Micah hss lots of news, but I only have the energy to talk about one thing today.

Today she actually interacted with another bird! She usually completely ignores any birds not in flight. She yells her head off when the macaws are flying but is otherwise very nonplussed by her fellow flighted creatures.

Today she hung out a bit with a nanday conure. She's hung out with this conure before and hardly even acknowledged his presence before. Today, well... It wasn't the very best interaction ever. She reached over with her beak open, like she wanted to chew on his feathers. Then she noticed his toes, and asked, with a beakful of toe, "Do your toes taste good?" The correct answer, of course, was, "OFF MY TOES, BITCH!"

She also reacted to a blue and gold macaw. She does NOT LIKE Jessie. The feeling is mutual, Jessie wants to Kill All Conures. Micah flew to Debbie and Jessie was with Debbie. Micah landed on Debbie's shoulder and then squeak-bonked at Jessie. Ha.

Oh one other thing. Micah flew "down" today. I forgot about the idea that "down" would be different than "up." Up is easy! Down, not so much. We should practice flying Micah down the stairs or something. So next week's fly group, hopefully we can get her to fly down from the loft area several times, so she gets used to flying down. That'll be important if she ever flies up into a tree.

I also heard about a sixty acre soccer field with roads that are miles away from the soccer field. It seems like it'd be a great place to teach Micah about these funny things called "drafts" that happen outside. Wind!! :O Birds can go a lot further with a nice draft, so hopefully we can teach her how to handle changing drafts.

Basically, I want to fly her in a lot of different situations and get her recalling in as many situations as possible so if anything should ever happen, I could recover her easily.

Plus, the last thing I'd want is for her to fly away into a situation she didn't know how to handle. One huge fear of mine is her flying out into a heavy automobile traffic area. Cars make weird drafts, and I'm not sure she knows how to handle cars, other than trying to get into them to go places. There's really no way to practice dealing with cars, of course, but we can practice dealing with drafts.

It's a very scary world for a little companion bird who has never lived in the wild! Outside birds know how to handle cars, drafts and predators. Little Micahbird doesn't know any of these things. :( Poor little Micahbird depends on us to keep her safe. Sometimes that makes me feel funny.

Funny like, it's such a huge responsibility. It's so bizarre to me how we have taken a wild thing and made it totally... well, we don't make it not wild, she's still a wild animal. But we've taken away all the advantages to being wild. And I feel funny-weird because, well, what if I can't keep her safe? What if something happens and she gets away from me somehow, in spite of all I'm trying to do to keep her from getting away? I can hope that all the things I've tried to teach her are enough to keep her safe...

But I feel like a parent sometimes. It's scary. I'm not going to do it "in real life" with a real baby. No way.

All right, now we've stopped talking about birds.

More about Micah and her attack-bird antics later.