I can’t help it.  I cringe every time I see a large parrot with a small child.  From a toddler to a teenager, children carry a significant amount of energy.  You can feel that a child is present no matter where they are. Parrots, as prey animals, are easily alarmed. It is their nature and red flags go up any time something is amiss. We are far more tolerant of our parrots natures than they are of our children’s, and I have seen things go wrong, regardless of how well behaved your child or your parrot is.

I went to visit an out of state friend years ago, and she requested that I bring Abu, my first umbrella cockatoo.  Abu was one of those rare cockatoos that was quiet, sweet tempered and would sit on a perch for hours in the company of her favorite people.  She was potty trained, and without a doubt, the easiest bird I have ever had.  I had no reservations about bringing her along.  She was barely in the door before she had won the hearts of everyone, including my friend’s 3 year old grandson.

I kept Abu in the bedroom where I was staying when he wasn’t out mingling and making new friends.  Early into my visit, my friend and I were in the kitchen talking while her grandson busied himself with a coloring book in the living room.  The next thing I know, there was a horrible shriek and the little boy came running to Grandma for comfort.  His hand was bloody.  He had gone into visit with Abu without our knowledge and had apparently stuck his hand inside the travel crate.  Inspecting the wounds, it appears that Abu managed to get three fingers into her beak for one nasty bite.  One finger was nearly crushed.  I felt horrible and couldn’t apologize enough.  We all knew that this wasn’t the child’s fault because he was just being an inquisitive as children are, and it wasn’t Abu’s fault for objecting to the small hand invading her cage space, but ours for lack of supervision.

Last summer, I watched a young girl be bitten in the eye by her beloved cockatiel after he was frightened by a slamming door.  Fortunately, her lid took most of the injury, but the relationship between the two was never the same.  Even a small bird can do substantial damage to a small body.

Despite the risks, children being raised around birds are offered some unique experiences.  There’s a lot to be learned about care-giving, compassion and our responsibility to nature. When you are raised to be patient with and tolerant of things different from yourself, you can be at home wherever you are. And it doesn’t hurt to have an awareness of body language, whether it be avian or human. I have a friend who rehabs troubled parrots whose very young children (2 and 4) have learned not to make eye contact with a screaming bird so as not to reward the undesired behavior.
When I was about 10, we found a baby screech owl with a wing injury.  After waiting until we were sure there were no parents caring for the bird, we took him home and nursed him back to health.  We knew nothing about the care of a wild bird and found advice about its diet from a family friend who was knowledgeable about wildlife. Willy was the sweetest bird and he became a member of the family.  It was a wonderful experience that I am grateful to have had.
When we learn at an early age to respect and appreciate nature, it is something that we carry throughout our lives and pass along to our children.  They, in turn, pass it along to theirs.  What a wonderful world this would be if all of humanity were on the same page.

Think, for a moment, about all of the life-stages a human being goes through from birth to old age, and the way each stage effects and changes the person that you are:  from the complete dependence of infancy to the confident and very mobile 6 year old; from the hormonal teen years to early adulthood, the child bearing years; from adulthood to middle age; from middle to old age, where health might start to decline.  Then consider the long life span of our companion parrots.  Parrots go through life-stages just as people do.  In 10 years, your parrot will likely be a different bird than the one you have now.

We all know to expect behavior changes as a parrot reaches sexual maturity.  A young bird might start getting nippy and territorial.  You can equate this to the 11-14 year old child that has begun rolling her eyes at everything you say.  Yesterday you were a hero, today you are an idiot that knows nothing about the world.  You will remain an idiot until she reaches 21 and realizes that your claims about “how hard it is out there” were not fabrications and scare tactics designed to gain cooperation and control.  The respectful behavior returns, but you will never again be the hero.  Changes are part of life and we do best when we learn to roll with them.

A parrot’s demeanor, attitude and level of tolerance changes as it ages.   While some changes in your parrot might be a reflection of a changing home environment, this is not always the case.  Any intelligent being has the capacity to change.  Some changes might be welcomed, others frustrating, and you might find it necessary to put new strategies into play as your bird goes through its life.

As I get older, I find I have less patience for things that were once very important to me, things that I now find to be trivial and unworthy of my efforts.  It makes me laugh to think how much time I have spent fussing over my hair, applying make-up, dressing up to go to the supermarket.  Events I once thought were the end of the world are now met with a simple sigh.  I have changed, but the essence of who I am, my morals and ethics, have remained the same.  I’m still me, just different.

Tinky, my 16 year old cockatiel, has gone through several attitude changes in his years.  I have had him since he was a baby.  When he was young, he took everything in stride.  If he wanted to come out and play, he would kick up a fuss and let me know.  After a few minutes, when he realized he wasn’t going to get his way, he would quietly move on to something else to do.  No big deal.

