Hyacinth macaw

There was a video on Youtube some years ago featuring an african grey with the nastiest vocabulary I have ever heard. It said not only the worst of the worst words known to English slang, but it used them to descriptively detail human anatomy.

It was obvious that these words had not been simply overheard and repeated – they had been taught. The video had a gazillion hits on it. I am by no means prudish, but hearing these words said with an african grey’s perfect clarity, my jaw bounced off the floor.

congo african grey

There are those who might find this kind of thing funny. Let me tell you why it is not:

Often, unforeseen thing happen in life. People lose their jobs and their houses – eventually we all die. Circumstances may dictate that your bird be rehomed. We need to prepare our parrots in many ways for that possibility. They should be well socialized and able to adapt to change. They should NOT be able to vividly describe activities that take place in a bedroom.

A bird that has an offensive vocabulary will be difficult to rehome. It would not be suitable for a family with children or for those who are sensitive to vulgarity. It might be hard to find a willing bird sitter when you want to go on vacation, and it might cause people to not want to visit your home.

Blue throated macaws

Our birds pick up enough colorful language just by overhearing what we say in their presence. Abu, my first umbrella cockatoo, learned the term “shut up” in an innocent way. A friend came by to show me a guitar he had bought for next to nothing from a person who was unaware of its value. When he told me what he had paid, I excitedly said: “Shut. Up.” (in the same way you would say “no way”). That’s all it took. From that point on, whenever the conversation in the house would get lively, Abu would tell us to “shut up”.

One day my daughter’s teacher came by to drop something off and she asked to see the parrot my daughter talked about all day long. She greeted Abu with a cheerful hello and was told to “shut up” in an equally cheerful tone. It was a bit embarrassing.

Umbrella cockatoo

Wild parrots learn about appropriate behavior from their flockmates. For a captive parrot, that responsibility falls to us. Just as is the case with children, we have to demonstrate with our own behavior that which is acceptible, since it will likely be imitated. Ultimately, our bird will pay the price for our lapses in judgement.

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!

Camelot macaw

As I was driving the other day, I was thinking about the huge contribution that Irene Pepperberg and the amazing Alex made to our knowledge of avian cognition. Without she and Alex, and our acceptance of her findings, I wonder if the avian community would be using terms like “enrichment” today.
Life was uncertain for Dr. Pepperberg. She became outcast among her peers. Grants to fund her work were hard to come by and it must have seemed to her that her career was always on the verge of collapse. We owe her a debt of gratitude for her perseverence.
We, who spend our lives with birds, were amazed with Alex’s feats, but I doubt that many of us were very surprised. We routinely watch our birds doing things that defied the scientific world’s former claims. Birds are now ranked alongside small primates in their demonstration of intelligence – a position they have earned. HA!

Blue throated macaw

I wonder where humans went wrong that we saw fit to coin terms like “bird brain” or “dumb animal”. Somewhere we lost sight of the fact that WE are classified first as “mammalian” and as “human” second. We have gotten the idea into our head that because we evolved to develop “big brains” that we are better than the rest of the creatures that inhabit this world.
The fact is, our big brains have made us vulnerable in many ways. Our brain, only 2% of our body weight, uses 20% of our total energy intake, increasing need in that area. Our infants are unusually helpless and remain dependent for a very long time.
If WE are taken out of our “natural” environment and forced to live in the extreme conditions faced by most of our wildlife; foraging for food and determining what is safe and most nutritious to eat, building shelter from the elements, etc., most of us would be dead within a week. When a animal is placed in our environment, they adapt to survive.

Rosebreasted cockatoo

Yes, our big brains have invented some amazing technlogy (some of which we are now dependent on). And the human life expectancy has increased through the advancement of the sciences. But to say that we have evolved as “superior” is just wrong.
Evoution means “change”, not “improvement”. Each species on this planet has adapted over millions of years to become exactly what it needs to be to survive in a changing world environment. All life is perfect, just as it is. And as to the intelligence of these “lower” species, we are not smart enough to judge it with any certainty and are continually surprised to find how little we know.