In July 2001, Elli spent some time in my flock as a vacationer together with her friend Toni. The budgie lady always behaved in a rather reserved way due to her handicap - she suffered from the so called "EMA syndrome". She got along well with Toni most of the time when they were at home in the house of their owners. But sometimes there were little troubles and the two birds where fighting for a few moments. In my bird room, Elli was full of enthusiasm when she got the first sight of the old and charming male budgie Kiki.

They became a loving couple shortly after Elli arrived in her "hotel". Toni, my second feathered vacationer during that time, turned out to be a hen like Elli even though the breeder from which her owners bought Toni identified her as a male budgie. My male bird Herkules fell in love with Toni and they became a couple as well.

For me, it was out of the question to separate those loving couples in the future. The owner of Elli and Toni shared my point of view, thus we exchanged one bird each although it was hard for us to give away one of our beloved birds. On 08/10/01, Elli officially became a member of my flock and Herkules moved away with his new love Toni.

Due to her serious illness, Elli unfortunately had no high life expectancy. The vet told me that she would have roughly about half a year of time left until her illness would become too bad. Her left wing showed a huge swelling and several small ulcers that she would probably scratch in the future so that she was always in danger of losing too much blood. It was clear that I would have to put her to sleep in the near future according to my vet. Unfortunately his negative prognosis about her ulcers turned out to be true much faster than we expected...

On 08/20/01, Elli was bleeding strongly after she scratched her wing and I wasn't able to stop her wound from bleeding. My poor Elli died even though I was fighting for her life. It all happened so quickly that I could not even have brought her to the practice of my vet. It was an indescribably horrible experience to be unable to safe this beautiful, courageous little lady's life and I couldn't stop crying for hours.

Meaning of the name
Since I took her over of her former owners - the bird was more than ten years old at that time - I didn't rename her. So she didn't carry an astronomical name like most of my other budgies.