Things I wish I Had Known When I First Got A Parrot

People who are new to parrot keeping will agree on one thing: having a bird in the house is a challenge. There is a lot of reading you should do to understand a bird’s needs and wants, and how to keep them safe in the human environment. This is all vital information.

Here, though, are some tips that I have stumbled across during my own journey with my birds that you won’t find in the parrot care books. I wish I had known these things from the beginning…

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Your Parrot’s Digestive System

 

Camelot macaw

Camelot macaw

Birds eat…and they poop…and then they poop some more. A cockatiel might relieve himself every 15-30 minutes – that’s a lot of relief. Have you ever wondered about the journey your bird’s food takes before it becomes an embarrassing stain on your shoulder?

Let’s go through each step…

The Beak and Esophagus:

It all begins in the parrot’s mouth. The tongue and the inside of the beak are dry – a fact which your fingers may have discovered in ...

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Why Do We Feed Our Birds Pellets?

Cold pressed Feed Your Flock pellets

Cold pressed Feed Your Flock pellets

What is a parrot pellet?

Formulated diets for our pets have been around for years. After watching the booming cereal industry produce tons of fast, convenient breakfast foods for eager consumers, someone cleverly put the same machinery to use to produce dry dog and cat food.

In later years, as parrots became more commonplace in homes all over the world, this same theory was applied to a formulated diet for ...

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How Much Should My Bird Weigh?


Galah

The domestication of animals is something that humans have done through breeding for millennia to manipulate animals with the intention of creating ones that are used for service or companionship, that are suited to be in human society and are aesthetically pleasing.

Domestication is what we have done with dogs, which started out as wolves. Humans bred dogs together which both possessed qualities they wanted to carry on – from personality traits to size to coloring and markings. It ...

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A Healthy Parrot Environment Needs Clean Perches

As my cockatiels get older, they are spending more and more time on their flat perches. I still provide a variety of standard perches for them, but their tired, old feet always head back to the flat perches before too long.

Flat perches gain a lot of points for offering comfort to my cockatiels in their golden years, but lose points with their constant need for cleaning. The beauty of the design of a standard perch, taken from nature, is that droppings fall from ...

 

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Problems With Keeping More Than One Bird In A Cage

cockatiel

cockatiel

I love cockatiels. So much. They are the sweetest, funniest, most agreeable and easy to read birds I have ever had or known. I hope to always have them in my life, so much so that I have to purposely avoid any I see at a bird store because I don’t trust myself to say no.

At this date, only two remain from my original flock of four cockatiels which were all housed in one large cage. While keeping ...

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