we bought this amazing indoor garden hose and now i use it for all The Peas baths. they love the spray and they can bathe to their hearts content because i don't get tired using a hand spray bottle or something. all i have to do is hold the sprayer up and it just goes and goes. someone suggested taking pictures of the boys bathing, so i did. i admit i went a little overboard. but where else will you find so many good pictures of bathing pionus? ;]

as you may notice, cricket (BW) gets much more enthused about his baths than ernie (Dusky) does. i have faith that ernie will learn to love his bath. to you, gentle reader, who worries because your bird does not like to bathe, please hear this: when we adopted cricket he was 1 year old. he hated to bathe. he ran from the water bottle. i started with putting him on the perch and just spritzing him a few sprays. then more. eventually at least he would sit still for the bath, but didn't actually enjoy it. it has taken two full years of patience and coaxing and encouragement to teach cricket this Learned Behavior. because bathing IS a learned behavior (read articles about blind birds and you'll see). only recently has he really started to enjoy his baths. it can happen, with patience and love =] .

each of these photos actually is a link to a larger version, if you want to see them

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