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Omar Gonzalez is a well respected aviculturist and award-winning retailer. His love of birds began as a young boy living in Cuba where he and his father used to catch wild songbirds (known in Cuba as "mariposa") and would build cages from twigs. This experience sparked Omar's interest in birds and after coming to the United States at the age of seven, Omar's parents bought him two little canaries. Omar loved his birds and throughout his childhood studied everything he could about them. In his early 20's, Omar purchased two parrots from a local pet shop. However back in the 80's, many birds sold in pet shops were either imported or illegally smuggled into the country and many would die from various diseases. Unfortunately this was the case for both of Omar's pets. This was Omar's first real-life lesson of the importance of buying a bird from a clean and reputable store. Dissatisfied with the unsanitary conditions of most bird stores Omar visited, he began talking to people in the bird business and found out where the quarantine station was. Again since this was the 80's, the quarantine station was the place where most pet shops purchased birds from as very few birds were being bred domestically at the time.

That's when the vision of owning his own bird store first entered his mind. Now armed with the whereabouts of the quarantine station, Omar began buying more and more birds there. Since parrot-taming techniques were quite inhumane back then, Omar relied on his own experiences with the birds to develop his own methods of taming them.