I thought you all might enjoy seeing a video showing me and some of the incredible birds I am lucky enough to work with to give you a better insight to what I do for a living.

I hope you enjoy it: This is me!

Feathered cast, in order of appearance:

Che and Esteban – Hahn’s Macaws

Bonnie and Alfie – Green-winged Macaws

Kookie –  Kookaburra

Wispa – Barn Owl

Flint – Harris Hawk

Zeus and Athena – White Storks

Ruby – Green-winged Macaw

Rosie – Galah (Rose-breasted Cockatoo)

Molly – Citron-crested Cockatoo

Charlie – Blue-fronted Amazon

(Coco, Blue and Gold Macaw in the background!)

Jasper – Congo African Grey

The second you get known simultaneously for helping animals in need and as a parrot owner, you’d be amazed at just how many calls you get to help an abused parrot, or just a parrot who needs re-homing. It is incredibly difficult to say no to the sob stories. In the last twelve months, I personally have dealt with just under 30 non-wild native parrots that needed re-homing or help finding their lost owner. Fortunately, in most of those cases, the owners were looking for them.
Needless to say, my flock of eight consists mostly of sob stories that I couldn’t say no to. I’m lucky that I have a life that allows me to be around them fairly constantly because it is an incredible amount of work to keep that many FIDs (feathered children) happy.

Morgy (a bit on the heavy side)

I’ve mentioned before that the first bird that I took on was an abandoned galah (rose breasted cockatoo) named Morgy. She literally decided to move in to my garage, taking chunks off anyone that tried to remove her. She was nightmare at first, but training fixed that. Morgy’s only problem is a tendency to be very lazy. She likes her food, she likes her sleep and the only exercise she is interested in, is throwing things at the cat.

This has led to a weight problem. Which has led to a diet and exercise program that isn’t proving to be that popular with her. She isn’t that patient with having to work for her food and has broken more than one so-called “bullet proof” foraging toy as a result.

Merlin displaying his wings

Merlin was the second bird that I took on. He is also a galah, but he is from the khuli subspecies. I bought Merlin from a pet store after I found him in shock, with bleeding wings after an incorrect wing clip. Think dirty water, seed-only diet, cowering on the bottom of his small cage which was on the floor. I wouldn’t normally buy from a dodgy pet store but if I had just lodged a complaint, I’m pretty sure they’d have hit him over the head with a brick. It made more sense to get him out and straight to a vet. I then drove the storeowners crazy by plying them with the evidence of subsequent vet bills. It did make a difference.

In the meantime, it has taken years to get his wings working, but Merlin is now fully flighted. He’s an odd bird. He talks on cue, but he makes everything sound as fake as possible. He says “Ha ha” instead of actually laughing. He says “brrrr brrrr” instead of actually imitating a ringtone. His main issue though? He loves nothing more than to remove the bolts that hold his aviary together. I’ve come home in the past to find he has removed a whole wall. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was a screwdriver in a past life.

Cocky Boy - will work for peanuts

Cocky Boy, was the next galah to join my flock. Cocky Boy outlived his previous owners and was inherited by a teenage girl. He is over 60 years old. He came to me through another wildlife rescuer’s intervention. Cocky Boy was in a rusty cage with no perches, behind his owner’s house. They had put him there because he was so aggressive. There were no perches because he was mostly crippled. He’d inflicted some pretty serious injuries on the children who lived there, biting through to bone. He regularly screamed: “GET ME A PEANUT!!!!” – so peanuts became his diet. The owner gave him to me, in the hope that he’d be happier around other birds. She said he was nice years ago, but no one had been able to get near him since his owner died.

 
Osteoarthritis has crippled him. He still can’t fly and he can’t move his legs properly. Before you all send me hate mail for not euthanizing a suffering bird – you’d be surprised how well you can treat arthritis in a bird. He is on regular medication and with a corrective diet, he has recovered enough to have an excellent quality of life. He lives in a specially designed cage with ramps and platforms to help him move from perch to perch. He is the cuddliest bird in my flock, although he still hates children. Initially, he was in love with me but then he met my mother. She is his ‘preferred mate’; I am the ‘tolerated food and entertainment source’. Meanwhile, he still hasn’t learned to say “please”.

