Being a magician, it’s kind of a must to have a dove and such is with us. Dave creates many bird related products for magicians and doves are the most affordable for people across the board to use in their shows and they are very easy to return flight train as well. You’ll see them in many magic shows appearing from nowhere and being thrown towards the audience only to circle back to the magician and land on a designated prop or back on his hand.

We acquired a single dove whom we called Mr. Dove until our facebook fans renamed him Ari, from a local magician. As we brought him home for his quarantine in the garage, away from the other birds, for the 30 days, we realized pretty fast he had what we thought and assumed were mites – which turned out to be feather lice (we’ve not had much experience with either). Thank goodness we abided by the quarantine period so that the lice didn’t spread to the other birds.

Shown: Feather lice on the inside of the wing of the dove

In order to get rid of the lice we grabbed a mite/lice spray from PetSmart and did 3 different ‘doses’ of it on Ari. Dave would hold him and spread one wing out at a time and I would spray wherever I saw the mites on his wing and tail. We made sure to spray more towards the wing bone where the feathers are small and cover the bone because often times lice nest in there and hide. Although a lot of the time when you first open the wing up they are obviously visible on the feathers.

After doing this on 3 different days/occasions, the lice were gone. The spray was probably $9 and we made sure it keep it away from his head/eyes/etc. We did spray his neck just barely a bit to be sure no lice had made their way up there, as well.

For the difference of mites vs lice check out this image.

Have you ever dealt with mites or lice on your bird(s)? Did you find a better way to treat it? Leave your advice in a comment and if your bird shows signs you can always rule on the side of caution and take your bird to your certified avian vet.

PS… writing “mites” and “lice” is hard without writing “mice” and “live”. So if you see those anywhere from me, just translate them appropriately I tried to find them!

One thing I LOVE about toucans? They’re fearless! This is Rocko’s aviary. I’ve experimented with putting him in the others but this one seems to suit him best. Not to mention I have to thoroughly clean the aviaries before putting him in the others in case there is food or things he can’t have. That’s not to say I haven’t done it, but this is the best one for him and so I added TONS of new toys on a shopping spree to my local PetSmart. It already had lots of our natural toys in it and I decided to add some color, some toys that I wouldn’t give my parrots since they could chew it and ingest it. Toucans can’t chew on things and destroy them so toys last longer for them. Which is pretty nice on my wallet!

However, Rocko is so FEARLESS when it comes to new toys that he will jump down to play with anything and plays with every single toy in his aviary. It’s adorable.

Though things still spook him, say, in the house, when it comes to toys or anything new I put up in his aviary for him, he’s fearless.

Whether it’s fruit on a skewer or pieces of colored wood that LOOK like fruit with bells… he is all over it. Bells used to be my swainson toucan’s favorite toys and Rocko seems to just like everything, especially rope. He also seems very drawn to color. Though I often see him playing with one of our natural coconut toys quite a bit.

When he inspects a toy, he tests how strong it is against him by shaking it and investigating it all over. Especially bells… what makes this thing make noise? 

I even picked up these awesome new perches from PetSmart. Immediately when Patty saw them she was like, “You aren’t giving those to the parrots, are you? They look like they’re kept together with glue.” I told her they were Rocko and I was so excited, and so was she so we raced out and she helped me put it up for him which he immediately used and posed for me on.

Since his favorite thing is playing with rope, I figured he’d love a perch with rope in it and coming out of it! How fun.

Us toucan owners have to get more creative because these are not very popular pets and little is known about them. But entertaining them is a full time job and a fun one at that!

Ever wonder what it’s like to be one of the BirdTricks birds? Or maybe be one of the Womach’s? Well this post is all about a glimpse into a day in the Womach flock.

It all started with a BBQ outside, Dave cooking chicken for the two of us…

The birds were playing in the aviaries and everyone was enjoying their day.

I went over and grabbed Comet, our eldest camelot macaw who is freeflight trained by us, and let him hang out on the chair by the pool with us. He shared in a little of our grub, took a slice of my tangerine and flew a few times in the backyard. We hung out on his own chair and performed a few tricks, then just spent some quality time with us. As I screamed and jumped up from a lady bug almost walking itself into my mouth off a piece of food I had, Comet didn’t even stir uneasily.

Comet went back into the aviary to play and I brought out his younger brother Tusa.

He flapped like always when first out of the aviary and into a large space, then shared in some short recalls across the pool and some quality hanging out time in the yard.

Even Tusa was up for showing off his “wave to the camera…

Which actually got better and higher than ever before. We were proud “parronts”.

It’s just a little of what your day with your bird could look like if you chose to enroll in our Freestyle Flyer’s Club, which is our freeflight course personally taught by Dave Womach. It’s a lot of fun and so far all our clients through it have become some of our best friends. For information on how to enroll email info@birdtricks.com.

