Giving Rescue Birds a Second Chance – Avian Rescue

Giving Rescue Birds a Second Chance”

Attention Bird lovers, we all know how much our bird(s) means to us so it is hard to believe people would give them up. Matter of fact according to Jerry at Austin Avian Rescue and Rehab in Austin Texas, they have had record number of birds given up in the last twelve months. Some have literally been left at the door without even a name for the bird. Can you imagine the trauma that bird experienced? One day the bird is in his home and then all the sudden he is in this new environment where no one even knows their name. That is the way it has been at the Rescue this last year and it has been a struggle to keep their head above water. Besides the downturn in the economy effecting everyone, the rescue located in Central Texas been under a severe drought for the last 2+ years and the rescue’s well is dried up. They have to have water trucked in which adds to the cost to operate. Business has been down in general so people are not coming in much less buying anything or adopting the birds. With the downturn business has slowed down to a trickle but the number of birds given up has only increased.

How do we fit in, last spring Tod and I came by to visit with Linda and Jerry at the Rescue and talk to them about taking some picture of the birds, that’s when they told us how bad thing were. So we asked ourselves what we could do to help. Well we are photographers so we offered to photograph the birds at the Rescue so that we could do a calendar or something to raise funds to help them out and spread the word about their situation. We decided to publish a 2010 Parrot Calendar using the pictures we took at the Rescue. The calendars are selling for $14.99 plus shipping and sales tax for those in Texas and all proceeds less printing cost will go to the Rescue so they can continue operations and taking care of the birds.

You can purchase them online at http://beecreekphotography.com/order_calendar.htm.

We also have a gallery of all the pictures we took while at the Rescue that are available for purchase on line at http://pa.photoshelter.com/c/beecreekphotography/gallery/parrots/G0000_g7aOYYiloo/

The pictures in the calendar are birds that been rescued or now live at the Rescue. Some of parrots, due to behavior issues are very difficult to handle and may never be able to be re-homed and end up living the rest of their life at the Rescue. While we were working with the Rescue on this project we fell in love with one of the birds waiting to be rescued. We adopted the Severe Macaw in the calendar called Sassy. She was one of three birds that came from a home where their owner lost her job and then got another job where she had to travel. She could not afford to pay boarding while she traveled and had to give them up the Rescue. Sassy has turned out to be the sweetest bird and loves to sit with us and have her head scratched for as long as we will do it. She has joined our flock with two other birds we have, an Illiger Macaw ‘Bongo’ and a White Cap Pious ‘Sweetpea’. We had no plans to adopt another bird but we are glad we did. So to make a long story short we adopted her and are very grateful to the dedicated employees and volunteers of Austin Avian Rescue and Rehab who make it possible for the birds that have to be given up to be given a second chance.

Cynthia Hestand
Bee Creek Photography

Here is a slide show of the parrots that are in the 2010 Parrot Calendar.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 3:06 pm. It is filed under Parrot rescue, Uncategorized and tagged with calendars, parrot calendar 2010, parrots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.