Visually sexing a parrot is never 100% reliable, with the exception of the dimorphic eclectus, whose genders are entirely different colors and were thought to be two different species in the wild for the many years before they became a popular companion parrot.


While DNA or surgical sexing are the only guaranteed ways of determining your bird’s sex with certainty, well, that and finding an egg in the pellet bowl, there are a few parrots that allow us to make an educated guess visually.

In the cockatoo family, it’s in the eyes. The females typically have a lighter, chestnut color to their eyes, which is most easily seen in strong light. The male’s eyes are a very dark brown, nearly black. Additionally in the male galah, or rose breasted cockatoo, the eyes rings become rough in texture and tinged with pink (although this is not the case with some males who do not get enough exposure to sunlight.)

The male standard cockatiel will have a bright yellow head, with clearly defined orange cheek patches, while the female’s head coloring is less distinct. She will also have barring marking the underside of her long tail.

In the budgie, the male typically has a light purple colored cere (the area around the nostrils), and the female’s is shades of pink to brown.

I had heard several years ago about a method of visually sexing african greys, but I had for one reason or another thought it to be too unreliable because of the way feather color varies in that species.  I had actually snooped under the tail feathers of several greys of unknown gender and never found those tell-tale silver tipped feathers.  I suppose it is possible that all of them were male.

Someone sent me this link recently, and as I have questioned my friends with female greys, most have reported that theirs have this feather coloring. I feel that it is a fairly safe bet that if your has these feathers, it is likely a female. If it doesn’t, I think the bird should still be considered of unknown gender.

We wear many hats as bird owners: we’re cooks, toy makers, housekeepers and behavioral analysts.  I once read: “Yur day job iz how ya ern muney, yur reel job iz to spend it on yur handsum burd”  by author Mango McCaw. If your parrot had to go out and find work (oh, the indignity!), what would he do?
I think this is what best suits my birds:

Theo, goffins cockatoo, 24
I used to think of Theo as a philosopher, quietly contemplating the things around her.  Lately, though, I have thought of her as more of a novelist.  Her active imagination has more than once created a scary monster out of an inanimate object, the latest being the bath brush in the shower. Yesterday it was a scaly, howling beast intent on savaging the world (or at least the bathroom), today it was just a personal hygiene tool.  I also think that her remarkable measures of patience and tolerance would make her a valued school teacher, although story-time might cause the children to have nightmares.

Linus, umbrella cockatoo, 18
Linus, would be a fine woodworker,  but I think engineering is his true calling.  This bird can do things with his cage cover while I’m at work that defy the laws of physics. Cockatoos are known for their skills in this area, and for their flare for the dramatic, but that he is able to weave the fabric through a dozen cage bars, around his perch and meticulously through the eye-screw hole just baffles me. Then there was the knot I found tied at the end. He is very talented.

Libby, quaker parrot, 4
Quakers are uniquely qualified in the field of architecture, with a little interior designer thrown in.  If you’ve ever seen one of the huge, multi-roomed, condo-like structures that quakers build on city transformers, you’d know what I’m talking about. Libby apparently didn’t get that contractor’s gene but is still an interesting and well rounded little bird.  I think she would do any job well.  As long as she was the boss.  And the food availability was non-stop.  A girl’s gotta keep up her strength.

Nikko and Visa, budgies, 2
Jamie and Dave’s budgies are hard to figure out.  I have always seen them in the roles of the drowning swimmer (Nikko) and the lifeguard (Visa).  When I first came to Orlando, Nikko had contracted a infection which required months of medication.  After the Womachs left for their tour, I was the evil stranger who reached into the cage with a huge hand to capture and torture her. Visa took up the role as bodyguard and positioned himself between my hand and Nikko, threatening to bite if I proceeded.  Recently, I found Nikko in the cage with a toe injury. Visa was standing guard over her.  It was days later that I discovered that Visa also inflicted the injury. So, who knows?  Nikko has had hard life health-wise and might find it satisfying and rewarding to help the less fortunate.  Visa would make an excellent prison inmate.

