Nanday Goes Peek-A-Boo

Work is crazy right now, so not much time to blog.  My birds come before my blog.  Hopefully things will slow up shortly, but for now, this video is worth a peek - a peekaboo in fact.  It's not my Nanday, but another who is a real charmer by the sound of it.

Enjoy.

Scream Fest...On Purpose

When I adopted my first secondhand parrot, Nanday conure Gigi, I read over and over again how loud Nandays can be.  I wasn't discouraged in the least, but I did read about what to do when your bird is a screamer, or loud, and since then, nine parrots later, this info has come in handy.

First thing to master is " the ignore." Do nothing save for maybe leave the room, which is probably the last thing your parrot wants you to do, but likely the first thing you want to do.  Other than leave, do not respond in any way.  Do not change what you're doing. Do not look at your parrot, tell your bird to be quiet or gently coo to your bird.  Do nada.

The second, more proactive approach is to work a Scream Fest into your daily routine with your bird.  This can be unbelievably satisfying for your bird(s), and if you have a job like I do, it can be a lifesaver in the sanity department.

So how does one go about a Scream Fest?

When I get home for work, all birdies come downstairs and go on their playstands.  After fresh food and water are doled out, and they've had a chance to snack a bit, I grab a bird to help me conduct the evening's symphony (or should I say cacophony?).  I sing loudly to start it off, dancing with conductor bird of the evening on my arm, and then call each bird's name and imitate some sound I know they love to make.   It doesn't take much to get the flock to going.

They scream, sing, whistle, bang bells, and have a grand 'ole time, really, really loudly. The whole affair is ridiculous...looking and sounding.   But who cares?  Our house, our asylum.

We do this for 10 minutes, sometimes 15, if I've had a day from hell.  Then we settle down, the denouement as it were, and it's over.  They go back to eating, preening or playing, and I do what I need to - in relative silence. 

This has worked for me. If you have a problem screamer, let them get it out and have fun doing it with you.  But make the Scream Fest something you initiate, preferably soon after you've come home from work, or returned from errands when your parrot friend is expecting a little acknowledgement and attention from you.

It's not a good idea for you to allow your bird to commence a Scream Fest. This could be confusing - how will your bird know when it's ok and when it's not? 

But do have one regularly, and you'll be amazed at the results.  A Scream Fest a day, keeps crankiness away!

And always keep in mind intense vocalizations we think of as sreaming are completely normal and, one could argue, very appropriate, at dawn and dusk. These are the times parrots are noisy in the wild.  I haven't attempted to change this in my parrots because it doesn't bother me, and I think they should be able to answer nature's call and be parrots.

Birdie Byte
Incidentally, I lucked out because my Gigi is not a very loud bird; I love every last noise she makes.   In fact, I haven't found Nandays to be particularly loud.  My Mitred and Gold-Capped conures can beat a Nanday any day on the vocalization front.  And don't get me started on cockatoos....you cockatoo owners know what I mean - see the video below if you doubt the vocal prowess of a Too.

But ALL BIRDS MAKE NOISE, and frequently they're loudest when it's most inconvenient for you - when you're on the horn with your kid's doctor, or you've just connected with a real live person on the phone after navigating umpteen voice prompts. 

It's really a question of tolerance level.  Before you decide to bring a bird into your life, be sure you know what that species can sound like at its worse.  Visit your local rescue to get acquainted with different species or talk to your avian vet.  If you feel you must have a baby, a sign of a good breeder is one that addresses this question and wants to help find a companion that's right for your temperment.

Senegals - The Little Cubists

I read recently on Dee Haven's rescues about Senegal Brightsides about her affinity of ice cubes.  Other than it generally being quirkily cute, it was fascinating to me because my Senegal Beaker has the same fondness for these frozen treats.  She regularly bobbs for cubes in any water glass that might be sitting about the house, and then holds one in her wee talon and munches on the thing for five, maybe 10 minutes. I've always wondered about it. Is a trait and if it is, what's the attraction or origin of this behavior?

My cursory google research has yielded nothing worthy yet, other than a startling number of people experiencing this same behavior.  So maybe it's not that unusual after all.  

If anyone knows the whys or wherefores of these little cubists' mania, do tell.

For now, take a minute and ponder:

"The Cubist" -- A Photographic Study of Senegal Beaker Having Her Way with an Icy Delight.

Preparing to bob for an ice.

Got one.

Ha, ha, all mine.

I think I'll savor this one lick at a time.

Oh, to hell with that. This is no time to be dainty.

