Congratulations to the winners of our second Family Pet Contest! We put out a call for family pet photos and stories early in 2021, and are delighted to see such a lively mix of canines, felines, lizards and birds out there among our loyal readers!
THEIR PET PROJECTS Wings of love Mother and son raise two caiques while fostering other birds in need
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Maria Josephine Idris points out that pet birds can be a great idea for children. “I love having them around because it teaches respect, boundaries, empathy and compassion,” she says. Her son, Dimitri, who just turned 3 in January, knows how to be gentle with the birds and is used to the noise that parrots can make. His mother was raised with birds as a child and now the Everett resident is active in rescue, helping foster parrots through her connections with two rescue organizations in Oregon. Dimitri is photographed here with his pets Trombold and Lada, who are caiques, members of a small, highly vocal parrot species found in nature in South America’s Amazon Basin. These caiques, about a year and a half old, were hand-fed as babies, raised by Idris with very early exposure to Dimitri. “They can fly, but they don’t want to fly because they’d rather be with us,” she says.
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PHOTOS BY JOS HUA HUSTON
Ma rc h /Ap r i l 2 0 2 1
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