Portable Outdoor Parrot Aviary

While on tour for such an extended amount of time, Dave and I wanted to get some kind of portable aviary to be able to house our birds outside so they are still getting lots of natural sunlight and tons of fresh air like they would normally get at home in our aviaries there.

But we couldn’t figure out for the longest time how to go about this. Our requirements were:

1. Affordable (aka cheap)
2. Large (lots of space for the birds)
3. Packs small (easy to travel with)
4. Easy to set up and break down (non-time consuming)

We went through tons of options from seeing if we could convert a dog kennel into an aviary, to looking into getting them custom built, to contacting theme parks to get their mesh usages and use those (upwards of thousands of dollars since the mesh is hand woven with stainless steel metal)

We finally settled on the fact that the aviaries would not be full time, and they would never be in there unattended. Though those things would be nice, they’re a little too tricky for “on the road” for us so we accepted those two things and moved on.

At Walmart we found these 10×10 tents that you can usually find being used at most Farmer’s Markets. They come with optional mesh around them just like a normal tent and have two entrances used with zippers from top to bottom. Stakes go in all 4 corners and you get extras if you want to stake it into the ground even more for safety and windier weather.

Because they’re 10 x 10 we felt there was lots of room for our foraging trees. We wanted to be able to give as many birds free time out there as possible, so the bigger the better.

We set it up at night, so our cockatoo Bondi tried it out for us and upon her approval, we decided we’d let everyone else check it out the next day in daylight so it would be less scary. The shadows were freaking her out a bit in there as we only had one light to use.

This entire set up took us less than 15 minutes to set up!

That is completely ideal for us.

The cost? $50 for the pop up tent and $30 for the mesh that went around it. We happened to find it all on sale and were super pleased with the price and set up time. It literally packs down into a duffel bag and plays big like shown in the photos… it was super affordable and great on time management too. It’s a no brainer to set up. Pushing a foraging tree or two made all the difference in the world so the birds have tons to do. I can’t wait to use it in the day time!