Rooftop Pool Party!

Well – kind of!

What a year 2020 has been! We hope everybirdie is hanging in there well. We can’t believe we’re officially in July. With summer creeping in, the temperature has started to get stuffy here at the birdhouse, and the birds are reacting sensitively to the dry heat. Since all three are waterbugs, I let them splash around in their Italian bowl today, which was placed on Chewie’s poquito cage roof.

SO, it IS a rooftop pool party, right? 🙂

The white bowl is actually Dante’s baby pool. I had bought it for him to learn to take bowl baths. When he first came Dante loved being sprayed and taken into the shower, but this whole bowl bath business never clicked with him. He always stood awkwardly when a bath opportunity was given. The social learning aspect of birds really amazes me. A lot of things we take for granted can be non-learned (is this even a term?) if the baby animal misses their chance to learn at the appropriate age — like how Dante never learned how to take a bowl bath or preen other birds. And every time I’m confronted with that in real life, I have to admit that I’m pretty blown away.

You can probably tell by the pictures that he eventually learned how to splash away in a bowl.

Anyway, aside of the random musing, the birds had fun. It was very entertaining to watch Baby’s thought process and how she figured out to get in the bowl and enjoy a bath. Baby’s problem-solving skills are really sophisticated! I’ll just list out her train of thought and end the post here.

Baby approached the bowl notices it is too deep for her to jump in (the bowl has an angle and is slippery with no grip)
Stage one: Dip forward, wet face (didn’t seem satisfied at all)
Stage two: Walk around, notice that the tail gets dipped (splashed around the tail, still not satisfied)
Stage three: See how far she can lean in while gripping the edge (water was shallow – again, only face got wet)
Final stage: Figured out that she can grab the edge with her beak and go in tail-first, dip her body in to take a full bath (seemed really giddy). This was her Eureka moment! 😀
Post-enlightenment: After going through the final stage a few times, Baby eventually understood that the water wasn’t too deep and she could jump in and out.

Pretty smart and logical, these little birbies. 🙂