Pepi marking his card

The next bird to come along was my male eclectus, Pepi. Pepi was not a rescue. My mother and ex-fiance purchased Pepi from a breeder as a gift for me because I was inconsolable at the death of another male eclectus called Mac. It was not a good way to get a bird. Pepi was beautiful, he ran his tongue lightly over my face when he first met me, but that didn’t last. From day one we had issues. On some level, I think I resented that he wasn’t Mac. Pepi seemed to sense that and took chunks off me if I tried to go near him. Similarly, Pepi seemed to resent that I wasn’t the breeder. He’d sit on his perch and chant: “Coming home soon!” over and over again. I rang the breeder because I couldn’t quite believe they’d get rid of him if they knew how much he seemed to love them. “Coming home soon” was what the breeder’s wife said to calm Pepi when he was calling her husband continuously (who was at work). Neither she nor her husband wanted Pepi back. I couldn’t quite believe that someone could be so indifferent about a bird that was clearly pining for them.

 
I wasn’t prepared for Pepi’s intelligence. I recorded him saying over a hundred phrases in that first week. He’d watch me approach for training and say “Make my day” followed by an evil laugh, then he’d lunge and try to bite. It took time and patience. Now, no one would guess we started off with serious issues. I can’t imagine life without him. Admittedly, I’d prefer it if he sang in tune or at least hadn’t listened to the neighbours’ kids screaming Justin Bieber lyrics at him over the fence. That said, there’s nothing quite like sitting down to cuddle a bird who desperately wants to stick spat-up corn up your nose.

Lori, 3 seconds before she got her head stuck down the side of the couch

At the same time that Pepi and I were getting to know each other, another bird joined my flock. Remembering that I had graduated high school as ‘most likely to become a crazy cat woman’, a high school colleague had looked me up on facebook hoping I hadn’t changed. She was looking for help with a young rainbow lorikeet. Friends of hers wanted to re-home a tame lorikeet. They thought they were looking after her well, but she was in a really bad way. She was extremely sick.

Lori required strict quarantine while she underwent treatment for psittacosis, so it was a few months before she met my other birds. The vet thought she was a weird mutation/hybrid lorikeet because she had bright blue stripes across her back but that turned out to be due to malnutrition. Lori did recover, but it took two years for her to become a normal looking rainbow lorikeet. She is extraordinarily affectionate but has a weird obsession with teeth. You can’t talk when she is on your shoulder because she’ll take any chance she can get to climb into your mouth and tap your teeth.

Dori (about to follow Lori to find out what is down the side of the couch)

Dori was the next one to join my flock. She was found on the side of a busy intersection being attacked by a group of ravens within metres of an Indian ringneck who was also being attacked. She was an un-weaned chick and the IRN was an adult with clipped wings. It appears the birds were unwanted pets that were thrown out of a car window. Someone with parrots adopted the IRN, while the rainbow lorikeet was brought to me for help. Dori was in a pretty bad way, there was a serious impact indentation in her beak, her tail feathers had all been ripped out (leaving a bloody mess) and she was badly dehydrated.

I was able to stabilize her and got her to an avian vet, who hospitalized her. A few days later she had passed her disease screening tests and was free to go home. The problem was she would require crop feeding and at least 6 months of supportive care. To my relief, Lori took over mothering duties. There was one heart stopping second where Lori decided that Dori needed a bath and threw her head first in their water bowl – but both survived the incident. Dori has grown up to be very placid (for a lorikeet) and she follows Lori absolutely everywhere. Which is sometimes unfortunate because Lori’s curiosity gets them into all sorts of trouble!

Nemo (Her eyes have just turned red this breeding season)

I thought 3 galahs in a flock was enough, but Nemo proved me wrong. Nemo was a lost/abandoned pet that wasn’t coping in the wild and was drawn to my guys, or more specifically to their food bowls. I first saw her on top of Cocky Boy’s cage saying “Hello!” over and over again while staring at his food bowl. She flew off when I approached.

This was repeated for several days until I finally found her unconscious in my neighbour’s cat’s mouth. It still shocks me that I was able to stabilize and treat Nemo, but I’m afraid I will forever be the evil human with the syringe. While I was unsuccessfully chasing up leads on possible owners, Merlin and Nemo had fallen madly in love, ditching Morgy in the process. I couldn’t bring myself to break their hearts by re-homing Nemo. I tried keeping Merlin, Nemo and Morgy together but they had other ideas. Morgy seems much happier on her own.

