Thank you! Unfortunately most birds are a few hours away which makes it hard to visit ahead of adoption.
Any thoughts on the impulse to buy a rehomed bird from a family that isn't treating the bird well? I don't want to encourage people to throw out pets but don't want to leave a bird in a bad situation either!
First, I've had good luck with CL - but mostly by making rules for myself -
If the asking price is way too high, don't bother to respond.
If the person sounds dicey on any level, I pass.
Never rescue a bird just to get it out of the situation. Only take a bird you absolutely want, who also wants you (or seems like he intends to give you a fair shot).
This would be the rule I broke a few months ago when we took in Cookie, a sulphur crested cockatoo.
We brought him home because his owner was what I can only describe as benignly bad with birds, the kind of guy who wanted a bird, started with a cockatoo (one of the most complex & needy personalities out there), then probably decided the amount of attention and the cost were too much - not to mention a chewing & screaming cockatoo is a good way to get kicked out of a rental townhouse. So after the bird had been there a year & started to settle in, he was being placed, again. (Which is a very common theme for CL birds - "sadly, life changed meaning I can't give this bird the attention he deserves" and then you find they've had the bird for a month or a year & come to understand the "live changes" is they have decided they don't like their new toy & the responsibility, so it must go. But they want to lecture YOU on the need for stability in the bird's life & want YOU to promise the "forever home" that they promised the prior owner, but didn't provide.)
Standing there looking at him in his former home, I knew I wasn't in love, but hated to leave him in a situation that clearly made him unhappy (long days alone in a room). Even so, I don't think he necessarily wanted to leave a known environment - he loved his cheap-seed diet & just wanted to spend more time with his owner, who was away for days at a time, and with the 2 other birds in his house (who were in a different room from him).
So I can't really say that we did him a favor, in his eyes at the time - although in my world, improving his diet & giving him the companionship of other parrots & more (if somewhat casual) attention from humans has calmed his plucking & offers him a chance at a longer life.
We didn't promise the forever home & I told myself we would try to rehome him quickly to someone who would have fewer birds/more time than we did, so he didn't have time to try to bond with us. We would merely be petsitters. And yes, I felt guilty, but still thought overall it would be a better life for him.
I paid $300 for him & a nice cage & was thinking of asking $300 to weed out some of the flakes who respond to ads for birds (flakes like his prior owner, for example). In reality, I would have given him & his cage to the right person, if they came along.
Of course, no one really NEEDS a cockatoo & the responsible owners have tons of them already. So Cookie is ensconced in the corner of the bird-room, where he can look out the front window & warn us of cars coming up the driveway, look over my shoulder when I work at my desk, roost a few feet from our other South Pacific birds (the budgies) & converse with Goose-the-Greenwing when he is on his day-cage, right next to Cookie.
He is growing on me - he gives the Grey a run for his money in the "smart" department although Cookie has sole title of "most destructive" in THIS house. He used to be right beside my desk, where I carefully set his cage far enough from the corner of the desk & the window that stretched full out from the side of his cage, he couldn't reach (and chew on) the furniture or the woodwork. Unfortunately, I forgot that he could easily move the thumb protector on the outside of his food door, open it & give himself an additional 4" reach toward the desk. When I noticed the woodchips on the floor, I moved him a little toward the window, still far enough away. Or not. when I found THOSE woodchips, I rearranged the furniture. He immediately grabbed hold of a fern & upended it on the carpet.
The fern is now tied to the macaw's cage, so if Cookie grabs it, it isn't going anywhere . . . I just have no place else to move him!
I love setting him a challenge, just to watch how he solves the problem. And when he won't go back into his cage at night, I'm pretty sure he is setting a challenge for ME, just to see if I can solve the problem, too.
So things turned out fine, but that was luck, not planning, and by the time I realized it was possible we'd made a bad mistake, there was no turning back.
So the lesson I took away from that is that you must always remember that you can't personally save them all - and if you try, you risk becoming a 'birds need rescue' situation yourself.
But I DO think you can find the right companion on CL (PaulE, my beloved amazon, is a CL bird, too). And I think you really CAN help one out of the wrong situation & prevent it from having to go to a rescue to wait for its special person to show up. No meaning any disrespect to rescues, but I think that the type of parrot who enjoys the companionship of humans and bonds to one individual is not happy in that situation, even though they are safe and well-cared-for there.
Whatever you decide, good luck!
If you found your bird on CL then thats awesome and I'm glad you gave a deserving bird a good life. I know there are decent people out there.
