November 2006 Meeting Minutes

Club Business: President John Long opened the meeting with an announcement about the NCBC Christmas Party.  The party will be held this year at Jeanne Nathanson's home in Bethesda Maryland. The club will provide the main dish and members are asked to bring a  side dish to share. The party will be held Sunday, December 10th at 3:30 pm.

The Bird Clubs of Virginia annual convention will be held at the Virginia Beach Hotel and Resort.  The convention is scheduled for March 30, 31st and April 1st so mark your calendars now.  Susan Friedman will be giving a one day workshop on parrot behavior that Friday.  This year the clubs are pledging to support Branson Ritchie's work to stop PPD.

Each companion bird that suffers from a preventable disease, or dies before its natural life expectancy, represents an unfortunate and unacceptable deficit in our knowledge.

- Dr. Branson Ritchie

Speaker: Tammy Kramer of DJ Feathers in Fairfax Virginia gave a wonderful talk about her work.  She is a breeder of mostly the smaller parrots.  She has a large number of cockatiels. She brought some cockatiels with her a varying ages--some were adults, and others were still being hand fed.  She showed a video of her life, which demonstrated how much work and care she puts into her passion--birds.  The video included as assisted egg hatch, hand feeding, the many beautiful cockatiel color mutations, the types of food the Kramers provide their birds and how they socialize the birds. Tammy and her husband also brought samples of birdy bread for all of the members and items that she sells from her website.  Thanks to Kitty Miller for bringing her large TV and DVD player so that all could watch this video.

There were 19 members in attendance.

Respectfully submitted,

NCBC Secretary, Sally O'Dwyer