March 1st – 79 degrees

You have to love a place where it’s 79 degrees on March 1st.

I spent quite a while outside soaking up some vitamin D, watching the birds that inhabit our back yard flitting about (if you look very hard, you can see a few birds in the rose bushes below) and enjoying our whirlygig sprinkler as it sparkled and danced in the sun.

Kono got to go out, too, for some warm, fresh air and conversations with his friends.

We’ve got a few more days like this one ahead and we’ll be out there enjoying them all.

kono

Did you ever watch the old Hawaii Five-0 series? We’ve been watching it quite a bit lately, enjoying the scenery as well as the great characters on the show, one of which is Kono, a 5-0 officer.

One night Mike noted that Kono would be a good name for a cat, but we don’t intend to ever get another cat, so the point was moot. But I did agree that Kono would have been a good name; too bad we didn’t think of it when we were rescuing cats.

Well… we have a Kono in our house now, but he’s definitely not a cat. Meet Kono:

For the past few weeks this little white parakeet has been hanging around our yard with the jays, sparrows, doves and assorted other birds, and it was very cool seeing him out there. Today he got stuck in one of our bird feeders. We figure he must have been trying to reach up inside to get some seeds and couldn’t get out. When I first saw him I thought he was eating, then it looked like he was cleaning his feathers. When I moved closer I saw that he was stuck.

Mike came out and took the feeder apart to free him, but when he tried to fly away he couldn’t; most likely his wing was bruised or slightly injured while he was trying to escape from the bird feeder (he was fine within a short time). It only took a few minutes to catch him. Mike thought he belonged to one of our neighbors who have parakeets, but they said no, he wasn’t theirs. So we put him in a cat carrier to keep him safe and secure… and headed off to the store to get a nice home for him and some assorted bird supplies.

Mike felt Kono would feel better being outside for a while, so outside he went.

That’s a monster of a home for a very small bird!

Here’s Kono in his new home:

He was outside most of the day, eating, drinking and resting after his morning ordeal. Right now he’s safely tucked away in the (cat free) back room where he can watch TV with me and I can talk to him while doing my chores back there, like folding clothes, going through old photos or napping (ok, the last two aren’t chores).

 

Thirty years ago we had parakeets, finches, cockatiels and peach faced love birds, but those have all been gone for many, many years. It’s nice to have a bird in the house again.