If anyone saw my video of Seymour, the sulfur crested cockatoo, just about an hour ago, you’d know that I finally made a trip to the parrot rescue today.

It’s been probably more than two weeks since I last helped out at the rescue, so I made a point to resolve my guilt and go this morning since I finally have a day of NOT making hamburgers for ungrateful customers. Oh yeah, I work at Wendy’s, by the way.

Weekdays at the rescue are much less… event-filled? than weekends. Most of the volunteers and adopters come around on Saturdays, so my weekday visits are long and dull (well, as dull as a rescue filled with dozens of parrots can get) but most appreciated.

Today, as usual, it was just the owner and me getting the work done. I helped get some extra cleaning done while she took care of the regular routine of food and water changes. I forgot to take a ‘before’ picture, BUT LOOK AT THAT SPOTLESS FLOOR OH MY GOD. THOSE MACAWS HAVE NO MANNERS BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PIECE OF ANYTHING ON THAT FLOOR. OH, DID I MENTION IT’S CARPET?

If there’s one thing I learned from working at Wendy’s, it’s how to sweep crumbs off of a carpet.

I continued the cleaning in the rescue for a good few hours, sweeping and changing the newspaper on the bottom trays of the cages. That would be my least favorite chore in the rescue… if I didn’t get to pick up all of the beautiful feathers in the process:

It seems like almost all of the birds are going through a good molt right now… I hit the jackpot. After probably about 10 months of volunteering, I FINALLY got a Moluccan cockatoo crest feather, and it is amazing - that skinny little orange feather in the middle of the picture. Not that exciting for anyone else, but whatevs.

Please excuse the 3 megapixel quality and the backlight, but I wanted to show you guys one of the silliest birds at the rescue.

This is Seymour, a sulphur crested cockatoo that came to us under less-than-common circumstances. He was actually a show bird at Busch Gardens in Virginia! I don’t remember his whole backstory of how he ended up at our rescue, though (he’s been there since before I started volunteering).

So now he spends his days performing at his own will instead of responding to a trainer’s cue (which we are still trying to decode, with very little success…)

Here, you can hear him very clearly say “Hi, Seymour” and “WHOOO” when he starts shaking his head (:

Here’s a video of my family’s pet Meyer’s parrot, Reno, bathing. He is saying “take a shower” and “shake!”