Category — Friends of Phoenix Landing

Spring is here, and the garden is growing! Thanks to a very special donor, Richard Rossi, The Landing has new greenhouse. We will be growing a wide variety of veggies over the next few months. As each comes into harvest, we’ll chop and freeze it for our future batches of mash. Not only does this save us with our fresh food expenses, but the birds that pass through The Landing adoption center will have a great boost in the freshest of nutrition. We’ll post updated photos throughout the year to show how the garden grows and how it brings joy and great value to the adoptable parrots of Phoenix Landing!!

We just had the first major harvest of several varieties of kale, chard and spinach. We chopped them into small pieces and put in the freezer for future use. Greens are one of the best sources of calcium and vitamin A – two essential nutritional needs of our parrots. We are already longing for an industrial food processor, because we are looking forward to an amazing harvest of fruits and veggies this year.

Thanks to Penny Coghe and Kathy Kocsan, we now have an orchard as well! It includes pear, peach, and apple trees, as well several blueberry bushes. Laura Ford topped it off with some gooseberry bushes for fruit and some butterfly bushes for extra parrot fun and foraging.

Stay tuned to learn more about the gardeners that made this wonderful resource possible!

Guest Post by Patricia Sund

Well, I’m not sure. What I am sure of is my commitment to the field of birds. I have a soft place in my heart for parrot rescues in general, but Phoenix Landing has always been by far, my favorite. I met Ann Brooks, in 2005 at the NEI Advanced Parrot Training program in Lake Whales, Florida We sat in the third to the last row on the right-hand side in the tent that served as a classroom.

I was in awe of Ann and all of these people in the class that had already established rescues, or they had their own bird related businesses. I had one bird, my African Grey, Parker and I wanted to learn to train him properly. That was my only reason for attending.

I had no idea that years later, I’d be writing about this business of birds: running around the country to experience life as a Zoo Keeper, a staff member at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, or simply reporting the goings-on at the Houston Parrot Festival.

I began my own blog (http://parrotnation.com/) and it has been happily chugging along for almost three years. The blog has caught on and a post I did about Phoenix Landing a while back still gets hits.

At the end of November, I received an email from Quark Expeditions about a blogging contest. The contest, Called “Blog Your Way to the North Pole” is a writing contest. The winner of the Contest is awarded a trip for two to the North Pole through Helsinki, Finland to Murmansk, Russia, and then on to board a nuclear-powered ice breaker expedition vessel to the North Pole which will take between four and eight days. So I entered the contest with the idea that if my entry won, it could raise awareness of Parrot rescues and nonprofit aviculture related foundations.

This trip is rough, long and cold. I live in Florida, so this will be an uncomfortable trip for me. It would not be a glamorous journey. It crosses 8 time zones so I am sure the jet lag would be brutal. It could possibly involve getting seasick. It’s on a nuclear powered vessel and I could come back glowing for all I know. I’ll have to take time off from work, get a Russian Visa, and the packing is probably going to be very complicated. But this doesn’t matter to me because I’d be doing it for something much bigger than me. It’s not about me, it’s about the birds, and as far as I know, I am the only entrant that has a shot who has an interest in birds.

To win, you have to get people to vote for you. A lot of people. If you get enough votes to be in the top five, a committee, including the president of Quark Expeditions and a professional travel blogger will judge the top five and the entry considered the best wins the trip.

There is only one vote per person. You can’t vote every day like you can with other contests. So, in order to win, I must get enough people give me their one vote.

So I am asking for your vote. I am asking that not only you vote, but that you ask your family, friends and anyone you know with an email address to vote for my entry.

How could this possibly help birds? It can and I think it will. Along with the publicity of the contest, the person going to the Pole on the trip has to write about it as they travel. Obviously, my personality, my interests and my passions would be coming out in the pieces as I write. The fact that I am a writer in the field of birds will obviously come up. Traffic to my blog would increase and I have so many links to wonderful websites that benefit birds including Phoenix Landing. I’m hoping this will enlighten other people about some of the foundations and non-profits that I love and respect.

If my entry wins, I want to make a feather scarf and wear it to the pole, return with it and auction it off, all proceeds going to Phoenix Landing. I have other ideas that could benefit Phoenix Landing, as well as the Alex Foundation and other bird related non-profits. But I have to win first. Here is the link to the Quark Expeditions Blogging contest:

http://www.blogyourwaytothenorthpole.com/entries/94

The current title of my entry is “Santa’s Sleigh Needs a Flight Attendant.”

It only takes about a minute to vote.

I thank you so much for helping someone who loves birds go to the North Pole and I thank you for your vote.

With Respect,
Patricia Sund