Birdie Byte

Did you know that Senegals have been known to live to 50 in captivity?  Their life span in the wild is 25 to 30, and they are native to West Africa, specifically, if you can believe it, Senegal (wow), Gambia, Guinea-Bisseau and Guinea. Their habitat is open woodland and savannah.  For my part, they are darling, persnickity, somewhat unpredictable, playful and smart.  They love to forage for food in their cages - very quick to figure it all out.

Easy Birdie Bread

Fast and Easy Birdie Muffins


Everyone seems to have their own version of Birdie Bread / Muffins, and I'm no different.

But because this is ridiculously easy, I thought I'd share it.  I give credit for the concoction to Lynne, president of rescue Feathered Sanctuary, for turning me on to this great recipe.

Birdie Muffins
1 box Jiffy corn bread mix
3/4 cup Roudybush crumble pellets
(you can use any smaller pellet, I just happen to think Roudybush crumble works best, particularly for birds who haven't learned to eat their pellets yet; it melts right inot the birdie muffin)
1 egg lightly beaten
1 jar of organic baby food
(sweet potatoes, squash, fruit blends - non-organic baby foods have been found to have carcinogens)
2 T. of water or add a small 4 oz. container of applesauce
Optional: Talk to your avian vet first, but for sick or immune-compromised birds, add in 1/2 bottle (.5 oz) of Avx Booster from Harrisons. Heat the bottle to liquefy.

Mix it all together, and let rest for 5 minutes or so.  Scoop into muffin tins (Baker's Secret and EKCO nonstick bakeware do not contain PTFE, the fumes from which are toxic to our birds - see below for more).

Bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes.  Makes about 12 birdie muffins.

Please do not use bakeware with Teflon as the PTFE fumes emitted from hot Teflon  are deadly to birds.  Two brands of bakeware that do not produce PTFE fumes are Baker's Secret and EKCO.  See a more detailed article on birds and PTFE fumes by clicking here. (By the way, PTFE fumes are not so great for people either.)

Voila! All of my birds eat it up.

Birdie Byte
Birdie muffins or birdie bread with pellets mixed in is a great way to get pellets into a bird that prefers seed (wouldn't they all, if they have their druthers?). An all-seed diet isn't good for our birds.  Pellets, as well as a nice assortment of veggies, fruits, sprouts and whole grains, is what they need to be healthy and happy. 

Off-limit foods and drink:
Chocolate, avocado, parsley, mushrooms, onion, alcohol of any kind, "recreational" drugs and more.
For a more complete list of toxic foods and plants, click here.

Birdie Bread Mixes & Recipes
Momma Bird birdie bread mix
Harrisons birdie bread mix
BirdsnWays recipes (birdie bread / muffin recipes and more)
Amazing Amazons Birdie Bread recipe

Shop Rescues

I thank the organizations that saved my birds,
like silly Mealy Amazon Fred below, in the first place.

I am grateful to all of the good people who do animal rescue work. It is a heartbreaking road, but thankfully, rewarding too.

So if you love animals, why not do all you can to help these groups? You can't beat an outright cash donation, which I'm sure any of the rescues to the right would appreciate, but there are other ways to help too.

Shop
Many rescues sell supplies to help fund their operations. Find out if you have a parrot rescue in your area, call them up and ask if they sell supplies. I bet they'd love to have you as a customer.

If you don't have a parrot rescue nearby, or if you do, but they don't sell supplies, buy from one over the web.

Give Stuff
Rescues need all kinds of stuff that you probably have in excess, from towels to TVs. Most have a wish list posted on their site or at their location.  Cages, playstands, DVD players, radios, computers, printers and much more. And while rescues expect and appreciate hand-me downs, they are not your local dump. Used is fine; dilapidated, disintegrating or just plain gross isn't. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does need to be clean and safe.

If you're a rescue, and you sell bird supplies in your town or over the web, please post your site in a comment, so I can list it to the right under my rescue and / or shopping links.

Birdie Byte

Online Rescue Shops
The Gabriel Foundation's Bird Brain store
Healthipet Network - New Jersey

Friendship & Positive Reinforcement

Allie, My Ham
I mentioned in an earlier blog that parrot behavior consultant Liz Wilson focused on two themes when I contacted her about how to "handle" my Military Allosious, or Allie, his unruly behavior and his relentless regurgitation.

The first was foraging which I wrote about here.

The second was to think about relationships with companion parrots as friendships, not parent-child or romantic relationships. Allie was regurgitating because he found me attractive, as in mate attractive. I was unintentionally doing stuff that returned his affections - holding him too close, kissing him too much. You get the picture.

My second challenge with Allie was teaching him some rules of engagement. His freewheeling lifestyle pre-me didn't help. This was a bird that was permitted free reign in his former home. There, his cage didn't even have a door on it.

