Finches!

To say that I am an animal lover would be an understatement. I’ve had dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, chicks, ponies, fish and now birds. I started eying the Zebra Finches at PetSmart about a year ago. I love song birds and the busy little finches were really fun to watch. I didn’t want a parrot or a parakeet or a cockatiel. I wanted to little finches, so I started reading about them and talk to RJ about them, and yesterday we brought two male Zebra Finches home:

Welcome Calliope & Humphrey to our home.

As is the case with most pets, birds need certain amenities to make them happy:

Our cart at PetSmart.

Finches like to build nests, so we needed hay and little nesting houses for them. We also had to buy finch food and a cuttle bone. The cuttle bone is literally a bone that the birds can peck on throughout the day. It provides them with calcium. They like to have several different perches at different levels in the cage and they like to bathe, so we bought them a little bathtub. After their cage was properly outfitted it looked like this:

Lucky birds.

While at PetSmart, the young lady helping us made the remark that our finches were “lucky birds.” If you know anything about our dog or cat, you know that we’re professional pet spoilers, so I don’t know why the finches would be any different. We were careful to buy all the necessary accessories, we read up on Zebra Finches online and we chose a perfect spot for the cage. However, we failed to get one key piece of information. How do you get the birds from this box:

Like a mini cat carrier.

Into the cage. We figured we could slowly open the side of the box and hopefully the little finches would fly right into the cage. Well, finch #1 definitely flew out of the box but he thought our kitchen looked much nicer than the cage. After a minute of carefully following the finch around our kitchen, we were able to catch him and coax him into his new home. Learning from our mistakes, we just reached into the cage and scooped up finch #2.

Safely in their new home.

I love to watch them and listen to their little chirps. They seem to be settling in nicely and I’m sure there will be more finch stories to come.