When he was older, about 8, he became much more serious about life.  Things that would normally instigate rowdy play were suddenly annoying to him.  For a while, he preferred to play outside his cage independently, always within sight of me, but less physically interactive. Then, he went through a period where he couldn’t bear to be away from me.

Now, in his golden years, I find he has very little patience for nonsense.  Nonsense being defined as anything that doesn’t suit him that day, anything that doesn’t go his way, and everything else.  He can be quite stubborn, and has no trouble voicing his opinions.  But he is still, and has always been, fun and lovable Tinky at his core, although there have been many versions of him along the way.  I have enjoyed every second of our journey together, whoever he happens to be at any given moment.  I even love the crotchety, old man he has become.

The cutest things on the planet may very well be (and not necessarily in this order): a baby cracking up laughing, kittens doing just about anything, and birds playing.  Some of the very best memories I have of my birds are of them playing, especially when it involves me.  There’s something so precious about watching the determination of a 100 gram bird tug on something twice its size, and the lengths they will go to to accomplish an nearly impossible task.  I am always on the lookout for things that will peak the curiosity of a nosy bird to inspire play.

Here are some things you can make quickly and inexpensively that can change and grow with your imagination, all of which work best with your involvement:

1.  Birdie tunnel (budgies/finches):
You can make this simple toy from a cardboard paper towel roll and two shoeboxes.  Remove the lids from the shoeboxes and place them open side up.  Cut a hole in one short side of each box just large enough for an end of the paper towel roll to fit through.  Connect all the pieces together with the paper towel roll in the center.  It will look like a dumbbell when you’re through.
I have a friend with 3 little budgies that spent hours with this bird toy.  Eventually she raised the height of the tube to the top of the box and created ramps and steps and climbing ropes for her budgies to reach it.  They went to great lengths to get to that tunnel,  they’d race through and start again from the other side.

2.  Birdie Maze:
Thesecan be both fun and interesting for your bird.  If you have smaller birds, budgies to conures, the  walls to the maze are easily constructed from Legos.  At first make the maze more of a winding tunnel and coax him through it with treats.  As he gets better at finding his way, make dead ends and false passageways that cause him to have to evaluate his moves.  If your bird is a cheater, and flies to the top of the wall to find his way, you can cover the top with a towel if he feels comfortable with that.
For the larger bird, you will need taller, more sturdy walls.  You’d have to have A LOT of Legos.  My daughter’s umbrella cockatoo, Abu, actually taught me this game while I was packing for a move.  She created her own maze from the cartons that were slowly overtaking the living room.  She had a ball.  I told a friend about Abu’s game.  This guy had the largest record collection I had ever seen and he used the milk crates he stored his albums in to create a maze for his amazon.  Last I had heard from him, he had still not returned his record collection to it’s original spot.  This game might not work well for some macaws because their tail is always dawdling two feet behind them.
3.  Play Mat:
What bird doesn’t have the time of his life trying to remove the buttons from your clothing?  Or trying to disassemble your jewelry?  The play mat offers all of those opportunities and more…
Take an old blanket and sew beads, buttons, bows and bells to it.  Or you could be a rebel, and use things that don’t start with a “B”.  You could use a towel and sew on plastic rings, keys, leather strips with beads, wooden cutouts and pretty much anything else you can think of that your bird would enjoy.  The fun for the birds seems to be in tugging on the items, just like the buttons on your shirt.  When you are done playing it folds right up for storage.  If  it becomes soiled, you can put it in a lingerie bag and machine wash it, depending on the durability of the items you have sewn on.
I had made one of these for the cockatiels years ago and this post inspired me to make another. I did make one for Linus, my umbrella cockatoo, a short time after he arrived to live with me.  His efforts were spent trying to fold it back up or dragging it around behind him by one of the plastic rings. I wasn’t yet aware of what a tyrant Linus was with toys, always trying to bend them to his will and make them do things they weren’t designed to do.  He had a good time, though, and that’s the point.

4.  “Greyzilla”:
I read about this guy somewhere who made a little city out of appropriately sized Legos for his African grey and made up this game called Greyzilla.  It was the grey’s role to come along to destroy and terrorize the city and all it’s tiny, little people.  It was the human’s job to portray the little Lego people running from Greyzilla and begging for their lives.  As Greyzilla crashed his way through town, he showed little mercy for the Lego-ites.  If I remember correctly, though, this compassionate monster tried to reassemble the city when he was through, although probably not to Legoville building code standards.  I can only imagine how much fun they must have had.

I had two days off in a row this week!!  I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you work in retail, believe me, it’s rare.  It feels like spring break.  I intended to tackle some projects that needed tackling.  I actually tackled two.  And they were, of course, bird projects.

