My Blue and Gold Macaw, Fid.

I just had my hair dyed yesterday. I got rid of all of my grey roots. I had finally found a colour that I liked and my hair was still at that stage where it looked like I’d been to a human hairdresser rather than to a lorikeet frizzathon. I had chocolate in the house and no one needed me to do anything. I had no assignments due and I had at least 10 minutes to myself. Only ...

Greenwing macaw

You have heard us recommend many times that you should strive to mimic nature with your birds. You will hear it many more times in the future. This should always be in the back of your mind and if you are doing things the right way, you will find this idea infiltrating all aspects of your parrot’s care.

The most emotionally healthy birds are the ones that are allowed, and encouraged, to be birds. My feeling is that birds that are parent raised (avian parents!) and allowed to fledge make ...

Hyacinth macaw

If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend this exercise: go into the woods or someplace where you can’t be heard (this is to keep you from being arrested) and scream at the top of your lung for 30 seconds. Just 30 seconds. You will find yourself needing a nap afterwards. It is a lot of work.

There are a million different reasons why a bird would choose to scream. But the one thing all screams have in common is that, somehow, it is beneficial to the bird. If ...

A planned burn in the Dandenongs, Victoria, Australia. It doesn’t look it to the untrained eye, but this actually a controlled fire.  Firefighters do these burns to reduce fuel load to reduce the risk of serious bushfire. The smoke blankets numerous suburbs when they do this.

Occasionally something may happen in the area that you live that can create poor air quality. It wasn’t that long ago that there were reports of pigeons falling dead out of the sky in ...

Budgie

I was in a conversation recently with someone who mentioned that he’d lost not one, but two, birds to the same manner of death. He came home one day to find one of his budgies dead, his head trapped in the bottom grate of the cage. A couple of months later, he came home to find that a second bird from that flock had died in the same way.

Naturally, I asked: “If you knew there was a safety issue in the cage, why didn’t you do something about it after ...

Read the rest or post a comment »

Greenwing macaw

As much as we try to make our birds feel at home, there is no way around the fact that life in our world is unnatural for them. Even the bird that has been raised entirely in captivity might struggle to understand the human environment.

Wild parrots learn about their world from their parents and flock mates who teach them what is safe and what is not. We humans, not being birds, are mostly unable to communicate similar messages to our companions. Often our birds have to learn by trial ...