When you decide to spend your life enslaved to a pet bird, you’re not doing it because you like their ‘chewed-on style’ decorating help. Usually it has something to do with you actually liking birds. Not surprisingly, bird people have a tendency to not just welcome wild birds into their garden, but to actively encourage them to show up.
Which brings me to the controversial topic of feeding wild birds. You might think it isn’t ...

 

It was like Christmas for my birds at my place last week. It was what I fondly refer to as “Psychotic branch week”. It’s usually an annual event, although sometimes it happens twice a year. It’s not planned (I wish it was) and it isn’t consistently at the same time of year.

 

It’s not general knowledge but it is actually illegal to take branches and foliage from trees that are on public property ...

 

Have you ever blown an entire week’s wage on a new indoor cage for your parrot and then discovered that it sucks? I challenge anyone who has done that to refrain from complaining about it!
About 6 months ago, that’s exactly what happened to me. I decided to ‘upgrade’ my male eclectus parrot’s cage. Stainless steel cages aren’t readily available in Australia, so his old cage was a powder coated one. Unfortunately, they ...

 

 

There’s a common misconception that working in wildlife rescue means working with lots of amazingly cute and cuddly animals. Unfortunately, the real situation is quite different. A LOT of wild rescue work results in the animal being euthanised because they’re usually extremely ill before they come to someone’s notice for rescue.

Not many photos of dead animals make it to the media and no decent rescuer is going to be stressing out a seriously ill ...

 

“Oh wow, you’re just soooooo fat,” my Eclectus Pepi has started saying to people in a very despairing voice. My voice. He picks his audience too. I have one relative who is particularly concerned with her appearance so naturally she is his favourite target. As he uses my voice – I’m the one that gets the blame for being rude. How dare I teach my bird to say that to her???

 

There have been a few questions on the BirdTricks Facebook wall lately, asking about health record keeping. The question is basically what information is useful? In terms of written records, the answer is: it helps to keep a notebook where you record the date, your bird’s weight (in grams) and note any obvious behavioural changes.

I thought I’d share a couple of extracts of another type of record that I ...