My new budgie!

As of Thursday the 25th of September, Claire and I became the proud owners of a budgie!

Well, Claire has had many budgies all her life, really. This is my first bird. The only other pets I've ever had were a german shepherd (in Venezuela) and a couple of terrapins in Singapore.

After obtaining permission from our real estate agent, landlords and body corporate (which took about a month), Claire and I trooped off to Petworks at the Great Western Shopping Centre in Keperra. There we found a beautiful baby boy budgie, who we could already tell was going to be sweet and good-natured. Cosmo was what we named him.

The first couple of days, Cosmo was quite shy and avoided us when we went close to his cage. Which was normal for a budgie (said Claire and other budgie owners). Budgies can take months, even years to become friendly and tame, if at all. Cosmo spent quite a bit of his day climbing around his cage trying to look for an escape, even digging down into his seed/grit to possibly burrow his way out! Yet he was never very flustered or flighty - he always remained fairly calm and easy going. Whenever he heard any other bird (even the slight hint of one) he would chirp as loud as he could. Claire guessed that it was because he missed bird company; his cage in the petshop had about 15 other budgies. Here's Cosmo and his cage (he's normally inside it :p).

Then, amazingly, he began warming up to us! Claire would take him out of his cage for a little bit each day to let him grow comfortable being near us, and for the first few days she'd have to catch him with her hands to return him to the cage. But on day 4, she managed to get him to hop up onto a chopstick, letting her put him back in the cage! The same happened on day 5, but this time, Cosmo even let Claire use the chopstick to scratch his neck! We couldn't believe it!

Not one to let moments like these pass, I whipped out my video camera. The result was Cosmo and the Chopstick (coming to a cinema near you).

Today (day 7), we had another breakthrough - Cosmo hopped onto Claire's finger! We thought it would be months till he would be comfortable to do that, but it happened after a week. He even hopped on to Michelle's shoulder for a few minutes too! Amazing. He's still not completely tame yet (obviously), but he's making great progress, and we're really happy about it. God made birds really special, and it's cool to be able to appreciate and enjoy it through this little budgie.

If things go my way, you'll be seeing more Cosmo videos in the time to come ;)