And So This Is Christmas

And so this is Christmas
Originally uploaded by makeupanid.

Not the best of all shots, but there will be more coming, at the moment Christmas is staying with the President of the TBO. He will eat out of his hand and today when we took the bird to the vet for a checkup you could see that Christmas is already bonding with him. He obviously has been handled by humans and was pretty amiable. We took him to Dr. Karen Regan, the same vet I use for my pet cockatiel, and she kindly did the work pro bono for us. Thank you so much Dr. Regan :D

Christmas is continuing to eat well, Dr. Regan was quite impressed with the shape he was in considering one bystander told us that he had been loose for at least three possibly four weeks. We (and he) are so lucky we caught him yesterday as this morning the temperatures went down to -15C with the Wind Chill. Not the best of climates for an Oz native! Rosellas are originally from Tazmania. In an article from The Society for Conservation in Aviculture they liked this reasoning behind the name Rosellas-" The second is the story that I like best. This is from a simple spelling mistake made in the middle of the 18th Century. It would seem quite likely that the name of "Rosetta Parrots", may have been given to the birds, being named after the Christian name of the wife of George Fife Angas(1789 - 1879), a pioneer of Southern Australia. Several place names are still to be found in Australia named after his wife such as Rosetta Harbour a small town on the coast. In a diary from John Gilbert(? - 1845) a slip of the pen - forgetting to cross the "t's" may have resulted in the name being used right up the present day." Though I kindof liked the first story he was refering to they were named after the area of Sydney where they were first discovered thus the "Rose Hill Parakeets"

Christmas seems to be in very good health, they did do several tests on him the results of which we will not know for several days. Birds often can be sick even though they do not appear to be and there was some slight discharge around his nose.

Joe Fiorito who wrote the article that brought Christmas to our attention, also came with us to the vet as he is planning to do another story in the Toronto Star in Monday's column. I will continue to update stories about Christmas here.

Oh and now we have been asked about helping a budgie flying with a flock of chickadees....oh my what have we started? LOL At least we'll get to band the chickadees too :D