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 ...

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 ...

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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 ...

Male Eclectus Parrot: The “I just unlatched the food bowl door and climbed out but are you going to stop me from escaping?” look.

There seems to be one in most people’s flocks. The evil-minded escape artist. You know the bird. The one that you think is safely resting in their cage but is secretly biding their time waiting for the chance to unlatch their door when you aren’t looking. That’s nothing though. If they get bored with a simple escape, they’ll go and ...

Goffins cockatoo, Theo

Of all of the mistakes we make with our parrots there is one that stands out over the rest. It is something that we often do unconsciously, but sometimes very consciously. Sometimes it happens just because we don’t understand not to do it.

Unfortunately, it is one of the most damaging mistakes we make, and creates problems that are some of the hardest to fix: in a word, it is inconsistency.

It doesn’t sound terribly evil, does it? Actually, though, it is among the worst of all our sins we ...