By Josh Bridwell | Project Leader
Everyone here at SoCal Parrot were so excited that our article in the Audubon Magazine finally came out in July. It's hard to believe that our story was first submitted in May of 2014 and the pictures in the article were taken in November of 2014. The wait was worth it when we found out that we were actually on the cover. When we started SoCal Parrot, we never imagined we would be on the cover of any magazine, especially Audubon's. I had assumed that we would encounter resistance from organizations like the Audubon Society since we work with non-native birds but it has actually been the exact opposite. We have encountered nothing but encouragement for our efforts. We have even given tours to excited bird watchers visiting the Adubon's San Diego Bird Fest in March. We were able to take them to our amazon flock's morning roost and they were quite surprised at how loud these little parrots can be. I have attached a copy of the Audubon Magazine. We were especially proud of our cover model Irie. He is a very happy mitred conure that came to us blind as a baby in 2014.
We have had a very busy year so far in 2015. To date, we have received 42 amazons and 10 conures. Our outreach efforts must be working since we took in 27 amazons in all of 2014. We have already been able to release several parrots back to their flock this year when the circumstances are right but we are preparing for our large release in November. We recently implanted microchips in each of our wild parrots so we will know if any of our birds return to us. We gather the flock together and microchip them all at the same time. I included a picture of some of this flock right after they were chipped before we returned them to our flight. We also swabbed for disease so they will be kept separate from our flock in our main flight until we receive all negative results. We tested our entire flock last year and found no disease. Once these parrots are brought into our main flight, we will begin strength training by making the flock fly from one end of the flight to the other. This also helps to reinforce a for dislike humans and to avoid us at all costs.
We have been focusing on building SCP stronger from within with great volunteers and planning for the future this year. It hasn't left anytime for fundraising but we do plan on having an open house event on October 25th at our Sanctuary. If you happen to be in San Diego at that time, you can find the details on our Facebook page.
By Josh Bridwell | Project Leader
By Joshua Bridwell | Project Leader
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