Birds of a Feather

Birds are certainly one of the enjoyable things to see at a zoo, at least for me. Some of the zoos have cooler birds than others and we thankfully have a zoo that's got some pretty cool ass birds!

I think one of my favorite things that I've gotten to do recently is some parakeet feeding. I had parakeets as a kid and they are pretty cool but I never got to hold them or anything, probably because I may have hurt one and likely because we also had cats so we didn't want the birds to get eaten which they almost did a few times lol.

Two of the zoos we've been to over the past year have had these really cool exhibits for parakeet feeding and we've participated in them for sure! You get to buy some sticks with bird seed on them which is nice, and you hold them out. The birds fly on over and land on you and just go to town on the thing, it's awesome!

The funny thing about it is that since we've done it at two places, I get to compare them. The place that we went to that is a LOT farther away does a way better job at it haha, they give you way more food on the stick than the one that is a lot closer to us! This means that the birds stay around a lot longer on the other one since they have a lot more food to get off the stick. On the same token though, I'm not complaining much about the whole thing because it was really cool to be able to feed them and hold them like that.

The interesting thing is that there are often a lot of birds that just aren't interested in getting food from us. I don't know if they were already full since we went later in the day or what but most of the birds were sadly not interested in this particular feeding opportunity we went to. That was a shame but it was still cool to be in their cage and walking around, feeding the ones we could, and just listening to them yap away. I think the parakeets have a cool sound, their strange combination of yap and chirp makes for a good listen.

The zoo also had, not sure if by chance or if it was intentionally there, a really cool peacock. I don't know where peacocks are native to, though I probably should know that but I think that will be the subject of one of my next educational adventures with my son. We see the peacocks at a certain number of local places; I remember one amusement park as a kid that famously had them just wandering around. They are pretty tame, I guess I would say in that they just walk around, eat bugs and stuff and just make their loud calls.

This dude was ready for some females that's for sure LOL he was studded out! I spent a good 10-15 minutes waiting for him to puff his feathers out but he wasn't biting. He decided that he was just going to walk away from me and hopped on the barrier of the exhibit he was hanging out in and said peace out bitch!

I walked away and of course that's when he decided to strut his stuff. I caught up to him and was able to get a few pictures which was nice but I was afraid I wasn't going to get any. I had turned the camera off and removed the zoom when he decided that he was going to participate in what I wanted hahaha. Glad I at least got some! The birds are really interesting for sure, I love how gigantic the feathers are on these things! I don't even know if you could call those back things a feather or what, considering how large they are and mostly just keratin or whatever they are made of.

This one was popular with the kids too which is nice. A lot of kids ran over when they heard it starting to make its mating call and when the parents noticed it was getting all decked out, told the kids to come by. The little man was too busy playing at the little park they have in the zoo to mind, he's seen these plenty of times but it was nice to get a few photos of the fella before he calmed down and went back to foraging for bugs. There were definitely plenty of bugs to eat that day, that's for sure!