I only know a few people with birds and they love them.  It was much more popular in the past when pet stores sold them. i don’t even know where to buy a bird now.

I didn’t know pet rescue is for anything other than cats or dogs. I will check Petco, but their lives animal section is small.  I’ve fostered and rescued dogs but nothing else.  

https://www.petfinder.com/

Look under All Pet Care and it shows rabbits, birds, and "other small and furry pets" probably hamsters, guinea pigs and so on. You search by your area zip code and within anywhere from 10-100 miles of you. You have to apply to adopt and have a referral from your veterinarian. It's a wonderful service!

I found some birds that I didn’t know were used as pets. 

My son brought home 2 swallows one year and 1 swallow the following year while he was working part time when going to school.

He was working at a gasoline station and the roof over the gas pumps was 20meters (65ft) high. Swallows built a nest under that high roof. One day, 2 swallows fell out of their nest, but the mother didn't help them to return. He felt sorry for them and couldn't return them to their nest thus he put them in an empty box and brought them home. At the time, we were already keeping a parakeet.

He looked up online how to feed baby swallows and went out and bought the syringes and feed to give to them. You have to initially force a tube down their throat and use the syringe to force the food into their throats for about the first few days. After that, they learn to open their mouths and take the food from the tip of the tube. It's so cute. After about a month to 1.5 months, we fed them mill worms with a pair of tweezers and finally, we just placed the mill worms in a small bowl and they ate them directly.

Note: It's illegal to keep swallows as pets in your home, but we weren't planning on keeping them. We only temporarily kept and fed them until they were able to eat by themselves and then released them in the same place where their brothers, sisters and parents were once they were able to fly. It was also cute watching them fly around in our house as well, but their bird droppings were much larger than our parakeet's which was larger than them. So cleaning up the poop wasn't much fun.

Finally, my son took movies of letting them go. Initially, they flew up to and start flying with the other swallows, but then returned to our son 2 or 3 times before finally going their own way. It was so cute. My son was filming them leaving his hand and then flying up to a power line where other swallows were. Then it returned back to him and then flew up to the other swallows again. That was over and over a couple of times and then finally, they just flew away with the other swallows and we never saw them again.

Here is a picture of one of the swallows in our house next to our parakeet. Mind you, this is a very rare picture because birds of a feather flock together... these are birds of a different feather together!

FWIW

no, never had a pet bird and really don't want one. I do feed outside birds, but only thistle for finches or songbirds because they aren't ground feeders - there are outside cats in the neighborhood

That’s a beautiful picture. A real success story.  I tried to save another type of bird that fell out of the nest, but the mother kept pushing the babies out and eventually they all died.  They were extremely tiny and I could not feed them.

Showtalk said...

That’s a beautiful picture. A real success story.

Well, he did it twice... the first time he brought 2 of them home and the 2nd time he brought one home.

The picture I took was the 2nd time with just the one. We didn't let our parakeet out when he had 2 of them.

We kept them in separate cages. So when we had 2 of them, the swallows had their flight time and then after we put them back in their cage, we let our parakeet out.

But the 2nd time, as we only had one swallow, we decided to let our parakeet out with him and initially, he didn't want to go near the swallow, but the swallow kept following him and finally, they were both together on that perch on top of our book case.

After our son graduated, he got a full time job and we've not had a swallow since.

FWIW