Tinky and DeeDee, cockatiels, 16
The cockatiels are not suited to work outside the home.  Instead, they would prefer to be kept in the manner to which they are accustomed.  The pampered life as the wives of an insanely rich man would work well for them.
It’s career day. What line of work is your parrot best suited to?

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.

After so many of you raved about the video I sent you last week, I knew I had to scour the internet to try to find the rest of the video for you.

So I found a website where you could actually buy the whole video for $10, for those of you who mentioned you wanted to do that.

But the website that you can buy the whole video from also gave me this video that is supposed to play the entire clip… for those of you who wondered what happened at the end of the last one.

Just use the little forward and backward buttons on the video player and you can skip ahead to a different chapter. There are three chapters and each is 20 minutes long. It’s the 2nd chapter that leaves off where the last video I sent you ends.

My work days are sometimes very long and it often feels like bedtime the minute I get home.  I want to have plenty of time to spend with my birds since that is the highlight to my days.  Bird related chores and meal preparation sometimes cuts into our fun-time so I try to get these things done with the most efficiency possible.

I want my birds to have fresh foods everyday, but there are some mornings when I know that I will be running against the clock and 20 or so  minutes of washing and chopping just won’t fit into the schedule, especially when the chopping has to accommodate 4 different sizes of birds.  These are the days when I have to rely on what I have in the freezer.  I try to always have a stock of frozen meals prepared that require only that I remember to put them into the refrigerator for thawing the night before.  Not only do these meals offer convenience and big savings, but they add variety to the menu.

15 Bean Soup Mix: In the dried bean section of your supermarket, you will find 20 oz packages of 15 bean soup mixes.  It makes an awesome slow cooked soup.  Quite often, though, I will buy a package that I use only for the birds.  The greatest thing about these packages is it gives me a huge variety of beans in a not so huge quantity – just enough to cook and freeze without any spoilage.  The packages contain different kinds of kidney, lima, black, navy, and pinto beans, split peas, black eyed peas, lentils and more.  I soak the beans overnight, rinsing a few times before I go to bed and then again in the morning.  I fill the pot up with fresh water and cook them for about 40 minutes until they are tender.  Small birds have no trouble biting into the whole cooked beans.

Multi Veggie Chopped Mix: You can get really creative with this.  With a small food processor and a variety of raw veggies you can make the most nutritionally complete and economical meals for your birds.  Simply mince the foods and put them into a fine mesh strainer so that excess liquids can drain out (it will freeze and keep better).  There is no limit to the number of veggies you can use in a single batch, in fact, the more the better.  Sprouts and cooked grains also mix in perfectly. Try adding parsley, carrot tops and cilantro…use your imagination!  The more things you add, the better balance this diet will offer.

The best thing about this mix is that since the foods are chopped so small, they will often eat things they didn’t intend to because the foods will cling to one another, which will sometimes add a new option for foods they will eat and enjoy.  And it’s cut small enough to work for any sized birds from a parakeet to a macaw. I have a couple of birds that don’t care for celery, green peppers, or garlic.  I  don’t add these to the mix, only because they are so strong in flavor that they tend to permeate the rest of the mix and have caused these birds to turn down the entire meal.  Sometimes I will freeze these foods separately for those who appreciate them.  I know many people who serve their chopped mix everyday.  If your parrots love it, it will provide them with a nutritious and varied meal.

Freezing And Thawing The Meals: A Seal-A-Meal type of vacuum sealer works great for these meals, but Ziplock freezer bags work fine too.  Since my birds all get fed the same thing everyday, I put enough into each bag to serve them all, but the serving sizes can vary however you need them to.  As I mentioned, the dryer the chopped mix is, the longer is will last in the freezer, so drain it well before bagging it.

As long as you get as much air out of the bag as possible. the meals will last 3-6 months in the freezer.  The trick is to remove as much air from the bag as possible to avoid freezer burn.  Linus, my umbrella cockatoo, bit through the cord of my unplugged Seal-A-Meal a couple of years ago and I have yet to replace it.  So I resort to a trick my mother taught me years ago, although, I laughed at the time.

