SRSeedBurners

Not sure what's going on with the forum and videos. I upload to youtube and then paste the link in my post. The forum automagically embeds the youtube video. Works great.

That was just the main construction. I still have left to do: Wire with electric - I'm getting an electrician to do that because it needs power from the panel and I don't screw with the panel. Lighting - me and the electrician Cameras with cat-5 cabling - me Window wire panels - me Some landscaping - me More rope climbing nets and toys! - me

Oh you had to ask didn't you! Here's a sampling of his talking, he tends to only talk in private, private meaning on the other side of the wall in the kitchen. His favorite spot is in the kitchen, especially with someone cooking there "La-la-laaa-la....La-la-laaaa-la" F*#! (former owners two teenage sons taught him this along with the next one) S*#t "Get me the hell out of here" "What" "Hello?" (always after the phone rings) "Huey's a good bird" And apparently a lot more that we haven't heard yet. And this one is funny: Wife and I were having one of our usual fights - loud talking, talking over each other, lots of tension and Huey belted out: "SHUT UP - STOP IT...JUST STOP IT". Not only did it stop the fight that was going on because we could not believe what he just said, but since he said it in perfect context we felt bad that we were stressing him out. So the fight stopped immediately. Wife took him to the bedroom and babied him as if he had told me to shut up and stop it and I promptly got on messenger and asked the owner if what I heard was actually what I heard because it was so unbelievable. The owner confirmed that Huey doesn't like fighting and will say exactly what we heard. He's not the most prolific talker and he doesn't talk very often but we get a real kick out of it because he's the only talker now out of 6 birds. However he is not a cuddly bird and will bite the living daylights out of you if you make a wrong move - something my cuddlebugs GreycieMae will never do.

This is a super cute video. Before this was taken, Huey was helping himself to GreycieMae's nut, literally taking it right from her talon. She would look at him incredulously, then pick up another nut and before long Huey would reach over and take that one too. That's what I intended to get avideo of. But by the time I got the camera, GraycieMae had about enough of Huey's one-sided sharing. And here that are just chowing down a little later

I hour your contractor is faster than mine regarding his own time estimates. We were told 4 weeks, 5 max. 12 weeks later we were wrapping things up. Normally we would have said something but his work was such high quality with attention to detail - I just shut my beak. Keep us posted with pics.

With all the exciting luxury aviaries springing up, I thought I'd share a nice blueprint for the perfect home floorspace plan that I found. It's perfect!

We went with the Solar Grey, it's a really nice smokey color and casts a bronze light (sort of like the color you see when there's a forest fire in the area and the sky is filled with smoke - bad joke I know - but that really is what it looks like underneath them). Home Depot only carries Clear and Solar Grey in our area so I never got to see the others. We have enough sunlight that comes through the windows on the side that I'm not concerned about maximum sunlight overhead. They provide the partial shade I was after and then under the soffits it's full shade. How are you building the roof? We have 16 ft beams like what they use on a pergola. The beams come directly off our house roof. The Suntuf panels sit directly on top of the beams (on top of the Suntuf 'horizontals' but that has no bearing on what I'm talking about). Then on the underside of the beams I am putting up 16 gauge wire. So there will be a space the width of the beam between the wire on the bottom and the panel sitting on top. Similar to you I don't want something punching a hole in the panel and my birds getting an escape route. My concern is a squirrel chewing through. If there is threat of hail, I won't have them out there anyway so a baseball size hailball I'm not worried about. These panels will take a pretty good strike but it is possible a branch could punch through if directed just right.

If you are feeding any one of these three foods, pull them. Word is going around about two sanctuaries that have had small mass die-offs and two of these foods are common among both. The third, Lefebers is being tested, I would pull it too. Also pass the word along in any channels you participate in. The original posting is lengthy so I'm including the foods here in case no time to read the post. Zupreem Fruitblend, large size for macaws, cockatoos etc. Higgins Vitaseed Lefeber's Nutriberries Original posting from "Birds And Beaks Rescue and Rehab":

That's a tough call. We had the exact same dilemma and I finally decided to just use one type of panel all the way across. We went with the 'Solar Grey' as it has 35% light transmission. We have plenty of soffit for the birds to hide under should they want to get completely in the shade. Here in Texas we regularly get temps 90-100 for weeks or months on end. So I'm fully expecting to have to find a way to push air through our aviary. If you do use the SunTuf, I don't believe you will be able to use any other panel as the ridge profiles are hexagonal in shape. Most galvanized panels and the regular polycarbonate panels are a 'sine curve' shape. There is no guarantee those will fit together either as the curves may be different sizes between the two products. I do know, you DO NOT want to use the clear polycarbonate paneling that you will find at Lowes/HD. That stuff is pure junk and breaks easily. It's listed at HD under the name 'Palruf'. If you're going to have open sides, which I believe is what you are doing, you can easily hang a box fan and a mister on the outside and cool their jets with that. That's what I did on our outdoor aviary. Here's what I would do based on what I think you're building and what I know of how my birds have behaved in both my aviaries: I would put a solid section of roofing ~2ft out from the side of the house, very similar to the way our roof soffits are in our new aviary. Our birds tend to want to hang out under that. Our outdoor aviary has a tree that shades part of it and that's where they hang 90% of the time. They sell a closure strip that we used to join the SunTuf panels to the flat roofing board which is exactly what you would do too. I think I may have a pic of that before it was shingled. Have you thought about having a camera out there? I can't tell you how much peace of mind that brings being able to monitor them from inside the house. I have a dedicated monitor at home and work that is nothing but the live feed from my camera. Here is the manufacture link for the Suntuf panels. It contains the different colors, how much light they transmit and a couple of good videos comparing them. https://www.palramamericas.com/Products/corrugated-sheets/SUNTUF/ If you do decide to go with Suntuf, you will need their closure strips and what they call their 'horizontal'. Those are not sold at Home Depot which is completely stupid. I had to order them and wait, fortunately our contractor had other stuff he did in the meantime. https://www.palramamericas.com/Products/corrugated-accessories/CorrugatedAccessories/

