Technician Tales: Where are You Taking Them?

When I am out cleaning aviaries, residents and nurses alike will frequently come up and ask if I am taking their birds away. I’m sure this question is prompted by the fact that all the birds are put into a temporary travel cage while I am servicing their large luxurious one; it looks like they’re being packed up to leave! However, that’s not the case at all, the birds are simply placed into a smaller cage to keep them safe until their house is cleaned and ready for them to return. Otherwise, they would be escaping left, right, up and down!

There are however, birds that we do take. These are offspring of birds that started out in the aviary originally. Each aviary usually has at least one or two pairs of producing birds. The residents have an opportunity to enjoy watching the babies go from egg, to bald pink little chick, to soaring adult. Once they reach adulthood, things get slightly complicated; the aviaries can become crowded as more and more babies are produced and the offspring might even start reproducing with each other or the parents. For genetic reasons, this is not ideal.

Once the babies are of an age where they are fully independent from the parents, it’s time for me (and other technicians) to pick them up and move them out. But this isn’t a sad occasion! The babies may be placed in different facilities where they can start their own families, not unlike human children when they are all grown up and ready to face the world!

Luckily, there are always residents that help to make this transition easier for the babies. One lovely resident, when she found out I was taking a pair of doves that were ready to leave the nest, sat and helped to keep them calm as I packed up my supplies and got ready to head out. They sat close enough for her to stroke them through the bars of the travel cage, and she told them everything would be okay—that they would do great in their next home with their new families. Her gentle voice was similar to the soft cooing that doves make, and I could tell they were genuinely soothed. When I said goodbye and rolled my supply cart out with the birds, she looked like a proud mother watching her children go off to do great things!