EDITORIAL & ADVERTISINGLloyd MarshallTelephone .............................03 5983 2566Email..................lloyd@talkingbirds.com.auWebsite..............www.talkingbirds.com.auPO Box 216 Balnarring Victoria 3926

DEADLINES FOR ADVERTISINGBOOKINGS AND COPYJuly 2013 editionDisplay advertisements ................June 14Aviary marketplace .......................June 28SUBSCRIPTIONSSubscriptions to Talking Birds, which cost$87 a year in Australia, can be arranged byfilling out and mailing the subscription form,together with the appropriate payment. Theform can be found on page 20 of this edi-tion and at www.talking birds.com.au.

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Page 2 — Talking Birds — June 2013

Australasian news in brief 3Aviary Marketplace 17-18Budgies: Enjoyment the key 5Canaries: Perfectly formed 8Club listings 19Club news 15, 16, 20Fancy pigeons: Minis attractive 13Finches: Choosing aviary mates 7Finches: Gouldians + satellites 6

Finches: US smuggler jailed 6Forthcoming events 20Health: Cancer how and why 14Parrots: Hand-reared birds 10-11Parrots: Two amazons profiled 9Peacock feathers banned 4Pet birds: New arrival thoughts 12Pigeon sells for $400,000 13World news in brief 4

THIS MONTH IN YOUR MAGAZINE

COVER: HAND-RAISED ALEXANDRINE PARAKEETS TAKING FOOD FROM BOB PHILPOT.PHOTO:BOB PHILPOT. SEE: HAND REARING... — PAGES 10-11.

Australia’s avian newsmagazine PUBLISHED EVERY MONTH

By LLOYD MARSHALLAN electronic missing bird service bas-ed in the UK that is reuniting lost birdswith owners around the world has beendoing really well in Australia.

Last month the site had around 70 lostand found reports from Australia in-cluding Alexandrines, cockatiels, con-ures, cockatoos, corellas, eclectus, In-dian ringnecks, kakarikis, lorikeets,lovebirds, macaws, Quakers, galahs,Major Mitchell’s, budgies and rosellas.

Englishman Neil Rutherford is theman behind ParrotAlert — www.parrotalert.com — a free worldwide servicewhere information about missing birdsis instantly emailed to subscribers inthe area where the bird went missing.

He has been funding ParrotAlert outof his own pocket for the past few yearsand is now approaching the point wheredonations are covering costs.

The site is free to use and due to thehuge number of emails sent daily adedicated email server had to be leased.

“Shared hosting companies impose adaily limit of between 250 to 500, whichin my case is less than one Brisbane lostor found report,” Mr Rutherford said.

“ParrotAlert was built from theground up, it’s not built using any otherproduct out there, I do use the googledevelopers edition of google maps as ameans of visually obtaining and dis-playing the geographic positions of re-ports.”

Last month the site had 36,045 visi-tors worldwide, the highest on record.

“With still four days to go we’ve al-ready broken last month’s total,” MrRutherford said.

He said ParrotAlert was designed towork much like a satellite navigationdevice, with geographical positioningand targeting.

“It breaks with the mentality ofstate, county and town as internallyit’s all geo-point driven, for accuracy towithin metres,” he said.

“It works on the concept of the direc-tion the crow flies. The site targets

members by their distance from a re-ported position which will be ideal forwhen we bring our GPS-enabled phoneapp out.”

Mr Rutherford said ParrotAlert wasbuilt on the socialising lost and foundmodel.

“You give us a location of a bird lostor found, we’ll email alert all regis-tered members within a given radius,we auto cross post on facebook andtwitter, and bird forums around theworld pull our feed alerts into their lostand found sections,” he said.

“No matter how it’s shared via face-book etc, it all comes back to the onereport on our site.

“We send between 3000-10,000 emailalerts worldwide a day and 10 reportsfor the Brisbane area can generate over5000 email alerts.”

He said the site has had a lot of re-unites via people getting a found reportin their email inbox and identifyingthe bird as theirs.

“If you go to our facebook page wepublish the good reunites there, it’s notall of them,” Mr Rutherford said.

“Brisbane Bird Vets have used oursite since the launch, even when we hadlittle on there — in January this yearalone they reunited more birds handedin via ParrotAlert than they did duringthe whole of last year.

