Celebrating Toby’s Fifth Gotcha Day

I can hardly believe it, but today we are celebrating Toby’s fifth Gotcha Day! For anyone unfamiliar with the phrase, a “Gotcha Day” stands in for a birthday as the day you brought your pet home. It’s especially useful when you don’t actually know the date your pet hatched. Since Toby came to us by way of Petsmart, all we know is that she was under three months old when we got her, because she still had baby bars on her head.

Toby was the first parakeet of the flock, and gracefully endured all of our first time parakeet parent mistakes. These included scaring her routinely with our hands, letting her stay up too late, and not understanding that the proper diet for a parakeet includes lots of fresh vegetables. Through all of it, she has held steady and not seemed to judge us too harshly!

Now that Toby is five we might have expected her to slow down a bit in what is, essentially, budgie middle age. Quite to the contrary, Toby is still easily the most energetic and active of the flock.

Toby is always first to check out a new jacket or sweatshirt to explore pockets, and is a classic budgie female in her territoriality. It doesn’t matter whether someone else saw it first, if she wants something then it is hers (no sharing either!).

She was not successful in exploring the contents of this bag of chips. In fact, Toby has never eaten a potato chip or any processed human foods. We agreed from the start that we humans didn’t really want to share our food with budgies and we’ve stuck to it.

Toby is also the most likely to pose for the camera.

At various times, Toby has lived alone, then with Kelly, then with Kevin, and now by herself again. Having gone through all of these iterations I can now say that Toby is a horrible roommate. This is largely due to how territorial she is. She doesn’t shy away from getting into a viscous battle when the mood strikes, which is at random without any provocation.

Even with her idiosyncrasies, we certainly wouldn’t change her one bit, or any piece of her story leading up to celebrating Toby’s fifth gotcha day. Parakeet parenthood has been a roller coaster of highs and lows, beyond anything I would have imagined five years ago, driving home from Petsmart, hearing her nails on the cardboard box and wondering what the heck we had gotten ourselves into.

So, cheers to Toby on her fifth gotcha day, I hope we have many many more together!

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