His backyard is for the birds
Staff writer
Bella Quiring and Grace Lynn noticed them in preschool.
Now second graders, they still stop on their walk home to watch the birds in David Loewen’s backyard aviary at A and Wilson Sts. in Hillsboro.
Bella and Grace aren’t alone. Hundreds of Hillsboro schoolchildren and parents pass by the homemade aviary each year and see the colorful flock as the birds that dart between perches.
“I thought they were lovebirds,” Bella said with a giggle. “Because they had different colors.”
She wasn’t exactly right.
They’re parakeets — close to 100 of them.
“It’s cool to watch them because they like looking at the different colors,” said Sandy Arnold, Hillsboro Elementary media center specialist and high school volleyball coach. “They’re bright, and plus, when they talk, the kids like to look at them and talk back.”
For Bella, getting a closer look was better than a sidewalk view.
“I one time got to go in the cage,” she said. “They were all fluttering around my head. They don’t squawk that loud.”
They may be friendly, but Loewen has a word of caution for anyone tempted to get too close, too fast.
They don’t peck. They bite.
“One or two times, I’ve had blood going,” Loewen said. “They’ve got strong beaks.”
For the most part, Loewen’s flock is friendly. Parakeets are social birds, and after spending years watching, training, and breeding them, Loewen has come to know their quirks and personalities.
He has been fascinated by parakeets for nearly 60 years.
Now 70, he got his first parakeet when he was 10. A great-aunt asking him to look after one of her birds while she vacationed in Germany.
She was gone for about a month, but in that time, Loewen and the bird formed a bond.
When his great-aunt returned, she told him he could keep it.
The bird may have been temporary, but Loewen’s fascination became permanent.
“Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated with them,” he said.
It took until college for that curiosity to turn into a breeding hobby.
Loewen started with a female bird, teaching it a few tricks and becoming intrigued about what might happen if he added a male. That year, the hen laid three eggs, and two hatched.
A month later, when the chicks were fully fledged, Loewen got a surprise in the form of Mendelian inheritance.
One bird was completely white. The other was completely yellow.
The parent birds looked more like the ones in his backyard today — with blue and white, green and yellow, and combinations somewhere in between.
“The two albino types got me fascinated with breeding,” he said.
From there, Loewen began acquiring more female birds and learning more about breeding them. Eventually, he joined the American Budgerigar Society, a group for bird enthusiasts.
Then, in 1989, came birds that would form the foundation of his current flock.
Loewen entered a random drawing held by Bob Wilson, an avid society member and contest judge who died in May. Loewen thought he had won a single bird.
He misunderstood the drawing. There instead were eight birds waiting for him to take home.
They became the starting point for a flock that now approaches 100. Loewen has added a few birds over the years, but most can be traced to that original group.
Today, dozens of birds fly, perch and chatter inside Loewen’s homemade aviary, an enclosure roughly 10 feet in diameter and fashioned from an old metal storage shed his church no longer needed. He modified it to keep mice and other rodents out.
Loewen has brought the birds to the elementary school for demonstrations and has welcomed students and other visitors into his backyard for a closer look.
Elementary principal Nathan Hiebert enjoys having Loewen and his birds near the school.
“They’ll all take a second look,” Loewen said. “A lot of times, when parents come to pick up their kids, I stop by and talk about them and share about them.”
The birds have plenty to show off themselves.
One day, Loewen heard what he thought was an unusually loud cicada singing in his backyard.
The sound was so convincing he went looking for the insect. Instead, he found one of the birds.
“It was one of the birds mimicking the cicadas,” he said.
Cicadas’ drumming isn’t the only sound the birds imitate. Loewen’s parakeets pick up a variety of sounds around them, and some can be trained to have a conversation if they’re handled and taught while still young.
“They do chatter a lot when they’re outside,” he said. “Well, when they’re inside, too. They’re very social birds with one another.”
Grace now wants one as a pet.
“They look friendly,” she said.
When winter arrives, Loewen moves the flock into a heated shed, where the birds have room to stay warm, nest and breed, protected from rodents. Even before then, the cold doesn’t seem to bother them much for being tropical birds.
“Unless we start getting a hard frost, they’ll be out there through most of October,” Loewen said.
When it comes time to feed them, you won’t find their food in a pet store.
Loewen mixes canary grass seeds, oats, and white millet he purchases from as far away as Iowa.
His reasoning is simple.
“I don’t buy food from the pet store. That’s expensive,” he said.
When children walk to and from school, the birds are a burst of color and movement in a Hillsboro backyard — something to stop and watch for a few minutes before heading home or to class.
And after all these years, Loewen still isn’t ready to give them up.
“They’re fun,” he said. “I’ve had them for a long time, and I think I’d miss them if I didn’t have them anymore.”