Who's a pretty boy then?

'Pretty' is not a description that I have ever had used about me and even though we say it to the budgies, I have no idea, in budgie terms, whether or not our two male birds are pretty at all. Perhaps you should ask our female budgie (the white one) but as she doesn't talk back, we'll never know. One of life's real mysteries.

The pic above is the budgies getting their weekly opportunity to have a bath in lovely warm water and they generally take to it really well. Harry (blue male) is getting wet and the voyeur is Jenny the white female making sure he washes properly. Sam, the other male budgie doesn't like washing much and is hiding away (you can just make him out far right in the cage).

I was going out one evening last summer (2008) when I saw this white thing fluttering around the drive way and then into the middle of the road. I realised it was a little budgie and asked my brother in law next door to help catch her. He got a kitchen towel and we managed to capture this exhausted little thing. She was in a hell of a poor condition, bedraggled, tired and very young indeed and had a deformed foot - it seems to me some heartless bugger had simply let this lovely little thing go because she was of no 'value.' Had we not found her, she undoubtedly would have perished through exhaustion or having been attacked by other birds.

Named Jenny, she is now the best flier of the three birds, although difficult to handle and persuade to come to hand but she is unquestionably the queen of the cage, bossing the other two mercilessly.

The birds really belong to my son who is at university and I sent him these pictures and he was delighted to see them, a reminder of home.

And today's topical story. Fred was a happily married man and he was comfortable with his life save for one thing. His wife was always taking in and nursing sick birds. One evening he came home after a long tiring day and found a crow sat on his favourite armchair with a beak in a splint. On the dining room table was a heavily bandaged red kite. In the kitchen, he found his wife putting a towel round a tiny shivering, tiny, cold wren.

"I am fed up with this, " Fred shouted. " I am sick and tired of these bloody..."

"Shhhhh," his wife responded with a finger to her lip. "Not in front of the chilled wren."

Chat soon

Ta-ra.