Otto - only sits still for food

Otto is the final and newest member of my flock. Otto is a male musk lorikeet. He is a re-home not a rescue. The difference is that he came from decent owners. They purchased him from a pet store and were basically given the wrong information. They took him to an avian vet, who corrected his diet and ran the appropriate disease screening tests. His results were good. The problem was that Otto had some severe behavioral issues. He seemed to attack for no reason and when he attacked there was no way of stopping him – he seemed to take the view that it was fight until death. Despite being so small, he inflicted some very nasty injuries. He needed a lot of work and someone who could give him a lot of time. He demanded to be centre of attention. I had to agree that a different species of bird would better suit the lifestyle of these bird owners.

 
I found I bonded with the little psychopath the second I saw him. Otto is hyper and a handful but we’re making great progress and getting to know each other. Otto likes long branches with flowers on them. He dislikes tissues and human toes. Apparently it is necessary for him to get to and press each computer key that I press when I type. This conveniently means that Otto is responsible for all spelling errors in my posts. Considering I average 60wpm he is either about to collapse from exhaustion or have a complete meltdown. I’m thinking I should stop typing before I find out which?

 
Needless to say, it’s not hard to see how I ended up with MBS! That said, I don’t have any plans to add to my flock in the near future.

Photo by Jamieleigh
Location: Orlando, FL
Foraging for a nutriberry: Galah “Bandit”

Foraging seems like a wild and time consuming idea for a lot of people, but it’s not and it is WORTH IT for your bird to build confidence. I can’t even explain how important it is for your bird not to be sitting around all day bored out of its mind. Boredom causes a huge percent of the behavior problems out there in birds today such as plucking, aggression and biting, etc…

So let’s talk about foraging for beginners, how to do it and what you need to get started today with your bird, I promise it’s EASY!

Photo by www.beadjam.com

Easy Foraging Tip #1: Non-treated pieces of wood, wooden beads, etc. (non-toxic)

Simply start your bird’s first day of foraging by placing these pieces of wood or wooden beads (or both) inside your bird’s food dish along with its pellets. The first day add a few, the next day add some more and then more and more until your bird has to go from eating around the wooden pieces to picking out the pieces in order to get to what he wants to eat.

Some birds will start playing with the pieces, or begin destroying them into small pieces which is great. That’s what you want. Make your bird work harder and harder as he has more and more beads and pieces to pull out of the dish to get to the pellets he wants to eat. Some birds may avoid them and eat around them and that’s okay too.

Photo by www.richwallerart.com

Easy Foraging Tip #2: Plain white paper.

You can either fold the paper like shown above or crumble little pieces up like this:

Have them be the same size as the wooden beads and add them into the dish as well. This will get your bird picking something up and tossing it out or shredding the paper that’s in the way of his food. You can put all different sized pieces in there and even wrap some pellets up in some of the pieces for him to see and discover.

Easy Foraging Tip #3: More white paper.

This time you’re using sheets of white paper. Take the sheet and lay it over your bird’s food dish half way or 1/4 of the way so your bird can still mostly see the food inside. By either mother nature or your bird, your bird will move the paper off of it. Do this for a few days until you can cover the bowl completely and your bird moves the paper off of its bowl to eat.

You should still have all the wooden beads and pieces of small paper inside the dish.

Easy Foraging Tip #4: Using more white paper… and a rubber band…

Place the white paper over the food bowl and this time poke a hole in the center of the paper and wrap it around the food dish so it holds a bit tightly but don’t secure it with anything.

Once your bird is examining it curiously and moving it off the food dish, then secure the paper down with a rubber band and the hole poked in the middle to try to get your bird to start from the hole and break open the rest of the paper to get to its food inside.

Easy Foraging Tip #5: Now do a little less with what ya got.

Now do the same thing with no poked hole. Just secure the paper around the food dish and don’t poke a hole, leave that part up to your bird.

Photo by Jamieleigh
Location: Orlando, FL
Foraging: Galah “Bandit”

These tips will get you started on very basic and super simple ways to get your bird to start knowing about what foraging is all about in easy steps for both of you. Once your bird has this mastered, secure down more layers of paper to make it thicker and harder for your bird to break through.

If you’re more of a video type of person, I made this pretty awesomely unorganized video demonstrating it all for you:

Have fun and get creative, the possibilities with foraging are endless!

For those of you who don’t know me yet, my name is Mel Vincent and I live in Melbourne, Australia. I’m a wildlife rescuer, vet student and animal trainer. I share my life with 8 FIDs (feathered children), a dog and cat.

