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Longtime employee Gary Foster shows off Kiko, a scarlet macaw, at Adventures in Birds in Spring Branch
Photo: Elliott Lapin / Staff PhotoLongtime employee Gary Foster shows off Kiko, a scarlet macaw, at Adventures in Birds in Spring Branch
Longtime employee Gary Foster shows off Kiko, a scarlet macaw, at Adventures in Birds in Spring Branch
Longtime employee Gary Foster shows off Kiko, a scarlet macaw, at Adventures in Birds in Spring Branch
Gary Foster expected business to slow down substantially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, he has experienced quite the opposite, even with the reduced business hours.
The longtime Adventures in Birds employee attributes the increase in business to people spending more time with their pet birds at home and people having more free time and choosing to get a new pet and some of them choosing to get a bird.
The Spring Branch bird store, located on the northeast corner of the intersection of Westview Drive and Woodvine Drive, sells birds, cages, food, toys, and other bird-care items. It now also sells masks with colorful birds on them.
Adventures in Birds, which has been around since 1980, gave root to the Spring Branch Animal and Bird Sanctuary in 2010 to care for and rehome unwanted birds.
“With the 2008-2009 economic recession, nobody was buying birds, so we couldn’t buy birds, but people would come to us and say, ‘okay, take my bird,’ explained Foster. “Then we were going broke feeding other people’s birds, so we started a non-profit so we have a separate entity that can do fundraising that a retail business wouldn’t necessarily be able to do.”
Foster said that most birds would come to the sanctuary as a result of people moving or people dying and family members not wanting the birds.
He said if the sanctuary was not there, people might surrender the birds to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or the Human Society and that others might simply release the birds thinking they could take care of themselves.
“They’re flock creatures, and they don’t have a flock,” he explained why domesticated birds cannot survive if released. “They’re not from around here, so they don’t know all the predators. They don’t know how to do like a grackle or like a mockingbird or a cardinal. The other birds would shun them and chase them away so, unless they’ve got a flock of their own, they don’t fit in well. They’ll look for somebody who looks familiar and go to a stranger and say, ‘where is my food?’ They’ll show up unannounced, expecting to get cared for like they did before.”
The amount of birds that the sanctuary — which also receives and helps care for and try to rehome an occasional dog or cat — has not seen a significant change in the number of birds that it has received during the pandemic.
The funding that the sanctuary relies on has also not seen a significant change since the beginning of the pandemic. It has a couple regular supporters who have continued giving, and it also receives adoption fees for rehoming birds from the sanctuary.
Despite it having been in Spring Branch for 40 years, Foster still finds that Adventures in Birds is not well known in the community.
“We’ve quietly been here since 1980 doing pretty much the same thing, and, every day, I talk to people who have never heard of us,” he said.
Foster admitted that spending so much time around birds has caused some hearing loss but that just comes with the territory of having a pet bird. He joked that hearing aids have come a long way recently and that he is considering getting one after the pandemic goes away.
With the increased demand, Foster is concerned that people are making the decision to get a pet bird before really considering if doing so is a good fit for both the bird and the household.
His biggest source of consternation is that people almost always first ask about the cost of a bird before asking - which they rarely do - about whether buying a bird is a good decision for the bird and the household.
He said that a lot of people don’t realize that the larger birds can live 40-50 years.
“Where do you go to look for birds?” he asked hypothetically. “You go to a bird store, and here there are sanctuary birds along with birds for retail sale.”
To learn more about Adventures in Birds, visit http://www.adventuresinbirdsinc.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/AdventuresInBirds
To learn more about the Spring Branch Animal and Bird Sanctuary, visit http://www.sbabs.org/SBABS_Home.html or https://www.facebook.com/SBABSorg
elliott.lapin@hearst.com
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Spring Branch’s Adventures in Birds store gave root to a bird sanctuary - Chron
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