New cage covers were desperately needed for Linus, my umbrella cockatoo, and the cockatiels, so I moved this to the top of the to-do list.  I went to the quilting section at the fabric store and bought about 2 miles of dark broadcloth.  Linus has a really big cage.  He also has a really big beak and had shredded his cover beyond usefulness.  He has a favorite side to his cage for sleeping, and there was so little fabric remaining on that side that he recently decided to move to the other side for a good night’s sleep.  I know this because his back-end has been positioned over his water bowl all night for about a week now.  I don’t think I need to say more.  I constructed the cover and attached it to the cage using grommets and quick links.

The cockatiels.  My sweet little darlings.  The only thing worse that waking up to the horrors in Linus’s water dish is waking up to the cockatiel’s belting out a tune at 6:30am when I worked late and got to bed at 1 the night before.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love hearing their joyous little voices.  Just not then.  I made them a darker cover to encourage them to sleep a little later.

I was so excited when I went to bed last night, new cage covers in place, knowing I could sleep until I woke up rested.  Well, that was the plan, until I woke up to my alarm clock buzzing at 6:45.  Apparently, I had set it the night before out of habit.  The good news is that I did not hear a peep from the cockatiels at 6:30…if that can be construed as good news.  Oh, and by the way, I came down stairs to find that Linus had torn a hole in his new cover, right at his eye level, and every movement I made was being monitored by a blue eye ring surrounded by black cloth.  Creepy.

Today’s project was toy making for the cockatoos.  Linus was pouting this morning as if to say:  “Mom, I have nothing to do with my beak.”  I was thinking how he found something to do with it earlier that involved his new cage cover, but kept quiet.  I went to the lumber store for a pile of 2X4s and cut enough 1″ pieces to fill a 10 gallon bin.  I drilled holes into each piece so they could be strung onto chains.  I made HUGE toys for both Linus and Theo, my goffins cockatoo, who didn’t even notice the wooden behemoth in her cage.

Linus was thrilled, though, and spent most of the day transporting bitten off chunks of wood to his stainless steel pail for further processing.  I noticed about an hour ago that he has managed to give himself a black eye, something he does several times a year in the course of going to battle with his toys.  Sometimes they hit back.  He has already gone through about 7″ of wood, or the equivalent of 15 boxes of toothpicks (if I were counting, or thinking about going into that business).  I guess we both had a productive day.  Next project on the list:  Easter baskets for the cockatoos, and Easter…boxes for the little guys.

1. Dirty Food:

The expression “you are what you eat” is so true.  Since we are in charge of our parrot’s food selection, we have to make sure that it is not only the best quality we can offer, but that it is safely edible.  Thoroughly wash all fresh foods. Even organically grown produce use pesticides, although not chemical ones.

Many of us work full time jobs and are in a rush to get out the door in the morning.  It’s convenient to feed the birds and go.  However, when we leave fresh or wet foods out for a period of time they begin to collect bacteria.  Most birds are very hungry when they first wake up, so this is a good time to feed them their fresh foods.  Often they will have finished their meal by the time you are ready to leave for work and the dirty bowls can be collected.  I will often cut up the food the night before and store in plastic containers for easy service in the morning.

If they are slow eaters, like mine tend to be, give them drier, less seepy foods if it needs to be left in the cage for a period of time.  I save the wetter foods, which collect more bacteria, for their second meal after I return home.

Even dry foods will go stale.  Any pellets and seed not eaten should be thrown away and replaced at least every other day.  Even better, serve only as much as they will eat in a day.

**Note: If your bird poops in it’s food or water, it is no longer edible.  It may dry as a solid in the pellet or seed bowl, but there is urine in their poop that will spread and contaminate the food or the water.

2. Dirty Cages:

Birds eat with their feet.  This means that when they are done eating, they will be tracking remnants of food around their cage. It will sit and harbor bacteria, which your bird will walk through again on it’s way to pick up more food or to get to its toys. The amount of harm this does to your bird depends on how often you wipe down the bars of the cage.  Dirty perches can lead to foot infections, which in birds are a serious thing, given that they are on their feet 24/7.

Did you know that a cockatiel can poop every 15 minutes?  This makes for a lot of poop in a single day, and poop is another bacteria gatherer.  I have gone into homes and seen a mound of poop building up like a stalagmite underneath a parrot’s favorite pooping spot.  If this doesn’t particularly bother you, then know that it dries and becomes airborne, causing disease in humans.

3. Use Of Commercial Cleaners:

Commercial cleaners leave a chemical residue on surfaces that are harmful to your parrots.  Never clean cages, toys,  or perches with any commercial cleaner or solvent.  In fact, I won’t let my birds play on a floor that has been washed with a commercial product.  Even those claiming to be pet friendly or a green product are not suitable to me.  I use white vinegar diluted with water, grapefruit seed extract (GSE) or a mild dish soap like dawn for any bird related cleaning.