I have been involved in wild animal rescue for as long as I can remember. As a child, I often had my latest rescue with me at school in order to keep up with orphaned animal feeding times.My parents tried very hard to curb my behaviour and turn me into a ‘real lady’ but gave up after an incident where I filled my brand new sewing basket with butterflies and spiders (I wanted to see how their mouthparts worked). Mum screamed when she found them. Oops. Fortunately for me, my father proved very handy at building enclosures to keep whatever animal I was caring for out of my sewing basket. Mum was eventually pacified, especially when I took to knitting (with the aid of a feathered friend). Mind you, I had to break my hip before she could get me to sit still for long enough!

Mel at 13, with a pet budgie

When I left school, I jumped in to a university degree where I studied professional writing, psychology and history. I moved through a huge range of careers, one moment I’d be teaching ballet, the next I was working in retail management. I flicked between tutoring in English as a second language, or singing and playing in a band. I even ran my own jewelry design company. Basically I did anything that would support my ‘hobby’ of rescuing and training animals. In my spare time, I was attending every animal husbandry course I could find. I was also attending multiple animal behaviour training seminars and classes. My poor cattle dog was put through a LOT of different types of training.

Moono the red heeler at dog school

It took a natural disaster to make me realize that I may have missed my professional calling. In finding myself dealing with animal bushfire victims, I realized that people were always going to know me as someone to call to help animals in need. I felt I had a responsibility to get the qualification to better be able to deal with that. The certificates and short courses were no longer enough for me. I joined several wildlife rescue organisations and completed their training courses but still not satisfied I turned back to university.

Mel releasing a rehabilitated mother ringtail possum with her 2 babies

I am now halfway through a university degree in Animal & Veterinary Biosciences. I have become the type of nerd who enjoys reading medical journal articles as bedtime stories. The course that I’m doing can lead to being a vet, or a multitude of other animal-orientated careers. I absolutely love it. It’s amazing how much you can learn in a course like this and not just about animals. The course includes botany subjects (well let’s face it plants are what most animals eat) and a lot of human medicine too.

Examining a rescued Tawny Frogmouth

I accidentally became a bird person just before I started to seriously study animals. I say accidentally, because I didn’t choose to go out and buy a bird. I had grown up with them, but I hadn’t ever really appreciated them. My galah, Morgy, had her own ideas about my potential and decided to move in one day. She literally ran into my garage and bit anyone who tried to remove her. She had a leg band that told me she wasn’t wild and she was screaming “Hello Cocky” as if it was the world’s biggest insult. I spent over a year looking for her owner without success. If they had been looking for her – I would have found them. I have no doubt she was abandoned. I suspect this may have been due to her enjoyment in taking chunks off the nearest human. Apparently the more blood she drew, the happier she was.

Morgy the Eastern Galah vocally refusing to interact

So I found myself on the internet, somewhat cynically listening to Chet’s spiel about his cure for a biting bird. It was all very well for him to say it worked, but I had the queen of the vampire birds living with me. It’s not like I was uninformed on animal training. I’d attended enough courses. I’d even taught my dog to skateboard. Ok, I was still struggling to convince my cat that my bed is not the place to leave live snails – but overall I wasn’t bad at animal training.
Fortunately for me, Chet proved me wrong. With the aid of the birdtricks course, the queen of the vampire birds became a valued household member. Ok, she still seems to find it amusing to throw things on the ground in front of my mother (who is a neat freak), but the change in Morgy is quite amazing.
Before I really knew what hit me, I had become a bird person and the willing slave to a whole flock of birds. I enrolled in every bird course/subject I could find. I even fly interstate to parrot seminars. I’ve found myself working with my birds whenever I’m not studying them. Thanks to the trick training course, Morgy and her sidekick Merlin even go out to schools and events with me, to help train kids on what to do if they find injured wildlife and how to look after parrots. They have a whole routine worked out where they inform the children that they’re smarter than them, proceed to make me look ridiculous and give constructive information on how much they dislike vegetables (just like the children) but are supposed to eat them. Merlin drives his point home by throwing snow peas at the kids. It is possible that I have found the only legal way to throw vegetables at small, annoying children without being charged with assault!

