Cause He's Got...

...personality. If you have never owned a bird, you might not realize that they actually have personalities. Each individual will act differently, much the same way that we have individual foibles and peccadilloes. 

We soon learned that as we made up a name for him, he created "sounds" that were his names for us. When we would come home from work or come out of the house in the morning, we would call "Brandon" so that he would know it was us. We started this due to the fact that when we would exit the back door near his cage, he would get startled and zip around the cage for a few seconds. If we called his name before we opened the door, there would be no physical reaction from him, but he would make whatever the sound was that he created for us. In fact, if we both would call to him, he would respond in the order that we called!

Feeding Time

Whenever he didn't finish what we gave him at the meal previous, we would place it on the ground for any other crow to come down to eat. Brandon would realize that we were giving him food and make a sound that would attract more crows to the yard. It didn't take us long -- about the time that we had no vegetable leftovers for a couple of days -- that we discovered he had a favorite snack. Scarlette figured that, since they put "scarecrows" to protect corn fields, corn meal nacho chips were probably something he would like. This was an understatement. Crows can squeal (or caw) for joy, which is what Brandon did each time we would give him some nacho chips.

As is my wont, I would be feeding him and hold up a nacho chip to show him what was coming. His eyes wouldn't leave the chip. One day, I started to play with this fact. I waved the chip around slowly and watched him just follow it with his gaze.
This gave me another idea! I held it like a small, round, corn Frisbee and counted "one - two - three" and tossed it directly at him. He leapt away from it. I picked it up and tried again. Again he jumped. I figured, what the heck, let me try again. This time, he held his ground and actually caught the chip! From then on, he caught nearly every chip that I threw his way.

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