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The Caique Manual
25. If your bird is lost or stolen. One
of the hazards of keeping valuable birds is they can escape or be stolen. If
your bird is stolen, the first thing you should do is report the theft to the
police. The next thing to do is to post your loss on one of the websites that
list lost and stolen birds. Two of these sites are given in the front of this
Manual. You may also wish to place an ad in your local newspaper offering a
award for its return. The
best way to deal with theft is to guard against it--be security conscience. Some
people invest in a home security system to protect not only their birds but also
themselves. This can be expensive and often people become lax and do not use
them to full advantage. Alternatively, you can buy a television surveillance
system that records all the happenings in your bird room, which has an added
convenience of allowing you to snoop on your bird's behavior when you are not in
the room. Whether
your bird is lost or stolen, you need to be able to prove ownership. This may
not be easy since individual caiques look very similar to others of the same
species. One of the best ways to have a microchip inserted. A microchip contains
encoded information that can be read electronically with instruments available
in most veterinarian offices. These have the advantage in that they cannot be as
easily removed like bands. If your bird dies gave a band, write down all the
numbers and other information on it. Take photographs of your birds. Individual
caiques tend to have a few unique visual characteristics. Among the black-headed
caiques, the feather pattern bordering black portion of the head are usually
distinctive. Some birds have more yellow on the tips of their tail feathers.
Unfortunately, because the birds molt, these characteristics can change, so you
should take new photos every year. Check your bird for a tattoo. If a
veterinarian determined the sex of your bird, he will tattoo the upper bend of
the right wing if it is a male and the left wing if it is a female. Some of my
birds have tattoos on both wings because a second veterinarian discovered that
the first veterinarian did a poor job of surgical sexing. Write down the
physical and behavioral characteristics you think might allow you to distinguish
your bird from other caiques. For example, does your bird have a slight
deformity? Does it barber the feathers on only one area of its wing? What
commands does it respond to? You may also have your bird's The most definitive
way of proving it is your birds is to have its DNA archived by one of the same
companies that offer DNA sexing. A comparison of the DNA from the recovered bird
can then be made with the archived DNA to show they are the same bird. Even if
you do not have the bird's DNA archived, advances in DNA techniques now allow
you to prove ownership in another way if you can secure DNA from your bird's
parents. This is because half the bird's DNA comes from each parent. To my
knowledge, this last technique has only been used once and that was to prove
that an importer had illegally imported birds that he claimed he had bred.
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