When I was a kid, my parents had a deep freezer, which is a freezer that maintains a temperature below 0 degrees, as compared to the  below 32 degrees that regular freezers are kept at.  Being one of six kids, my parent learned to shop economically, buying larger quantities of food for less and storing it in the deep freezer.  Since, unlike the freezer in the kitchen which was opened and closed constantly, the deep freezer was only opened for the retrieval of food for dinner, and everything kept beautifully.

Long before the invention of vacuum sealers, my mom figured out that the foods kept better if air was eliminated from the bags.  I remember watching her process of preparing the food for the deep freeze.  She would seal off a plastic bag, except for about a 1/2 inch in the corner, with the edge of a  cool iron.  Then she inserted a straw, sucked out the air, and managed to seal off the remaining 1/2 inch without letting more air into the bag.  Pure genius.  Of course, her technique was revised with the invention of  Ziplock bags.  As much as I giggled at her, it worked, still does.  Of course, you have to be careful to suck the air out, and not blow your germs in all over the food!

She also taught me to wash and reuse the Ziplock bags.  I go through a number of them, and this alone has saved me a ton of money.  Just be sure to dry them thoroughly before your store them for re-use.

Thawing your parrot meals is easy.  Just take the bag and place it in the refrigerator overnight.  The pieces are tiny and will thaw quickly, even in the fridge, and once thawed they will keep there until you serve them in the morning.  Sometimes, I will pop them into the microwave for a few seconds to take the chill off.  Make sure you stir the mix or beans up well so there are no hot spots.

Less time we spend in the kitchen means more time for fun with the birds!

Photo by Alan Lee

In the early morning hours, as the sun is rising and weather permitting, wild parrots all over the world visit clay licks on tall riverbanks to eat dirt.  This practice has long confounded bird watchers, conservationists and scientists alike, and while all of the benefits of this activity are still a mystery, more and more is being discovered and understood.

Wild parrots forage on plants, their fruits and their seeds as part of  their natural diet.  However, plants naturally produce chemicals, poisons, that protect themselves, their unripened fruits and seeds from violators.  As parrots consume these plants, they can become laden with toxins that can overwhelm their system and interfere with nutrient and mineral absorption.  They get tummy aches.  Their diet is less complete.

Photo by InkaNatura.com

Enter the clay lick.  Not only are the cliffs at the riverbank rich with the minerals that are missing from the parrot’s natural diet, but the clay content in the soil contains some of the same ingredients found in our over-the-counter stomach and digestion ailment products.  Clay coats the intestinal tract and binds to the toxins that have been eaten and passes them through the digestive system so that they are not able to be absorbed into the blood stream.

There are still many questions about the clay licks that go unanswered: for instance, it’s unknown how often a single parrot visits his local clay lick.  It isn’t understood why that, while parrots benefit from a high clay content in riverbank soil, they don’t also ingest other soils that have been tested and shown to have a higher nutritional content.

There certainly isn’t enough knowledge about this behavior for us to be adding clay to OUR parrot’s diets, although some products now include clay in their list of ingredients.  We simply don’t know how much is being safely consumed in the wild.  It makes me wonder what other resources wild parrots and animals are using for medicinal purposes and health benefits that we don’t yet know about.  We owe a huge debt to these pioneers who have taught the human race so much.

Photo by Alan Lee

Field researchers logged in about 1,000 parrots visiting the clay lick in Tambopata, Peru early one morning.  Can you imagine the noise? Most people seem to associate the macaw with clay licks, but, in actuality, there are many species that benefits from them.  Parakeets, amazons, pionus, caiques, african greys, conures, lorikeets and parrotlets are some of the others parrot species that frequent the clay licks as well as many mammals.

Clay licks have become a huge attraction for eco-tourists. There are many eco-tours that make the clay licks a focal point in the tour and lodges have been built locally to house the tourists.  This brings a lot of money into the local economy and helps to support the conservational efforts for these magnificent parrots.