A bumpdate on a very old thread:
We got a buddy for Morty not long after the thread was last active - Rick, of course (no handy photos, sorry!).
Neither bird has really tamed well. Back when I was working in the family room, I had made a point of putting millet near me, and Morty actually got to the point of approaching me - got onto my rolling computer table a few times, even jumped onto my sweater once! Though his claws caught, slightly, when he tried to move, so I think that dissuaded him. I started working in a different room when COVID shut things down, due to needing to self-quarantine after some travel, then kept that up, so Morty was no longer so approachable. And Rick never did warm to us. We can get them to step onto our hands, with some millet and patience, but they bolt the minute we move. That's our fault, for not being able to spend as much time wooing them. Morty is a brat - he bullies Rick somewhat: yelling at him, chasing him away from the birdie crack, etc., but they are pretty inseparable anyway.
Their lack of approachability has been a real problem only once, so far: we had a smoke alarm scare back in June of this year, and could not get them into a cage to get them out of the house. Turned out to be a nonproblem: the smoke was due to a wiring issue in the furnace blower - so, aside from having no air conditioning for most of a week, all was well (and since the blower wasn't working, the haze got nowhere near the birds). About 2 or 3 times a year, Morty will go walkabout (flyabout?) and wind up perched on a window in the front of the house - nowhere near "their" room - and will stay there for a day or more until we manage to chase him back into the kitchen / family room. I think he gets somewhere he doesn't recognize, and can't figure out how to get home, and panics. Rick is less venturesome.
Earlier THIS year, someone posted on a neighborhood list that they had found a parakeet in the parking area of their condo, and would anyone like to foster it. We offered - named her Summer, of course (another character on the R&M cartoon). Because we knew nothing about her, we kept her in a separate cage until we could get her checked out by an avian vet - we're lucky enough to have an exotics practice not that far from us. They gave her a clean bill of health - and from photos also confirmed that our existing 2 birds are really Morticia and Erica! I still call them "he" out of habit.
Sadly, Summer passed away fairly shortly after that. No clue why; we had just started leaving her cage door open (when we were in the room) so she could join the flock, and she never did - then one evening I spotted her huddled in the corner of the cage. I touched her, she moved a bit, then an hour or so later, she had died. We kept trying to figure out if we'd done anything wrong with her, but decided it was just fate: she'd had the same food as the other two, and was in the same room (so, anything like aerosols, Teflon etc. would have killed them too).
Morty is about 4, and Rick is about 3, so we've got a few years left with them (we hope!). We likely won't get any more budgies, as enjoyable as they've been, because (and I'll start a separate thread on this) we sort of accidentally adopted an Indian Ringneck yesterday! I'll start a separate thread about that.
