What you actually need to know about parrot ownership.
As a first-time bird owner, I found many online parrot training guides to be… rather vague. It was hard to figure out how to create a tangible training process for my parrots out of abstract ideas.
Fortunately, I had a ton of guidance from the bird rescue where I used to volunteer, and now several years of the hands-on experience of rescuing five different parrots from varying walks of life.
Thus, I’ve created a list of suggested milestones for training parrots who are hand-shy to step up.
Once upon a time, a crazy parrot lady (me) thought it’d be a good idea to take her parrots a-traveling with her on an airplane. One would fly with her in the cabin, and one would fly via United’s Former Pet Safe Program (recently no longer accepts parrots), or as I’ll refer to it, in “steerage”. Because…
A little more than two weeks ago, little Beau lost 2 grams of weight; he’s really tiny (originally weighing in at 28 grams) to begin with, so any drop was concerning.
We weren’t sure what was going on, but ultimately decided not to take a chance and brought him into the vet.
He’s been fighting for his life ever since.
If your parrot is bleeding, that’s a bit of an emergency. Yes, even if it’s just from a tiny little feather. Think about how tiny a parakeet is; now think about how much blood a single droplet is in relation to how big that bird is, and how much that would equal if it were…
Do you? Do you really? They are unpredictable; they bite often, and bite hard. They are far, far from kid-friendly. So let’s face it; most birds, were they dogs, would be put down. Louie’s grandfather (or at least great-grandfather) likely flew the canopies of the Solomon Islands. And Ozone’s father is probably still terrorizing some…
When you think about adopting a baby bird, consider this: You are raising a child monster with permanently-affixed pliers, and that child is gonna be a two-year-old for fifty to one hundred years, depending on the species. Every mistake you make in his or her formative years, every bad habit you instill, will be with you…
Naturally, my status of ‘crazy bird lady’ meant that I just had to find the wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill on a recent impromptu trip to San Francisco. Here’s how I did it.
Oh, the holidays–friendship, cheer, the season of giving… What more could a bird want than a bit of pizza crust? Unfortunately, Louie acquired a mild case of toe-tapping to go with it. 😦 This performance brought to you by pizza: I gave Louie a tiny bit of pizza crust (standard practice when we feel like spoiling…
I’m on the writing committee for a local charity, and this is one of the songs we might be using/rewriting for our musical. Tippy clearly likes it as much as I do. XD Click here to watch him rock out and ‘stick it to the man’!
Screaming is one way birds get attention (positive, negative, it doesn’t matter!) Now, I can’t definitively say whether or not this was the case for Miss Viola Waddlesworth at her former home, however, her friend Sam, the African Grey who went to a neighbor’s house, frequently shouts, “Shut up, Waddles!” …So yeah, we likely have a few years’…
