I also have birds, and trust me, she is fully prepared to feed on you, dead or alive. You cannot trust a hungry bird.
It’s a great avatar! And she’s a lovely bird. Keep working at deserving her!
I had a budgie when I was a teenager, he was awesome and I still miss him. 
He looked exactly like @FloatyGimpy’s avatar.
Here is her (and her sister’s) story of how I raised them from eggs.
I tried to help – this was the best I could do.
Kind of off-topic, if that’s possible now that the thread has wandered along. Something I’ve wondered about off and on for a little while.
Can the mods see how many posters have a given poster on “Ignore”?
Here’s another version that might be a bit easier to see at smaller sizes. I zoomed in a bit, got rid of the wall background and sharpened up the image (which helps make it clearer at smaller sizes).
Here’s the one to save:
And here’s how it would look at the 45px avatar size I see on my screen:
Nice!
Yes. We can see the entire list of who you have on ignore.
ETA:
Sorry, misread your question. We can see your ignore list. I don’t know if we can easily see who has a particular user on ignore. But we do get notifications when a user is being ignored by several users (Discourse thinks this is a problem that we need to address).
I purposely left the background in because I thought the halo lighting effect looked better. Sometimes things you don’t try to do on purpose turn out making the picture better.
Why 45 pixels? I thought 240x240 was standard. Great job on the background removal. What do you use to do it?
Right, I’ve been paying closer attention since I made this post, and I was incorrect. If a person on ignore is the OP and I open the thread, then I do see the OP icon, but not content. And if the ignored person is the most recent poster, then their icon does show on the mail page as long as the thread is there. So the other posters later on in this thread were correct. Sorry for the misinformation on my part.
That’s cool. I actually do like it better at the 256px size. However, to me, at the smaller size used beside every post, the background seemed to add clutter that made it harder to make out the bird.
On my computer, the image beside every post is 45px square. So I uploaded a version of the image at that size as a preview of what it would look like if they uploaded the image as their avatar. I did the same thing for Senegoid’s lantern avatar.
As for how I removed the background? The short answer is that I used GIMP and its color-to-alpha function.
The longer answer is that I used the “fuzzy select” tool multiple times on the background until most of the background was selected, then grew the selection by one pixel to grab any stray pixels I didn’t get selected. Then I shrunk the selection back down by 1 pixel and pressed delete to remove anything in the selection. Then I grew the selection back one more time, and used Color to Alpha to remove any leftover color fringing. I then used the Levels tool on the Alpha channel to get rid of any pixels that were almost but not 100% transparent. Finally I cropped, scaled, and sharpened the image, in that order.
One of the ways I help out with Wikipedia is by removing the backgrounds on images that are tagged as not needing them (or which I knew would be tagged). So I’ve build up a lot of experience in how to remove backgrounds. This one was much easier than many of the ones I’ve done–no pesky corners I had to go back in and select manually, no partial transparency, and no transparency in the middle of the image.
Discourse might be onto something there. 
Jesus! How long does it take you to do all that? Hope it’s easier to do than to write out. 
I’ve had GIMP for years but I’ve never really played around with it. I keep telling myself one of these days…
Can you say how many users? Is it closer to 5 or to 20? Is it bigger than a bread box?
My thought also! These days there are better ways to remove a background, @BigT.
Here’s a version I made in a couple of seconds from the original image, by doing a drag and drop to the the site remove.bg.
I do not consider that one better. it has a weirdly smoothed edge.
I’m not a huge fan of automated tools for stuff like this because they are hard to tweak. Like I said, what I did here was fairly easy, and built up from years of experience.
I guess I might look at that site for a particularly hard removal—though it wouldn’t surprise me if a tedious removal for humans is also harder for an automated tool.
Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate your attempt to help. But I didn’t write out the full process because I find it tedious or taxing. It is not at the level where I would prefer an automated tool. That would be if I actually had to manually cut out the image. That sucks.
I do the same as you BigT, with Gimp. My own avatar’s transparency was done that way. (I love the fuzzy select tool so much.)
Yes, I’ve noticed Discourse tends to get a little preachy at times. “This is the third time you’ve responded to that poster. Don’t you think you should let other people contribute their thoughts?”
The Discourse Nanny Bot wants you to get the squabbling children to kiss and make up. Meddling old bat.
Ah then you should be good on the Ignore / Mute people front.
@discobot, will you ever forgive @codinghorror for giving you life?