Do You Have An Amazing or Humorous Bird Story?

Elvis was his name. A dusky conure as loud as he was beautiful. A bird that preferred to walk rather than fly. He liked stick matches for some reason, probably because they created a pretty flame. One day at Halloween time he was "spooked" by some decorations hanging on the front porch while perched on my shoulder. Unclipped he flew to my neighbors house which was one acre over. He didn't fly back to me that evening and I was very worried whether he would survive the elements.

Finally tracking him down in a neighbor's tree, I asked him if he had any stick matches? After finding a box of them I held them up shaking them and lighting a match as Elvis became more and more excited, eventually getting down and back home to safety.

We acquired a new cat a couple months ago and just yesterday while my 12 year old son was home Elvis was out and the cat got hold of him and killed him. I had Elvis 7 years and he was as delightful as he was obnoxious. He will be dearly missed.

Marsha and Ian Stroup

Sun Bear is my three-year-old Triton cockatoo. Two years ago, he began doing shows with the Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association in Connecticut. Sun Bear loves to be around cops (I am a retired sergeant) and the kids enjoy him. They love to pet him and think it's great when he tells them to "say no to drugs."

Sun Bear has a vocabulary of over 40 words and can identify many objects by name. When he sees and airplane, he'll spread his wings and say, "Look at that. That's an airplane." When he sees a baby, he'll say, "Look at the baby." When he sees a woman he likes, he'll say, "Oh, baby, wanna kiss; give me a kiss." When he gets mad, he'll raise his crest and say, "Stop it right now. I'm going to call the cops!"

His hero is Winnie the Pooh and he calls people he likes "Pooh bear."

Mary Angel Notarangelo

Cell phones have been implicated in the disappearance of more than 2,000 homing pigeons during two races in Virginia and Pennsylvania. The electromagnetic radiation involved in cell phone transmissions interferes with the homing ability of migrating birds, which orient themselves with an interior magnetic compass that utilizes the earth's electromagnetic fields like a grid. The races in which the birds disappeared normally would have been held on a weekend, when cell phone activity is lower than it is during the week, but they took place on a weekday after inclement weather had forced their postponement. A few of the missing birds eventually arrived home after two days, but under normal, i.e., weekend, conditions nearly all the pigeons would have returned home within hours.

The Jerusalem Post