The Beyond birdie Basics Workshop by the Gabriel Foundation continued on Sunday last weekend.

Many more topics were covered on the second day.

Foraging and toys are different topics that can be combined together to make interesting activities for your bird. One example was a simple cracker box. Inside the box, they stuffed pieces of paper, a foot toy, more paper, a little treat, more paper, another foot toy and so on. If your bird is not used to a foraging toy such as this, it would be best if you let her watch you put these items in the box the first few times, until she gets the idea. You might even have to find the items yourself the first time and get excited about your finds.

Julie Weiss Murad, the President and Founder of the Gabriel Foundation and Patti Christie, CVT,RN, the Director of Operations, Education and Avian Welfare discussed some health related issues and nutritian. These topics are very closely related since many health issues are caused by poor nutritian. They mentioned that we really do not know exactly how to duplicate the diet of birds in the wild and that one food does not necessarily suit every species.

They touched on behaviour issues, but since we were running a bit behind, this was skimmed over a little. I suspect that the online course may go into a bit more detail, but we did get the outline with the information in it for us to have.

We all know that every veterinarian is not an avian veterinarian and that we have to find one that we can trust before an emergency happens. We received tips on picking a vet for our birds, how to teach our birds to accept a towel for an examination and what to expect from a visit to an avian veterinarian.

All in all, I was very impressed with the ladies and their ability to answer questions from our group on each subject. I plan on taking the online version of the course as soon as possible and I fully recommend that everyone, especially new and prospective bird owners, consider signing up.

These two birds were having a bit of lunch at the workshop and I thought they looked cute enough for a picture. You will be seeing this picture up as a jigsaw puzzle one day soon.