Since we lost Sunbeam on December 24th, things have been a little sad around here. Almost daily the girl has reminded us one way or another about our missing friend.
A few days after he died, we began looking into getting a new boy budgie. We were trying to get one from our local pet store, who brings them in quite young from a breeder, but she was not able to get in touch with him. Missing Sunbeam was making the girl AND her Dad pretty sad, especially when the boy calls every bird he sees “Sunbeam”.
We had to make an unexpected trip to the city today, so we decided to take a look around the pet stores. We’d looked before and they hadn’t had any young birds that looked healthy enough to me, and the healthy birds were too old to start taming with much hope of anything other than a “might sit close to you” bird. But today, I think we got lucky.
At the same pet store where we got Raindrop, our female budgie (who is notoriously cranky and not very tame), they had a mixture of birds that looked anywhere from 8-9 weeks to 6 months old. One of them was an alert, curious little Yellowface blue that appears to be male to me (only time will confirm this but I hope he is). Now, I wanted a white bird that was very different from Sunbeam but Mama really liked this one and thought he was “friendly”, and since she had been the person who had called my attention to Sunbeam a few years ago, I went along with it. He’s not especially fancy and he isn’t going to produce interesting hybrids if he and Raindrop breed, but although he is one of those “Bin-O-Budgies” parent-raised never-tamed birds who chomped down on the clerk when she took him out of the cage, it looks like he might work out OK. We got him around 1pm, and by the time we were home at 6:30pm, he was taking seeds from my fingers - not from the palm of my hand, but right from between my fingers. Assuming it is not because he is ill (which is a slight possibility in my budgie experience), he is a very personable bird.
I only hope that we can have him as tame and friendly a companion as Sunbeam. An added bonus would be if I could finally teach a budgie to say more than one word. After watching some Youtube videos of some very well-trained and talented budgies, I have some hope!
So here’s a pic of the new boy - his name is Horizon. Yeah, I know, I am never going to be able to get him to say his own name…