Teaching kids Wildlife Awareness with Merlin's help

I now have a permanent flock of 8. I live with 4 galahs, 2 rainbow lorikeets, a musk lorikeet and a male eclectus. Working in animal rescue, you can probably work out that they all have long sob stories associated with how they came to be with me permanently. They all have amazing personalities. My house is never quiet and my life is never boring. I’m quite sure if it ever becomes quiet and boring, I can rely on one or more of the FIDs to come up with sounds loud enough to convince a neighbour that I’m strangling a small child and need to urgently be reported to the police for child abuse. The complaint may not be entirely unfounded because if Pepi (my eclectus) doesn’t stop doing his best imitation of Justin Bieber (off-key), then the strangling noises may yet become more realistic. I’m not very successfully trying to convince him that two hours straight of “Baby Baby Ohhhhhh” is enough.
I look forward to sharing my blog posts with you all, because if there’s one thing I know about the guys at birdtricks – they’re contagious and attract some amazing people to the online world of parrot discussion.

My name is Heather Scott, and I am the bird trainer and presenter at the Tropical Butterfly House, Wildlife and Falconry Centre, which is a small zoo in Sheffield, England. Dave clearly stated: “It’s important to mention you’re on the other side of the pond, since you guys talk funny” so there you have it!

Bonnie, Green-winged Macaw, about to land

In April 2010, I was lucky enough to land this dream job; I present the Parrot Displays which feature all the favourite tricks (bike-riding, skateboarding, basketball, talking and lots more!), along with the Aerial Antics display which includes free-flying Green-winged and Hahn’s Macaws, and birds of prey including Hawks, Falcons, Owls, a Black Kite and a Kookaburra, also not forgetting our stunning White Storks (although they can’t fly just yet, just walk and sort of skip!).

Heather with Kookie the Kookaburra, photo by Laura Martin

As well as presenting the displays, I am also responsible for training all the birds, preparing their food, cleaning their enclosures, providing enrichment, and generally looking after them.

I’m really pleased to begin writing blog articles for Birdtricks.com as I’ve found them to be an incredible resource in terms of training advice and practical information on keeping parrots happy and healthy. Also, as I’m sure many of you do, I feel like I know them quite well even though we haven’t met in person and love seeing their Facebook posts.

I guess mine is a slightly different perspective, as the parrots I train and look after are not my own (although if I could, I would take them all home!) but I do spend a great deal of time with my feathered friends and hope to share fun stories with you about them alongside the useful stuff. Training the Macaws for free-flying is my biggest achievement and I still feel really proud every time I see them soaring up high, circuiting round and round until I call them back in to land!

Bonnie and Alfie, Green-winged Macaws, ready for take off! Photo by Laura Martin

I’d like to point out that I had no previous experience at all with parrots before this so it has been a very steep learning curve for me and I’m still learning new things all the time! Before my first day of the job, I spent a couple of weeks researching as much as I could about parrot care and training but nothing could have prepared me for the amazement of my first day working with them. Just “wow!!” was basically the feeling, I could not believe how incredible it felt just to have a parrot willingly step onto my hand and how lucky I was to see such beautiful birds so close.

I wonder if everyone remembers that first moment?

Ché and Esteban, Hahn's Macaws, photo by Laura Martin

As the weeks went on, I was stunned as I discovered how individual their personalities were and it’s safe to say they secured a place in my heart from day one (and that’s even with Jasper, our African Grey, taking a massive chomp on my finger as a result of my clumsy, inexperienced and nervous attempt at picking him up!)

As this blog is about parrots, I’m just going to sneak in a little something about the meat-eating birds I work with, who are also spectacular! Alfie the Turkey Vulture, for example, is a very impressive bird and clever enough to learn tricks too… trouble is he’s a real character (sometimes a very mischievous boy actually) who has stolen sandwiches and nipped at my ankles many a time! I don’t fly him in the displays anymore but we did have some good days!

Alfie the Turkey Vulture

So back to parrots; as well as Jasper, ’my flock’ consists of Rosie the Galah, Molly the Citron-crested Cockatoo, Coco the Blue and Gold Macaw, Ruby the Green-winged Macaw, Charlie the Blue-fronted Amazon, Barney the Eclectus and also the free-flyers: Bonnie and Alfie the Green-winged Macaw siblings, and Ché and Esteban the Hahn’s Macaw siblings (who only hatched in May 2011). I look forward to introducing them all to you at some point!

For more on the Tropical Butterfly House, Wildlife and Falconry Centre, please visit our website and Facebook page.

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!