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Birthday Trip and a Day With Birds

·Hong Kong, China·#travel#family trip#birthday#birds#animal sanctuary
A smiling person sits at a table with a layered cake topped with a lit sparkler, glasses, and a candle.

The cake came first — a layered slice with a sparkler jammed into it that threw sparks well past the water glasses, while the birthday girl kept her arms spread wide and grinned straight through it.

Then the trip part of the birthday trip. Up to the Peak, where the haze had other ideas: the harbour was there, mostly, but the towers went grey and dissolved somewhere over toward Kowloon. Still worth the trip up.

The birds were the real event of the day, though. A big salmon cockatoo perched by a pond, a green parrot with an orange beak that stepped calmly onto an open hand, and a red macaw that settled onto the birthday girl's arm and was nearly as long as her torso. The sun conures had no manners at all — they landed on whoever stood still, and one worked its way down a sleeve and stayed there, tail hanging off the edge of a rock.

A smiling child sits at a table with a sparkler in a slice of cake, glasses, and a red candle.A panoramic view of a hazy city skyline, harbor with ships, and dense green trees under an overcast sky.A white cockatoo with a featherless chest perches on a branch above a pond, with cages and trees in the background.A green parrot with an orange beak and red accents perches on a person's hand outdoors.A child in glasses holds a red and green macaw on their arm, with a white cockatoo in a cage behind them.A child in a white shirt with a colorful parrot on their finger looks at a white parrot in a bird enclosure.A child wearing glasses has a colorful parrot perched on their arm outdoors.Two children and a vibrant green parrot perched on a hand in an outdoor aviary setting.

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