And one more thing, here’s a video of Comet performing some tricks and doing a short flight in our backyard:

If you’re wondering why we chose 4 baby sun conures as our new flock members, read this article on why I don’t rescue birds.

We are so excited to welcome our newest flockers, 4 baby sun conures, tonight! That’s right, we get these little rascals tonight from our breeder here in Florida. They are coming from the same breeder we got our blue throated macaw, Jinx, from.

We’ve decided on 2 out of the 4 names for them. The eldest of the clutch will be named “C.J.” which stands for… Comet Junior! Since Comet was the eldest of his clutch AND we call him a giant sun conure because of his hybrid-yellow-dominant colors… we thought it was fitting!

One of the others, depending on personality and mood will be called “Roikey” which is pronounced like it’s spelled “Roy-key”. This is after Linus the umbrella cockatoo featured in our Taming Training and Tricks series. This is something he’d say every so often that meant to us, “uh huh, I agree”. He’d say it so clearly sometimes and we’d have no idea where he learned it.

That, and it’s so original. I don’t think anyone has an animal named Roikey.

As for the two other names, we’d love your help! We plan on video taping lots of our daily interactions with these guys and we should know their sexes in about 7-10 days. So that will definitely help. Some names we’ve been tossing around are “Chaos” for any trouble makers in the group… and “Digit” for the smallest/youngest one possibly but we haven’t decided we like those names for sure yet and would love some suggestions! Watch out for our ConureTV webisodes of raising these little guys and training them for our show in Silverwood, along with of course… freeflight!
- Birdtricks.com

Related links:

• Our freeflight course
• Silverwood Theme Park contract

My three macaws were bickering a lot in their aviary they sometimes share outside and they had just spent 10 days apart in their own private aviaries so I thought they could use some quality time with me, some flight time to get excess energy out and a larger space to socialize together.

My camelot macaw Tusa immediately put himself alone in the den and stayed there the entire time, letting everyone know he wanted his space. So there he stayed.

Comet and Jinx, my two other macaws, however, were more interested in hanging out with me but were showing a bit of nippyness and lashing out aggression at one another and me. So I decided to bring out the clicker, the treats and a bowl with some coins in it. I also brought in my rose breasted cockatoo, Bondi, who already knows the retrieve from our Taming Training and Tricks series.

Up to this point of bringing Bondi into the scenario – Jinx and Comet understood they were supposed to “drop” the coins but that was it. As Jinx was stuck at figuring out the next step, Bondi began retrieving coin after coin into the bowl and happily receiving a treat for her perfect efforts. Jinx got so fed up with her earning all the clicks and treats that he would run her off every now and then.

However, the cool part was that at first he watched her and tried to copy her. He got REALLY close, and grabbed a coin off the ground and tried to put it in the bowl and missed. But that was just off WATCHING Bondi do it. I thought it was purely amazing. But then there was a point where he got unfocused and frustrated with Bondi being there because it didn’t give him much of a chance to succeed on his own with her stealing all the glory.

As you can see, Comet gave up early and decided just to take the best seat in the house and watch the action instead!

We’re holding our third photo contest ever on our BirdTricks Facebook!

The theme this month is “In Flight”. We want to see your fully flighted bird in flight, the only catch? No outdoor flight photos unless you are a Freestyle Flyers Club Student Graduate! We don’t want this contest to be ‘who lost their bird first’ type of thing so please don’t take your UNTRAINED bird outside for a pretty flight photo.

The prize: ONE MENS SIZE LARGE BirdTricks.com embroidered polo shirt. (Pictured below)

You can submit your photo as early as today, and no later than January 15, 2012 at midnight EST. 

We will announce the winner on January 16, 2012 sometime (via facebook). All photos will be put into an album entitled “In Flight Photo Contest” on our facebook page and although you can obtain “likes”, this photo contest is going to be judged by the one and only Dave Womach! He will pick the winner. We thought we’d change it up and since he does coach the Freestyle Flyer’s Club, we thought it would be fitting! And especially since all the previous contests have been judged upon how many votes you can get, we thought this would be a nice break from that.

Submit your photo by clicking the “photo” icon at the top of our FACEBOOK page and uploading it directly to our WALL. If you see it added into the album you will know it’s in the running. If it’s not in the album, give us time to put it in or repost it to make sure we see it.

Note: “TAGGING” the page in your submission photo will not make us see the picture and will result in us not seeing it to be able to submit it. We will comment on your picture to let you know it has been submitted so that you know it was received.

P.S. If you are interested in teaching your parrot flight training or even free flight training, email info@birdtricks.com to find out how you can get Dave to personally coach you for 3 months with your bird!