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 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.

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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.

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Watch a LIVE video demo of me taming our wild, biting Macaw, “Tiko.” (See how I handle “Tiko” as he lunges at me, screaming and biting — how I lovingly calm him down… and mesmerize him so much that he BEGS me to pet him with my BARE HANDS 5 minutes later!) Click for more »

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!

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"Discover How New Training Techniques Can Finally Train Your Parrot To Entertain Himself Quietly… Even If Trying To Ignore The Screaming, Cramming It’s Cage Full Of Fun Toys, & Giving Him More Attention Has Failed Miserably!"  Click for more »