“We’ve noticed lots of vets and ani-mal hospitals using the service to list.Even the RSPCA in Queensland haslisted birds on ParrotAlert.

“We provide our service to Australia,UK, US, Canada, Ireland and few othercountries.

“Currently we’re only operating inthe English language, we do plan toextend this to other countries and lan-guages.

“Australia is really the busiest coun-try of the lot at the moment.

“As it’s warming up in the UK, Can-ada and the US we’re starting to seemore daily reports submitted — we getbetween 10 to 40 a day.”

THE 2013 Gouldian finch count inWA’s north-west early in Septemberthis year will be the last and leadingGouldian researcher Sarah Prykeexplains on page 6 of this editionwhy the annual census has becomeredundant and how the focus fromSeptember will be on utilisingtechnology to keep track of thebeautiful little birds.

That turn of events saddenedSarah because she enjoyed thecompany of many volunteer birdpeople from Australia and aroundthe world who participated in thecounts each year.

Wyndham in the Kimberley is notthe flashest place on earth andeveryone who has served as avolunteer Gouldian counter theredeserves a huge pat on the back.n NUMBERS DOWN, OPTIMISM UP: Thebird sale season for 2013 is well andtruly underway and it seems that thenumber of birds offered is down inmost places and that demand is low,possibly due to financial constraintsbut that may all change at therelocated Castle Hill bird sale, wherea new, larger venue, $20 a head dinnerthe night before with a great speaker— Bob Philpot from Perth — and ahigh level of enthusiasm from theorganising group seem likely tomake the event a roaring success andone that should definitely not bemissed, see advertisement on page 17and story on page 15 for moreinformation.

n $400,000 RACER: Bird people inAustralia are often heardcomplaining about prices asked forspecies they fancy but compared to arecent sale in Belgium, where aracing pigeon sold to a Chinese manfor $400,000, we really do not havemuch to whinge about.

The same auction where that birdchanged hands saw a high-profilebreeder’s stud of 530 birds bring aworld record price of $5.58 million.

Europe is in huge troublefinancially but obviously somepigeon people from China, whoaccounted for nine of the top 10 birdsat the auction, are unwittingly doingBelgium a favour. Wouldn’t it be niceif that sort of thing happened here?

That story is on page 13.n ENJOYMENT FOCUS: Budgie writerFred Wright provides food forthought in his piece this monthwhich focuses on the fact that weshould enjoy our birds, putting asideclub politics, winning competitionsand making money.

The main thing according to Fredis to remember what got us into birdsin the first place, the wonder ofseeing youngsters in a nest, thecolours and the enjoyment youexperienced way back when.

He makes some very good pointsand they could probably easily applyto any of us. Read his piece on page 5.

—Lloyd Marshall

COMMENT

Chooks get nappiesTHERE’S free range and then there’sfree rein — around your house.

When American Julie Baker’sbackyard fowls began spending moretime inside it was tough to keep themclean so she got innovative.

She made a cloth nappy, added a fewbuttons and strapped it onto her littlelady. One thing led to another and abusiness was born.

Pampered Poultry sells 50-100 nappiesa week to urban farmers around theUnited States and the online store alsosells saddles.

Wait a minute. Saddles? Who’s riding

chickens? “The roosters,” Baker said.“They’re busy boys. Saddles are almostmore useful than the diaper, quitefrankly. A rooster isn’t particularly kind toa hen when they mate. He grabs her by theback and pulls her feathers out.”

So she started selling saddles toprotect the hens’ tail feathers and she’snot the only one.

Husband and wife team Derek Sasakiand Traci Torres turned their fowlaccessories business into a multi-milliondollar venture called MyPetChicken.comwhere nappies are some of the offerings.

ODD SPOT

Lost bird servicebooming in Aust.

Victoria non-natives moveTHE Victorian Department of Envi-ronment and Primary Industries islooking into the management of non-native birds in Victoria.

A briefing for interested parties held inMelbourne on May 30 this year was at-tended by David Renshaw, vice presidentof the Victorian Avicultural Council, whosaid it was very refreshing to find thatrepresentatives from the DEPI were gen-

uinely interested in obtaining feedbackfrom aviculturists as well as from otherinterested parties.

“It is important that aviculturiststake the time to review the proposed in-formation from the DEPI and forwardtheir comments to me by email — renwood2@bigpond.net.au — by June 16 sofeedback can be collated and sent to theDEPI by June 28,” David said.