Ooohhh! Great topic! I NEVER planned on getting an amazon. I had heard tooo many horror stories about them.....they were mean, they bite, they had a tendency to be fat and very special diet, are moody, dominate, uncontrollable, noisy, screamers, and very difficult to handle, only an very experienced bird handler would be able to handle one.
I made an overnight trip to Bird of Paradise in NJ, (about a 4 1/2 hour drive from my house. I took 2 of my kids, my boyfriend and we drove down 1 night, stayed over, spent the day in the pet store (they have over 40,000 toys) YES< we spent the day!! Bought lots of things, a BIG tree stand, food, lots and lots of toys!!!! They have rooms of birds, a living room type area where you can spend time with any bird as much as you want. Many of their birds are not caged, they are in areas that have a small wall of plexi glass, you can pick up the bird you want to and spend time playing/talking with it to see how you 2 get along. I had alreadt told my kids...NO MORE BIRDS!!! WE HAD 2 GREYS & 2 PARAKEETS ALREADY!
They kept coming over to me with various birds, showing me how cute they were and how perfect they would be, how my 12 year old needed his own bird, how he"d take care of whatever smaller bird we got...(Ya right!) well, they kept picking up this cute little amazon and bringing her to me, they would carry her around the store, keep returning to show me how cute she was. When I started to soften, I asked what kind of bird it was...(didn't have a clue) and how much it cost...I was told $1200! I said, NO WAY!!! II had hundreds of $$ in toys etc already in my cart! They kept trying to sweetly convince me we NEEDED her, she was SO CUTE! Finally I looked at her, made a raspberry sound to her 3 times only.......she immediately made the exact same sound back to me!! I beamed and said She's a keeper, SOLD! She's coming home with us! I paid for her with my charge card...
We drove her home... I began to try and research Amazons on the internet, couldn't find much, so decided to start up this amazon room since many members here had amazons & greys. I have learned so much here from everyone, all I can say is THANK YOU!!!!!!