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 ...

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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 ...

Photo of blue and gold macaw from parrotinfoclub.com

When we look at our birds, one of the first things we notice is the over-sized protrusion jutting out from its face. It is something we bird lovers have all come to respect enormously and the thing that causes many people their fear of parrots. I thought it would be fun if we took a tour of the inside our bird’s beak and discovered what is (and isn’t) in there.

When you look inside the mouth, right away you will notice there are no ...

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 ...