Nostalgia - Max the African Grey

I talked about him a little before, but Max was my first African Grey. I was just going through my "drafts" folder in my Outlook box, and discovered a whole bunch of emails regarding him, including pictures. When we had Max, we didn't have a camera, and so we have very few pictures of him. Here's the nice email:

"Hello Elly:
I'd love to talk to you about the possibility of Max coming to live with you and your husband.
Max's background: he was sold as a baby and I took him back at 8 months of, he was doing a small amount of feather biting on his chest, only a few feathers were involved at that time. He stopped as soon as he came home so I thought at the time he may have bruised his chest (the people that had him had over clipped him and he was landing like a melon whenever he jumped off his cage.) In any case everything went along fine until about 2 years ago when one afternoon while he was playing in the flight cage out back with the other greys he decided to start pulling all of his body feathers out. I brought him in to Dr. Kaye sometime after that and she did quite a few tests on him including skin biopsy's in an effort to discover what was going on, all of the tests were negative. His test results should still be on file there at WSU. A few months after the testing was completed Max stopped pulling his feathers out and re-feathered completely until this spring. In mid March he started ripping his feathers out again, again for no reason I can figure out. I didn't bother to bring him in to Dr. Finch this time but maybe I should have.
In any case before we both get our hopes up about you adopting Max I think you should see how he looks today, here's some pictures I just took of him. As you can see his feathers are still attempting to grow back in, so if he could be stopped he would still re-feather. But he is still a very sorry looking bird. Even though he looks so bad he still talks and plays with his toys. If after seeing him you are still interested you may give me a call. I do have an appointment I have to keep and will most likely be gone from about 11:30 am to 2:00 pm. I will be home the rest of the afternoon and evening.

Even though he looks so bad he is still a very nice bird."

I loved my naked little bird, and still miss him.

....................................................................................................................

In other news, I went out for a quick ride yesterday in the beautiful 50 degree sunshine. Jasper was HOT and we decided to work out in the field with our other horsey buddies and their riders. Jasper and I worked at the far end of the field while everyone else walked around, and I decided after 10 minutes or so we could catch up with our friends. We started to trot over, and then Jasper decided to canter, and then he threw in a few bucks for good measure. Luckily, I saw it coming and had his head up, so they were pretty minor. We decided to go back and work in the arena after that. :)