Looking for a Good Home

In light of some circumstances beyond my control, I need to find new homes for my small family of Fawn and White Indian Runner Ducks. You can get photos and standards here for this breed of duck.

The patriarch, Jack, is a fine example. He is lean with a perfect wedge-shaped bill. He stands 75 inches tall and has full, alert, and bright eyes. His partner, Jill, has tight, smooth, and hard feathers, and stands a very straight 66 inches from bean to toe. Their children, Wanda and Richard, are joyful, playful, and loving. These guys will do you well in the show pen.

If I can't find a new home for them, I will be forced to find room for them in my freezer and then practice my French cookery skills. I found a very nice recipe for Duck a l'orange.

I am offering these fine birds on a first-come, first-served basis. I will also hand over all of my copies of IRDA newsletters.

Dead Budgies

When Polly, our pet budgie, started looking a bit peaky, my dad intervened. He added a few drops of brandy to its water dish. For the next two or three days, it was very active, happy, and cheerful. Only later did it occur to me that the little green bird was probably quite drunk. Sometime later, we found it reclining feet up on the bottom of the cage. For years, I assumed it was dead, but someone later told me that it might have passed out. In any event, it was dead enough for the store to replace it without having to launch into any Monty Python skits about dead parrots.

I began to suspect that the replacement budgie, also called Polly, was an inferior bird when it was discovered that it could not fly. It plummeted straight to the floor. That was the only time in my life that I appreciated the bright orange shag. Otherwise, my memories of that carpet are of burns to various body parts - and I even have a friend who ended up with carpet burn on his face from that carpet. But, that happened in the teenage years, well after we gave up thinking that our family was capable of looking after birds or any sort of animal for that matter.

Budgie number 2 died within 10 days.

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Tom Cruise is Nuts, and here's the website to prove it. If you like that, be sure to visit FreeKatie.net.

I can't explain it, but just as I was writing that, I had this thought:

I feel sorry for any bird saddled with the words "lesser" of "common," like the Lesser Antillean Flycatcher, the Lesser Flamingo, the Lesser Bird-of-Paradise, the Common Bristlebill or the Common Gull. How drab and boring for them.

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