It’s been a long week.

Things have been a little stressful on the cockatiel front. The budgies are happy babies, but Adira’s feathers are just getting worse and worse. Considering we really don’t know her history, there are a lot of scary things that could be happening.

Grandpa peeked at her a couple days ago to make sure that there weren’t any emergencies we had to deal with right then, considering the first appointment we could get with her vet was on Friday. But he said she was looking good. Her feathers, while broken, were not showing the deformities associated with Beak and Feather, thank god.

Rijke, her vet, agreed today and instead said that these were the effects of a very poor diet as a baby, so her little feathers are weak and brittle. We already knew her breeder wasn’t an ethical one, so that really did not come as a surprise.

We’ve been working on getting her off the Trill bullshit, but as long as we keep doing what we’re doing, her new feathers should be fine.

It also means she’s lost the feathers cockatiels use for stability, so she is especially prone to falls and injuries. That’s fine. Her big cage is waiting for when she is ready for it, but. Until then, we’ve got her in a hospital cage with a lot of out of cage time so she still gets plenty of (safe) exercise.

Which was an issue yesterday.

While I was talking to Kosh, she had been climbing on the inside of her cage. Little girl managed to stick her wing through the bars and fall on her back, twisting the poor wing terribly. So Kosh is flying around the room at Adira’s distress, I rush back to her cage and it’s like. I’ve got to actually move her wing to get her out. She did not approve and let me know with a bite. It’s the first bite I’ve gotten from her and it was pretty deep, but. Man. I knew she would because she was in pain and there I had to go and make it worse in order to help her.

Her wing is recovering now, thankfully! No serious damage done, though she is — understandably — skittish of my hand.

I made sure that she’s okay and just cuddle her to me, while Kosh was still flying around the room. I admit I was maybe crying a bit >.> because, you know, seeing a baby hurt is just a killer. And so Kosh, being the wonderful, empathetic little boy he is, flew over to me and landed on my other hand. (Which I was keeping away from Adira because I didn’t want to scare her.)

He starts kissing the back of my hand and going ‘It’s safe! It’s safe!’ And, dear god, just even thinking about this is going to make me cry again. But yeah. Suffice to say, he’s just the biggest sweetheart.

In short, I have the best babies ever.