My son, Raphael, with some baby parrots at our farm in Vermont.

Sebastian Lousada & SillyTameParrots

I have been breeding large parrots since 1984 and have specialized in Amazon Parrots and African Greys and Umbrella Cockatoos. I have a very small, closed aviary with less than twenty pairs of breeders. As a result I have been able to maintain an extremely healthy flock which results in healthy babies.

My entire flock has always hovered around fifty birds, though there was a time in the nineties when I had a larger variety of species including Leadbeater's cockatoos and Hyacinth Macaws.

Since then I have re-focused on the species that have historically made the best pets. After almost 20 years of selling wholesale to select bird stores in New England, I've now decided to sell more of my parrots directly to consumers.

My breeder pairs are housed in a large, naturally lit barn. They are kept in suspended flight cages so that they have enough room to be able to fly. They are fed a pelleted diet which is supplemented by a mixture of grains, fruits and some seeds. Twigs are regularly provided as therapeutic chew sticks.

Whenever possible breeder pairs are allowed to incubate and feed their own young. An extensive system of foster parents enables me to only very rarely use an incubator. It is my firm belief that parrot chicks that are fed at least partially by their parents (as opposed to being fed by people from day one) are far healthier and more robust.

Having said that however, it is important that parrots are also handfed in order to be partially imprinted on humans and start out as super tame ("sillytame") pets.

To this end, the parrot chicks are taken from the natural nests at around 2-3 weeks of age and brought into our home. There they are then hand fed a ground-up mixture identical to what their parents were feeding them. They grow rapidly until they are ready to sell.

Some customers prefer to finish hand feeding their new baby parrot from around six weeks of age while others feel more comfortable waiting for their bird to be weaned at approximately 12 weeks of age.

Bird and Parrot Background and Research Projects

I have always been interested in birds and apart from parrots I am a master falconer and also an experienced field ornithologist specializing in censusing breeding populations of songbirds. In the eighties I became very interested, obsessed actually, with what were then known as "parvipes yellow nape parrots." I had purchased a pair of them and found the current literature severely lacking in information.

In the late eighties, I traveled to their native habitat in Central America with some friends. When I could not find the birds, I got even more confused! Luckily I had gleaned enough information from the trip that a second research trip a few years later was successful and enabled me to find the birds that had not been seen by ornithologists since the sixties. I helped name two new subspecies of parrot and described a third. As a result the "parvipes yellow nape family" now has a number of new members.

I currently breed one of the rarest and most beautiful of the subspecies (Amazona oratrix hondurensis) and hold in my aviaries what is almost definitely the largest group in the U.S.

With the help of the Amazona Society of which I am a past president and Merilee Hook, The Hondurensis Project has been formed to try to ensure that the captive population of these special birds can be preserved.