Ring-necked parakeets in the wild - in Surrey, UK!

We've known these parakeets have been living wild for years in London and further afield, but this is the first time we got a video of them! They're in an apple tree in a garden in a housing estate:

Of course, our cockatiels demanded to have a new video for themselves too...

Mike

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Precision flying

Birds initially have trouble flying in enclosed spaces, but our cockatiels have had plenty of practice, and do a little acrobatics show every morning, usually about 10 mins after they get up. Here they are, seeing how close they can fly to the wall without crashing.

Here's Pete, showing off his full set of feathers:
Here's Tom, who's moulting so is missing a few feathers:
In this one, it looks like he's got a bit too close to the wall, and is pulling up hard to avoid it!
And finally, the two of them together (yes, they do sometimes crash into each other, but never very hard):

Mike

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Hello from Pete and Tom

I'm busy visiting the shortlisted applicants for the Ashden Awards at the moment, so I've not been getting up to the wood very much. So, in the absence of any woodland photos, here's a couple of videos of Pete and Tom, our cockatiels.

Pete can be very demanding sometimes - in this video Tracy's working, but Pete thinks she should stop to preen his feathers. Eventually he gives up trying to distract her and goes to do the preening himself...


And in this video, he's just showing off and singing!

Mike

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Cockatiels looking for trouble

I thought I'd share this video I took today of our cockatiels, looking for trouble on the table. They're busying trying to chew the place mats to pieces, but it's taking a while as they're quite tough. Tom likes to copy everything Pete does - in this video he follows Pete around while he's singing, and even goes to have a poo off the edge of the table at the exact same spot Pete did a few seconds earlier!

My parents and my brother and his family are in Rye this week, so we'll all be heading up to the wood tomorrow.

Mike

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Butterfly Conservation volunteer day

This morning we went to help at a volunteer day for the Butterfly Conservation Rother Woods Project. The location was Beckley Woods, about 7 miles out from Rye, and the task was coppicing trees to widen a ride, in order to create a better habitat for butterflies (and incidentally other insects and birds too).

There's a short piece about it on the Butterfly Conservation sightings page.

Here's a few pictures:
It was strange going back to using a bow saw - no chainsaws allowed on volunteer days, as it's a bit noisy for the people not using them! We'll certainly appreciate our saws when we get to the woods tomorrow!

As well as getting a bit of conservation work done we also got to meet lots of people, including John, a retired forester who lives near our wood - we're hoping he'll be able to visit us this week to see the work we're currently doing, and give us some tips from his years of experience!

When we got home we found that our cockatiels had deserted their expensive cage with all its ropes and toys to go and sit in a branch we brought back from the wood...
I suspect the millet hanging in it was an attraction though...

Mike

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Well-trained cockatiels

This has taken a few weeks, but we finally have our cockatiels trained to go to bed! They're out of the cage all day, but sleep in it at night. We used to have a complicated procedure of getting them into a small cage and through the front door of the big cage, but look how good they are now!


Weather permitting we'll be working in the wood tomorrow...

Mike

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Cockatiels that think they're eagles...

Cockatiels like to "display", either to attract attention (i.e. from a potential mate), assert dominance or make themselves look scary when they're threatened - ours often do it when they see larger birds out the window. When we first got Pete (with the yellow face) he made a chattering noise while displaying, but we trained him to say "eagle" instead, and when we got Tom (with the white face) he learned it from Pete very quickly. Here they are doing it (the video is in HQ mode, so pause it and let it load for a while before playing):



Back to woodland stuff in the next post...

Mike

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Pete sings to Tracy's eye

Pete often likes to step up on a finger when he's singing, and if you bring him close he'll sing into your eye. We think he likes the echo!



Mike

p.s. it's raining today, we we're not up at the wood...

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A couple of videos of Pete and Tom

Out cockatiels haven't feature on the blog for a while, so to prevent them feeling left out, here's couple of clips of their latest antics: Tom chasing a grape around the table, and Pete declaring which bits of the furniture belong to him.

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Roll out the barrel

One of the things I want to do this summer is to try making some small charcoal kilns out of oil drums, just to produce a bit of charcoal for our own use. I'm not there yet, but the materials are now in place:


Tim's been up in the week with a log splitter by the look of it:and the last of the oak butts have now been milled, leaving a nice flat space, which could come in handy for visitor parking and further timber storage, if we prevent it growing back up: There's still a lot of oak firewood to be split and extracted, so it'll be a while before the wayleave track can be restored.

In the wood, things are growing really well, with the rain and warm weather we've had. Some of the coppice stools have grown up to 2 ft now:
and a chestnut stake I used to hold some logs back in January has decided to sprout. I'll be interested to see if the base of it has roots when I pull it up!
This one's my favourite though - an old pollarded chestnut that used to have several large stems on it. With the stems cut off, the pollard has come back to life as well as the stool!
Meanwhile back at home, Tom's decided that it's time he learned to sit up at the table during dinner time:
They're both enjoying their new box full of fresh grass seeds too:
Mike

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Shed building, and a dead boar

Over the past week we've been building a shed at our allotment, trying to get a bit done in the evenings. It was nice doing it on sunny days:
and before long we had the floor built, resting on logs from our own wood! :-)Today it was raining, but we decided to go there anyway in the afternoon and carry on, getting the walls up:
We put on the beam that goes over the doorway and then quit, as it was miserable weather and we wanted to pop up to the wood for a bit before it went dark.

One of the things we wanted to see at the wood was a dead boar that we'd heard was near the road in one of the woods that borders ours. It was quite easy to find, but very sad to see. It didn't look like it had been wounded, not sure what killed it. (p.s. Just in case anyone is wondering, we didn't touch or move the boar in any way)
On a more positive note, we noticed something happening to the stumps left from the chestnut we coppiced:
It's exciting to see the buds forming for the new growth - and also a relief, seeing as this was the first time we'd coppiced our wood, and although we knew it would grow back, there's always that niggling doubt until you actually see it!

Pete and Tom have had a good week. Something out the window surprised Tom just as I took this photo - if you look carefully you'll see he's airborne:
Pete said he was an eagle, and tried to prove it, which also gave us a chance to count his feathers and see that they are all growing back nicely after his moult:
After all the excitement it was time for a nap:
though once rested Pete serenaded Tracy, being careful to sing into her eye!

Mike

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Bird expressions

I'd written this for another forum but thought it might amuse some people, so here it is:

Pet birds, observed close-up, have many expressions:

For example, sleepy:


surprised (by a bird flying past the window)


confident


angry (argument over who sleeps where)


bored


suspicious (of a new thing placed below him)


I don't know if wild birds do the same? I'm guessing they do, but it's harder to watch them to find out...

Mike

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Birds in flight

Not wild ones, but our cockatiels Pete and Tom doing their morning acrobatics. Pete's the one with the yellow face, Tom's is white.

In the first picture, you can see Tom twisting his head so he can look out of his left eye while turning left. I also find it neat that while they're banking to turn, they still hold their heads upright.
You might notice a few gaps in their wing feathers - they're moulting. We're saving all their feathers - we reckon after about 10 years we'll have enough to stuff a small cushion! ;-)

Mike

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Old videos of Pete

I realised that there's several old, and amusing, videos of Pete that weren't on here, so here they are. None is longer than a few minutes. If you're not interested in cockatiels, there's a post about the wood below this one...

Pete playing "get the pen".


Pete trying to reach his seed. He's too lazy to fly...


Pete playing on my desk, practising jumping.


Pete playing at lunchtime.


More Pete at lunchtime.


Mike

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