Home made playstand for pet parrots

We get the most innovative, creative people posting on our facebook page for BirdTricks.com. If you aren’t over there already, please take a peak and join us!

One of those people is Vince and his fiance Jen. Vince was constantly posting photos of his supplies and progress while he attempted to make a playstand for his parrots. All the ones in the market nowadays are so expensive, and being able to “do it yourself” really appeals to people right now when you can do it at home for much, much less, and feel great about something you designed and built!

So I asked Vince for some photos, instructions and everything he could give me so that I could publish a blog on his home made parrot stand so that the rest of us can learn a thing or two and start making our own for less!

First off, get to know the maker…

Jen (my fiance) and I are getting married June 24th, 2012 and can’t wait! We have three birds; a sun conure aka “Jeremy”, a gold cap conure aka “Little foot”, and an African gray parrot aka “Grecey”. We got Jeremy first at a pet store; she was all alone. She came right out for me and we knew she was the one. Little foot we got at another pet store… she was only about 6 months when we got her. We walked by her cage and she was playing and we fell in love. We never thought we would get another bird but we did Grecey was only 3 months when we saw her. Yes, as a baby we fell in love and had to get her. We would go down and see her everyday. On the weekends we would spend all day with her. I saw the play stand online and kept looking at it for about a year… when I found the more detailed photos I knew I had to build it.

Here is what you will need to make your very own parrot playstand:

- 3/4 PVC piping (between 80-110 feet)

- 10 elbow 90′s

- 6 caps

- 6 4-ways

- 1 special 3-way

- 77  T’s

- LOTS of colored vet tape

Recently someone on our facebook asked how to get their bird who never ever plays, to play so that he wouldn’t look so bored all the time.

Remember… in the wild, birds aren’t bored because they’ve gotta work for their food all day long, finding it, eating it, storing it, sharing it, playing with it, fighting over it…

In captivity we give them a food dish and the rest of the day to think about the meaning of life.

The best thing you can do for a bird who refuses to play is get them to play by foraging. There’s a great DVD out there called Captive Foraging. I highly recommend it, it’s amazing and works within a budget!

It teaches you how to use household items to encourage your bird to forage (and play) for that food you would normally just give it in a food dish. No more food dishes for your bird – it’s foraging now!

This will knock boredom on the head and out the door. Once a bird learns to forage, it learns to play and you can start getting more and more creative as will your bird – and begin enjoying the challenging tasks that lay ahead of him every day.

Umbrella cockatoo Linus, and me

In the last 15 or 20 years, scientists came to the conclusion that birds are intelligent. More recently, they have considered avian intelligence to be in line with that of the primates. Of course, we bird enthusiasts could have told them this all along, and saved them countless hours and dollars spent in research and studies. But what do we know? We only live with them.
My birds have me in a constant state of amazement with the things they come up with to modify their environments, find solutions to problems or to simply entertain themselves. They learn by watching and take that knowledge and add their unique personal touch to create something new.

Umbrella cockatoo, Linus and Dave

Linus, my umbrella cockatoo, is very task oriented. He will assign himself a chore and spend the entire day, if necessary, to accomplish it. I have come home from work on several occasions to find splintered pieces from his wood toys jammed into every conceivable crevice in his cage. Sometimes he will unfurl an entire roll of adding machine tape and meticulously layer the bottom of his cage, covering every inch of available space. Sometimes he undoes his quick links and places each hanging toy neatly on his shelf perch in the corner of his cage. This is a bird that always finds something to do. The poster child for independent play.
His very favorite activity is pulling his lightweight cage cover inside of the cage and artistically arranging it. Nearly every day I come home to find it in the same configuration: woven into about 12″ of the cage bars, then wrapped about six times around a perch and finally the end is threaded through the hole in a screw eye at the end of the perch. (A screw eye is a closed metal ring that is attached to a screw. They are the things used to hang potted plants from the ceiling, or maybe, in our case, a hanging playgym.)
He has been doing this forever. Every night, when it’s time to cover him up for bed, I have to slowly pull the length of fabric so that it slides through the screw eye, and unwinds from the perch and through the cage bars without it get caught on anything. Sometimes there’s a tug of war as he tries to prevent me from dismantling that which took him so long to engineer.

Umbrella cockatoo

One night at bedtime, as I prepared to ruin his day’s efforts, I felt resistance from the end of the fabric and I wasn’t able to pull it through the screw eye. Linus watched very carefully as I pulled and pulled without success. I opened the cage to find a knot at the very end. I stood there with my mouth hanging open, contemplating that my bird had managed to tie a knot. (Meanwhile, Linus excused himself from the cage and took refuge in one of the kitchen cabinets).
I was shocked, but decided that it had to have been a fluke because, surely, a parrot could never prepare a knot. As it turned out I was right. Never again did I see a knot at the end of the cage cover fabric. Instead, what I found the next night was equally as astounding. Linus had bitten a hole in the fabric and jammed a piece of wood into the hole, once again preventing me from pulling apart his creation. This happened again the next night and the nights following that, until the fabric became too shredded to hold anything he pushed into it.

Umbrella cockatoo

My brilliant bird had discovered from watching ONE TIME, that something placed at the end of the fabric that was larger than the hole in the screw eye would stop me from unraveling his masterpiece. He also discovered, as an added bonus, that he was able to escape every time I had to open the cage to remove his obstruction. How’s THAT for a lesson in avian intelligence?