Silver Sage Aviaries

10/07/2025

10/02/2024

09/14/2024

08/17/2024

Both better dancers than I am, that’s for sure!

06/03/2023

This picture really sums up their personalities at this point. The male turquoise and female violet are eager to explore and up for anything! The little turquoise female is still pretty sure the world is a big scary place and she needs to hide from anything bright or loud.

05/31/2023

Life update 2023!

Two years ago our already chaotic life basically got put in a blender when our youngest daughter was born 9 weeks early right as we were packing up to move from Georgia to Washington.

I was already taking a step back to focus on the health issues of one of our other children as well as my own. My extended hospitalization trying not to give birth early, followed by weeks and weeks of NICU time under COVID restrictions majorly complicated the weaning and socializing of our 2021 chicks. The families they went home to are truly amazing people who had patience with us in the storm. A lot of selfless, caring people helped me and my family during what was the hardest thing I have ever gone through, and I wish I had been more able to repay their kindness in the way they deserved.

In the aftermath of that season, as we moved across the country with a 3 year old, 1 year old, and extremely fragile newborn, as well as our zoo, I decided to take a further step away from raising birds to focus healing and nurturing my human kiddos.

My breeding flock mostly went to a few amazing people in Georgia and Alabama, but a few select individuals have been with my mother in the Midwest who has been spoiling them and sweet talking them. In fact, they even had babies for her this year that I am hand raising. It feels great to be working with baby parrots again!

What’s next?

At this moment I have a few babies weaning, and I’ll be sharing pictures of them soon. Next, we are packing up and moving again! This time to the Washington DC area. My breeding flock is moving back in with us, but we will be working with a very limited number of pairs.

Here’s a picture of Audie, for those of you who were around back then been wondering how she is doing! She just celebrated her 2nd birthday, and while she has continued to face a few challenges, she’s a joyful person and an absolute peach.

03/26/2021

Breakfast! Carrots, Okra, radishes, guava, kiwi, and blackberries topped with 5 kinds of pellets! Usually we try to get at least one kind of sprout in daily but my sprout setup and my husband had a negative encounter last night...

03/25/2021

Do you ever wonder why most breeder clip the wings of baby birds even though science shows us it’s important to let them become expert fliers before their first trim?

Allow Indy to demonstrate for you! Fledging parrots LOVE TO FLY! And they will absolutely get into the most annoying places possible at the most inconvenient moments possible. They will smear food and p**p on the walls and they will love every minute of it!

People who raise more than a few birds at a time simply don’t have the capability to reasonably corral a large number of fledging babies flying everywhere during feedings or playtime, so their solution is clipping. Our solution at SSA is to raise fewer babies at a time and deal with the chaos as they learn to navigate life in the air.

When a bab bird learns to fly, they are learning how to interact with the world, not just their own bodies. They are learning that they can easily escape danger so they don’t need to live in fear. They are learning that their wings can protect them, so there is no need to bite, etc. And of course they are also learning how to work those incredible wings to avoid obstacles! This is important for their physical safety. One crucial skill they are learning is to FLY DOWNWARD which is a life saving skill if, heaven forbid, they ever escape and get stuck in a tree. Every year stray parrots die needlessly because they never learned how to FLY DOWNWARD so when the unthinkable happens and they end up in a tree, they can’t come down even if they want to 😢

So that’s a snapshot of what’s going on in the nursery this week and a little bit of why this is so important to us!

03/20/2021

Bingo is the first to get to go exploring! He and I are running errands safely using the Aviator Harness! He’s meeting all sorts of interesting people and learning to step up for strangers in strange settings :)

03/08/2021

Does your bird have a favorite food?