Introduction/Another gender post ^^;

kaminari · New Member Joined: Sep 16, 2009 Posts: 1

Hi all!
I'm a new member of these forums. I have visited this site many times in the past for guidance and information, before I finally decided to join.

I have alot of experience with pets from before, I've had all kind of species that you can imagine. I truly love all animals.
This year, however, I got the joy of having a kakariki for the first time.

Me and my boyfriend was visiting the local pet store to get the little nicks and nacks for our dog, and as always we gravitated towards the pet-section. Surely enough, we see this adorable little bird getting excited over our presence, doing all sorts of flips and acrobatics in the cage. The shop-owner saw our delight, and told us that his name was Kiwi, it was a little baby male born in march of this year, and that she had received him from a family that for some reason could not keep him. She said this was all she knew about it.
We were a bit hesitant due to the lack of information (later we also realized she charged us double the average price), but after consideration we got him home. I do have a weakness for animals with such a story and he was darling.

We just had a few issues with him biting, but it's all well and good seeing as he was just learning what these strange pink things are as well as testing his limits. We do have a suspicion that this was why the family gave him to the store, because it took a lot of patience and bleeding to get him to understand we weren't food.
Apparently he had also been taught that he gets attention when he screams, but he is coming off that now and has gone back to the natural cute, quiet chirping (most of the time). He is very tame and loving, and very, very curious. We decided to keep the name for him that the first family gave him, which is Kiwi (a quite common name we've found). He loves sitting on "daddy's" (my boyfriends) shoulder and playing away with his beard/hair.
He also likes to try and land at the dog, even though we won't allow him XD
He also lives up to the escape artist reputation of kakariki's. Just the other day we were changing his cage, and got very surprised when a green little bird casually flapped into the room and landed on my boyfriend's head, and looked at me like "Oh, hello!".

Aaanyway, sorry to write a long post. In essence, this is just my introduction-post, as well as yet another gender issue post. The thing is, the petstore-owner claims he is a male, but we are not so sure.
Seeing as she claimed she lacks a lot of information, I cannot see how she can be so sure, so I thought we'd double-check. She also seems to have sold him to us, knowing that he might be troublesome so get tame, because every time we drop by she asks us how he's doing and when I say he's lovely she looks as if she doesn't believe me XD

I'm attaching three photo's of our baby Kiwi. Two of them for potentional gender defining, one because he looks like a 'riki tie and it makes me smile :)
He's about 6 months old now, and he's a yellow-crowned 'riki (we think? It's so hard to be sure of anything what with hybrids and the lack of information we recieved). Been trying to compare and look at other examples and photo's of genders, but it's so hard to tell for me.

Looking forward to spending some time on these forum's, un-anonymously, and forgive my lengthy post :)

pabloc · Foundation Member Joined: Sep 26, 2007 Posts: 988

Hi Kaminari!

w3c

on board

What most people don't understand is that kakariki isn't the typical cuddly pet like a cockatiel. They are tame their way, under their terms signlol

I think it's an hybrid of red x yellow fronted, and gender, I'd say a male (big head and beak compared to the rest of the body).
It was a delight to read up your story, and very nice to have more members in the community.

Great job on socializing him, keep us posted about his progress!

Best regards / Pablo

Peterlimburg · Snr Member Joined: Sep 14, 2005 Posts: 132

I agre with Pabloc, it's a hybride male.