4. Use Of Air Pollutants:

Parrots have an incredibly sensitive and efficient respiratory systems.  Their systems is designed so that when they take a breathe, a second breathe is necessary to push the first one to complete the cycle.  A third breathe pushes the second through to completion etc.  When you think about this, since two inhalations are necessary to equal one of ours, it means that if there are toxins in the air, birds are doubly affected.

We have all heard about the coal miners in earlier times that would put a cage of canaries into a mining shaft to determine if there were any odorless gases present.  If the canaries were found alive after a time, they knew they could enter and work safely.  If the air was safe enough for a bird, a human certainly would survive.

It is very important that we pay attention to the air quality in our homes. We should never smoke around our birds, or use incense, aerosol sprays or scented candles.  Pick your cookware carefully, anything with a non-stick coating can kill a bird within minutes.

No Toys In Cages:

The most common excuse for this is:  “Well, it never played with them anyways.”  And it never will learn to, if they aren’t there.  Birds are very active and intelligent creatures and they need mental stimulation.  If your bird doesn’t care for a particular toy you selected, try one of a different texture.  Most birds can’t resist toys made of shreddable materials.  A crumpled up ball of paper can keep a bird busy for hours. If you give them enough options and watch how they respond, you will hit upon just the right type of toy, and you’ll know from there which toys are preferred and most likely to be played with.  Just remember to keep it interesting for them by rotating toys every couple of weeks.  A reason many birds don’t explore toys is because they don’t understand what they are.  If you play with the toy with your bird, it will quickly get the message.

There are countless sources of information about parrots online.  There are online forums and web pages that are dedicated solely to the specific bird you are looking for.  There are sites for conures, macaws,  cockatoos, eclectus, you name it.  Within each group you can learn the habits of the individual species.

The behavior differences between a macaw and a cockatoo are enormous, but even within a family of birds, different species behave differently.  For instance, the goffins cockatoo species is entirely different from the umbrella cockatoo.  Then when you throw in the independent personalities of each bird, there’s a lot to consider before you buy.  If you do your homework by looking into the natural inclinations and behaviors of a species that you are interested in, you are less likely to have a parrot that doesn’t fit in your household.

Ask yourself these question.  Within each question are more question to break it down further.  I will use a “typical” african grey as an example of how this species might or might not work in different households:

1.  Which parrot will fit with my my lifestyle?

• Do you live in a noisy, chaotic home that is filled with children and other pets? This may not be the best environment for the typical african grey, which has a tendency towards fearfulness.  A calm home that is not full of surprises is a better match.
• Do you live in an apartment or have neighbors in nearby? Since they are not considered to be loud parrots, african greys are great apartment birds.  This is not to say that they can’t raise the roof, it’s that they generally don’t choose to.  Be prepared for morning and evening vocalizations with whatever species you select.
• Do you work out of your home? This is the ideal situation for an african grey.  Since they are quiet(ish) as parrots go, you can go about your paperwork and phone calls without much interruption.  And your bird will get to have you around all day!

2.  What kind of owner am I going to be?

• Are you looking for a bird that might talk? Needless to say, the african grey is at the head of the classwith its ability to talk and comprehend.  Know, however, that yours may not.  Some prefer to imitate sounds  like the telephone, car alarms, kitchen timers, dripping faucets, and the alien spacecraft that apparently landed in your backyard recently.  (Half the fun in this is trying to identify the sounds and figure out where he picked them up.)
• Do you want a bird that enjoys being handled? Not all greys like to be handled. While there are some snugglers out there, this is not a typical trait.  Some prefer to watch from a distance.
• Will you make time to devote to a pet that requires a lot of care and interaction in order to thrive? The african grey is very intelligent and perceptive, perhaps even hyper-aware of its environment.  It requires a lot of interaction and needs to be included in the life and energy of its owner.
• Can you bring up a parrot the right way? African greys are are no different than other species in their need to be well-adjusted.  How your bird behaves in general depends on being taught him how to play independently to occupy his time on his own.  A parrot that feels bonded to its people, and has a sense of security, will find no need to play attention getting games.

There are many more questions to ask with regards to your environment and level of care you are willing to give.  There are some situations that are preferred for this particular species, but it will vary from bird to bird.  I know greys that are quite outgoing and love a house filled with craziness.  I know one that has never uttered a word or imitated a sound.  Some prefer multi-bird homes, others prefer to be the only child.  Your birds personality plays a big role in how well it will adapt, but knowing the probabilities will help you make the right selection.

After you’ve done all your research and found a great species match and your cockatoo turns out not to be a snuggler, or your cockatiel  prefers to hang out in its cage instead of in the family room, will you be accepting of that?