baby, it's cold outside

Winters has been really trying to live up to it's name this last week with the temperature dropping into the 20's at night and hovering in the 40's during the day. We actually got a few snowflakes on Tuesday. This prompted me to bring in the birdies, which are pretty hardy, but not really biologically able to withstand freezing temperatures as they are both Australian native species (budgerigars and zebra finches). The picture below is actually from a few years ago when we had a pair of Gouldians as well (the 2 yellow/purple/black), sadly gone now.So, on Wednesday I spent a good hour in the dark snatching all 12 of the current aviary residents out of mid air and stuffing them into our much smaller indoor flight cages.
I forgot what a mess these guys can make. With 10 little finches in the bottom cage dancing in the food dish and flapping their wings we had quite a lot of seeds and feathers surrounding the cage and on the floor in no time. Although the dogs valiantly tried to keep it clean by:

1. trying to eat the birds directly to prevent the problem (I highly discouraged this!) and
   
2. eating lots of feathers and seeds from the floor.
   
   
   

   although they gave it their best shot the dogs just couldn't keep up with the generation of mess! Myself not wanting to sweep every day (or possibly more than once daily) had to come up with some kind of seed catcher. Thus, the "bird skirt" was born.

The bird skirt creation process:

Step 1. Tex carefully inspected an old ripped sheet to see if it was fit for use.

Step 2: Although Tex really wanted to help, I insisted that he let me do the cutting of a 14" width of the bottom (elastic portion of the fitted sheet) to a length of 100" (and a shout out to my favorite helper, Craig) and then sew another piece of elastic to the cut edge.

Step 3: apply the newly fashioned "bird skirt" to the indoor cage and Voila, no more mess!