, I used to love to hear all the parrot calls from my neighbor in the evenings too! In their case though, THEY would come outside and leave the birds inside during their very noisy "call to flock" period! Hard to stay inside with 2 macaws, a grey and an amazon all being vocal!

Patty, the people behind us work during the day and have a couple dogs too, they keep them all inside of course while at work. Certain times during the day the bird starts constant squawking and gets the dogs barking their heads off, it is hilarious to listen too...must be loud because house is all closed up and we can hear it. I believe that bird is antagonizing those dogs. LOL