Take a look at Suntuf panels. That's what we used. 15 year damage warranty. They sell it at Home Depot too.

This puts a rest to my suspicions that there is a Grey conspiracy out there to get their hoomans to build luxury aviaries. You'll love being able to shove them in and out from the house. That's the one thing I didn't like about my first outdoor aviary - it's too hard to get in and out of. Once I put them in I was reluctant to pull them out. Silkies make really good cleanup crew if you need something to pickup the food that gets tossed. What kind of roof are you putting on it? Wire? If I didn't know any better, I'd guess you were from Australia. Your yard looks really similar to the yard where my wife grew up in Toowoomba. Those almost look like native australian gum trees.

That's Huey.

If you ask around, the most common answer you will get is Avianbiotech. However they were busted a few years ago providing false results so I have avoided them. I have successfully used vetdna and my birds have all seemed to match the results - meaning my males ended up looking and acting like males and vice versa https://vetdnacenter.com/dna-tests/avian-dna-testing/

Welcome back!!!! Now for some pics! Way back when I had three birds and that was it for us. Now at 6 birds I say, what the hell, they've taken over!

I almost made it....zzzzZZZZzzzzZZZZZzzzzzzz!!!!

Saw something on FB about it. Might have to investigate further!

Me and the brats finished net #1. Only 5 more to go haahaahaa!!!

One must know one's place if he was born a peasant.

If I was looking Id be all over that Bingo. We've used the petfinder successfully 3-4 times. There are probably rescues nearby?

I'm actually not a front-end developer. I have a like/hate for front end work. I like it in that you can actually see something cool (or hideous in some cases) when you're done. But on the flip side it's what everyone bitches about because they can see it. We just finished a three month long project developing an Angular/Node.js front end to our call processing server which is by far the most critical piece. The front-end was a very small part of the project. Yet we're a typical company where a few of us do the work while the rest justify their positions and you can guess what they chose to complain about! It would be impossible for them to find something wrong with the throughput of the call processing or scalability issues or something useful because they have zero skills but that's how it works. It sucks too because those of us in the development group are not allowed to work from home whereas test/documentation/implementation/etc are. The owners know who makes the grass grow. However back in 2006 when the economy went to crap and they needed to cut the fat...guess which groups were let go - not one developer ate it. All that to say I'm actually sort of a backend dev: some middleware, some database, c++ tools & utilities etc. I get dragged into front-end work usually kicking and screaming.

That's pretty funny. Before I read that part, I was waiting to see if you were going to say the Grey started the vehicle. I'll have to think on this one. I've seen some pretty hilarious videos of Greys that are learning to operate those Amazon echo's. I think the funniest one was someone posted a video of them going through the grocery list and it was quite obvious who was adding items to the grocery list.

Thanks Howardine (I hope I remembered that right!). Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your Precious too! We are currently in the build process of the first of several cotton climbing nets to adorn the facilities. Now that my back porch is part of the aviary, I have help - lots and lots of help As with anything I do, the design takes agonizingly long compared to the actual build. In case anyone wants to know, a climbing rope box knot sucks up 5 inches out of every 12 on 1/2" rope Net looks kind of small in the pic but when done it should be 5'x5' with some overage on the ends. You know how danged expensive good climbing ropes are online and they're so small! Foster's & Smith current price on a 30"x30" is $45. I'd need three of those to cover the area of this one net I'm building. Plus their holes are too small for Greys.

Here you go @Ray P: two quick and dirtys. I'm in the middle of making some cotton climbing nets so don't have time to edit or anything... * Sorry about the size of the video. I haven't figured out what tags this new forum supports yet so I'm stuck with direct embed of the link and it does whatever the heck it wants with it. *

Tell Alfie he can come have a visit anytime!

Construction is finished and the paint is dry!!! Looks better with all the tools and stuff gone! We're not sure about the paint color though. I'm thinking of two-toning the wall the darker grey in a strip near the bottom. I still need to wire some lights and cameras into the soffits. We're totally in love with it. The birds - well Rio hates it. GreycieMae and Toby are exploring. Rio thinks his place is in the kitchen and it drives him bonkers that he can hear momma in the kitchen and he's not in the middle of it. Now I need to outfit it with safety screens and hang some toys/perches/ropes plant some safe plants, grow some rye grass... The double sliding glass door and walling in the existing porch was the smartest thing we did. Those weren't originally in the plans. We love it. GreycieMae's sunroom/aviary is now open for business!