Happiness from an Apple

I was going to make this post about the overview of my recent observations, but something interesting happened today that changed my mind.  So I will just be discussing some of our Sunday because I feel like it was, in my opinion, important.
I change his cage whenever I feel it is necessary. And today happened to be one of those days.  I could feel that he was angry while I changed his cage.  Mainly because he was making these cooing like noises and was in an aggressive stance.  The stance consisted of him leaning forward toward me.  It doesn't sound like an aggressive stance but compared to his regular pose, it was.  That made the actually act of changing his area somewhat difficult, but I still managed to get it done.  In the end that got Little Bird in a better mood.  Later that day I was eating an apple and that happens to be one of Little Bird's favorite fruits.  I sat on my bare floor and peeled part of the apple with my teeth.  I couldn't help but notice him staring at me the entire time.  Once I peeled a fair amount of the apple, I stood up and bit off a piece and fed it to him.  He wasted no time and immediately ate the entire portion within five minutes (the piece was roughly the size of a small bouncy ball cut in half).  I also left three more chunks in his cage for later.  Once he finished, he turned around in circles on top of his cage and cleaned his beak off on the cage bars.  What I found to be interesting was that he kept turning around in circles.  Slowly but enough for me to take notice.  I believe he was happy.  Every once in a while he would peer down into his cage and see the other apple fragments but refused to go into his cage and eat them.  By then I had finished my apple so I went up to him and offered a bite, but he turned me down.  About six or seven minutes later his breathing slowed (noticed from his chest expansions) and his eyes started to close.  This wasn't an eventful day, but I like to believe that Little Bird was happy today.  Just one tiny insignificant piece of an apple made him happy (well it must have been significant to him).  It made me feel happy.

Bird Watching

It's quite interesting to think you know so much about someone or something, but when asked to give an accurate depiction of that one thing, there are no words you can piece together to utterly describe it.  That was my first notion at the start of this observation.  And weeks of observations have yet to alter that.
However, it has caused me to notice some things about Little Bird that I wouldn't have particularly noticed without the aid of this project.  The first thing is that I feel like he has a dominant hand which in his case happens to be the right claw.  Of course he uses his left claw but I've noticed that he uses his right more often.  That's something I should most definitely look into.  I can tell that Little Bird absolutely HATES loud noises.  Whenever I raise my voice or something loud occurs, he yells like there's no tomorrow and flaps his wings.  I can only assume that he doesn't particularly like anything noisy because of that.  Big Bird and Little Bird had that in common.  Now let me make a note about his wings.  Little Bird loves to come out of his cage and when he does a stretching like movement occurs once he has successfully reaches the top.  It resembles a human stretching their arms when they first wake up.  He brings them up nice and slow but in a somewhat choppy motion.  He also has these instances where he rotates his head back and "cleans" his feathers.  I used the quotations because I'm not really sure what he would be doing if it wasn't a nice little cleaning.  Anyways, after turning his head back he picks a feather and runs through it with his beak.  Resembling a bored teenage girl combing her fingers through her hair.  So possibly he is just combing his feathers?
I wouldn't say I'm the healthiest person in the world, but I sure as heck enjoy my fruits and veggies.  When I have the chance to share some of that with Little Bird I almost always do.  And the times I forget he reminds me (I'll get into that a little later).  One thing he cannot get enough of is kale.  As soon as I give him the slightest taste, his eyes light up.  I do feed Little Bird portions of whatever else I eat.  Well anything that doesn't have the potential to end his life.  Something that he could do is talk.  Nothing fancy.  But as I said in my previous post, Little Bird had lived with my grandmother for a chunk of his life and any thing he picked up was from her.  I've tried to teach him new things but nothing has broken through(or so I believe).  Anyways, whenever I have food and forget to share Little Bird Says "hiiiii."  Sometimes it's other things but mainly just that.  He has been doing that more than usual or maybe I just haven't given much thought to it.  I will end here mainly due to wanting to do some more observations before I can really get a feel for what Little Bird is doing during some of his activities both in and out of his cage.

The Beginning of Something New.

I chose to do my observation on my parrot.  He goes by the name of Little Bird.  He is a Blue Fronted Amazon Parrot and is roughly 37 years young, well that's what my grandma told me at one point.  Little Bird was my grandmother's bird before he came to live with me.  The main cause of that was due to me having  Big Bird.  Now she was also a parrot of the same species but my grandma had given her to me about a year earlier.  Back to Little Bird.  So my grandma felt that the two birds should stay together for the sake of their health.  I love animals so it was unimaginable to even think of saying no.  With that being said I welcomed Little Bird into both my home and my heart.  Although he has never been rather fond of me I still cared for him.  It wasn't until Big Bird's passing that I realized how much I emotionally neglected Little Bird.  With some thought after hearing about this project, I made the justly decision to make the subject about this fellow.  I felt as if it would give me chance to really connect with this old guy.