Goliath

This is a picture of Echo the day I brought him home, before his upper mandible turned horn colored. I've never had a camera that wasn't a phone so the quality is lacking. Behold! I also just picked him up a hanging play gym off of ebay. I imagine that's going to be lots of fun. EDIT: And here he is the day I put a deposit on him. <br><br>Post edited by: Goliath, at: 2008/02/14 16:38

TAG here. I call him my fearless falcon. The only CAG interaction I had is kind of biased, as I'm not bonded with it so it won't let me play with it like mine will. I do think that the CAGs are prettier though. I'm contemplating a male Eclectus in the not so distant future.

Animal Atlanta in Marietta (75N to exit 263, go W onto 120 and it's right in the first kroger shopping center) has lots of stuff, all different kinds of feed, but their prices aren't the best. I overpaid for my cage there, but it's where I got my bird. They have lots of exotics on hand to play with usually too.

I have an 8 mo. old TAG DNA sexed as male named Echo. He is my first bird and for that I certainly did some things wrong out of the box but I am reformed and now things are going pretty good. I brought him home a couple days after he was weaned and he was probably about 3 months old at the time. No words yet, but he will riff where he tries to talk when he thinks he's alone and that's pretty comical. I think I nearly have his trust, he will step up on command at any time in his cage whether he wants to or not if he's on one of his lower perches, but if he's on the ceiling or wall, he won't. When he wants to come out, he'll step up anywhere. His "trick" is if I lean in and say "give me a kiss" he will put his beak out for me to kiss or if I just lean in he will touch his beak to my nose. I have a couple questions, I've been misting him about twice a month (I try to do it more but he's not a huge fan), so I want to get him to bathe, after seeing the water bowl deal, I might give that a shot. Any other bathing suggestions would be great. Also, I almost want to find a play group to take him to so he can learn desirable behaviors (hopefully) from other birds, is this advisable? How do you track down one of these? And last but not least. He hates being petted, hates it. At first I figured it was my technique but just about any exotic I've come across and handled I've been able to almost paralyze with petting (macaws, cockatoos (that's an easy one), larger conures). Is there any strategy for warming him up to touch? Thanks!