Spring = Sprung
AAARGH SPRING. "Ah, spring, the time of year when a young parrot's fancy turns to PURE CRAZY." It's not their fault, of course. Their reproductive organs swell and start taking up valuable brain space, which is why Firefly is masturbating in his food dish again, and Kalu can't have anything warm and mushy to eat lest she become Overwhelmed By The Sexiness Of It All and attempt to molest my elbow or something (Kalu's strategy: if I attempt to feed all of Kyn's body parts, eventually I will get the right one). And Ninja . . . oh, Ninja.

This morning, well before his usual wake up time, I heard him making noise under the cage cover. This isn't, by itself, unusual, since he'll occasionally wake up around midmorning, get a drink of water or move to a different perch, and go back to sleep for a couple of hours. This, however, sounded like panting, almost like his patented Pionus wheeze that he uses when he's scared. Worried that there was something terribly frightening in there with him, I lifted the cage cover, just a little, to check on him, and there he was, hunkered on the cage grate. This is a Very Worrying sign for parrot owners, so I uncovered him to see what was wrong. He immediately started climbing up to the top of the cage to greet me, apparently fine and dandy . . . except that as he moved to begin climbing, something fell out from underneath him, slipped between the grate bars, and went *crack-splat* onto the liner.

An egg. A little pionus egg. Yep, Ninja is, after all, definitively and conclusively A GIRL. Proof that even a DNA sex test is wrong about a tenth of a percent of the time, but still, I'm floored. Wait 'til Dr. Ru hears about this. Although I probably should have known all along, come to think of it:



I'm going to rearrange his -- sorry, HER -- cage, and buy her some My Little Ponies. Happy New Year, everyone. :D