Birds a.m. & Cats p.m.

When I arrived at Feathered Friends I met the parrot and domestic bird caregiver and began changing newspaper under the cages and sweeping floors. I met Cody, an African Grey, who has an extremely large vocabulary and can say about 100 phrases and Tarzan, a Macaw who kept showing off by attacking his rope toy and then looking at me. It wasn't a bad start to my day, being whistled at and showed off for. Then we took a break, the cargiver I met this morning, another volunteer, and myself. The other volunteer was elderly and was really nice but she kept telling us about her dogs (who she refered to by name so we weren't sure who she was exactly talking about), her stroke, and how she thinks a dog napping ring took her 5 dogs away via a lawyer. Very interesting story indeed. It kind of sounded fishy, like she wasn't able to take care of them and while she was in the hospital after her stroke the social worker told animal control to take the dogs because she was going to die. There was some silence after all of that and the caregiver turned to me and said, "So, is today your first day volunteering???" as if to change the subject because he didn't know what to say to all of it. After break was over I went around with the caregiver who takes care of the raptors and outside birds, like peacocks, ducks, etc. I met one of the ravens, Forever, who lost her mate, Nevermore, a month ago. She's so old she's bald but was still a very good mother to her last set of offspring. They also have 3 barn owls, 1 snow owl, 1 kestrel, a prairie falcon and a red tailed hawk to mention just a few. They were all so beautiful and since they can't go back out into the wild they are used for educational purposes. Then it was off to the cats. It was the most relaxing afternoon, just sitting and loving anyone who wanted to get attention. Some were feral, some were just shy. BJ had alot of problems. The poor guy has a crooked tail, is neurologic, his eyes are weird, and he has chronic resp. problems, but all he wanted to do was lay in my lap. Clancy didn't like to share the attention, Nathan was a sprayer so I had to keep an eye on him and where he was pointing his rearend, Little Black Friend was so incredibly sweet and followed me around when I moved seats (he also gave "love bites"), and Licorice couldn't get close enough (he ended up crawling on top of my shoulders and then began to "knead", which was sweet but those claws hurt). Celine, a feral, was a complete wreck. She came out of a box and her fur was all matted and a mess, like she didn't care to groom herself. She was fine, no med. problems, and it was kind of humorous to see her come out all a wreck and not caring what anyone seemed to think. There were around 40 cats, 20 to each side of the enclosure. I picked up my sleepover dog, Fanny, after that. She looks like a lab/sheperd mix and she's very sweet, with funny ears and sweet brown eyes. I'm going to go outside with her but I'll talk to you all soon! (Tomorrow is cats a.m. and dogs p.m.)