Personality Profile - Caiques
by Sally Blanchard
My Black-headed Caique, Spikey Le Bec lived with me for close to 25 years. About 20 years into our friendship, he was diagnosed with a heart murmur and five years later he died of a heart attack leaving a huge hole in my heart. I have loved all of the parrot-family birds who have been in my life over the last 40 years but he was truly the quintessential companion. Spike was incredibly well socialised as far as new adventures and meeting new people went.
Spike used to travel with me to most of my seminars and was quite a show-off. The audience loved his tricks and his outgoing personality. One of several tricks was when I would wind him up by holding him around his back and when I let him go, he would hop around the table. When he first started touring the country with me in the late 1980s, most people had never seen a caique and several breeders at the time told me that Spike was single-handedly responsible for their growing popularity.