All of these factors contributed to his demand for attention that was turning aggressive when he didn't get what he wanted from me.

He wanted to gurge. He wanted to turn the back of an antique wooden chair into kindling. He wanted to crawl on the rug and regurgitate all over it. He wanted to step up and never, ever step down to go in his cage or onto a playstand.

If I disallowed any of these behaviors, he lunged, bit, hung off my shirt in true contortionist fashion with the goal of landing a strategic bite to show his displeasure. Once, hanging and swinging upside down from my sleeve, he took a nice chunk out of my stomach that sent me crumpled to the floor. I was not pleased. I made the call my avian vet and then to Liz.

What I needed to do was back off and establish some boundaries for myself in order to help him. I needed to remind him and me that he's a parrot and teach him parrot skills like working for food, foraging. I also needeed to reinforce good behaviors and limit opportunities for bad ones. I needed to be strategic about my interaction. I needed to use my head and my heart, so we could have a nurturing, respectful relationship.

No dominance. No anger. No force of any kind. Mutual respect, that's the key.

• We must respect parrots' nature, their species, the behaviors that make them parrots.
• We must respect their ability and need to make choices - on their own, not forced by us and our desires. Sometimes we may or may not agree with these choices, but our role is not to berate or punish. It is to support and guide towards better choices, like one would with a friend.
• We must behave, or learn to behave, in ways that earns us respect in the eyes of our parrots.

Respect allies nicely with the idea of positive reinforcement too. Barbara Heidenreich founder of Good Bird, Inc magazine and web site uses and teaches this method, as do many other animal behaviorists and trainers. I use it with my birds, but more consciously now than I did before in everyday activities with my parrots. I still find myself saying "No" on occassion to things I don't want them to do, as a reflex, but I'm getting better.

A simple 1, 2, 3 example of positive reinforcement:

1. Your parrot is screaming. You ignore the screaming or leave the room, right? (You do not coo, tell him to shut up, or respond to this screaming in any way verbally or physically, except to maybe leave the room, right? Because if you would do any of these things, that would be encouragement because it gets a reaction which is what your bird wants -- any reaction. So you do not respond or react.
2. Eventually he quiets down (Yes, this could take some time).
3. He quiets down, so you proceed to fawn all over him. He gets to step up, he gets a head scritch, he gets a favorite nut in its shell or a piece of dried fruit. He gets what he wanted, something that's pleasurable to him, because he's quiet, which is what you want. This is postive reinforcement. Everybody's happy.

It works. It really does. For everything. But it isn't an instant fix. It takes time for your parrot to grasp what's happening, particularly if you haven't been operating like this from the start with your bird. Your parrot will experience some confusion if a certain behavior he exhibited used to get a rise out of you, and now it doesn't. He'll try harder for awhile to make what used to work, still work. Hang on gently, but hang on. This can take months or years. Please stick with it, and you will reap the reward of a mutally respectful, happy relationship with your parrot.

If you're wondering, Allie and I are doing great. He's learning to step down when I request it (stepping up is never a problem with this bird). He rarely lunges. His gurging has lessened, some of which I do credit to the Lupron injections to control his hormones. And he forages or rampages cardboard boxes for his ultimate foods - almonds and walnuts. Nuts for the nut. In Allie's case ,we were lucky. Allie was a fast learner. It took us about five months. But we've much more to learn together, and I look forward to every day with him and all of my birds.

Befriending a parrot is a process, not a project with a beginning and end. In that way, it is kind of like parenting except these kids don't grow up and leave the house. They depend on us for their well-being for as long as we share our lives with them, and in return, we get immeasurable joy.

Birdie Byte
Make it your mission to find out what motivates your bird.

What does he / she like best? Nuts? Sunflower seeds. Head scritches?

Your relationship with your bird will blossom if you know this potent piece of info. For my senegal, Beaker, it's head scritches.

For Allie, its walnuts, almonds, and a short spell in front of the mirror laughing together, or dancing.

If it's food, remove that food from your bird's regular diet and only use it for training. I didn't do this at first, because I'm wussy, and thought it was mean 'cause "they liked it." It's not mean. Once I came to grips with this little concept, we were full steam ahead.

Please post a comment about what you find motivates your bird to learn with you.

Baths

Splish Splash Elmo's Taking a Bath...in His Water Bowl
Some kind of regular bathing is critical to our birds' feather condition and overall well being. Being forest, and more often rain forest dwellers, you'd think they'd all love baths. Well, I'm here to tell you they often don't at first, but they can learn to like, if not love, a dip.

Of my nine, two are offended by showers. Three tolerate them, perching stoic on my hand or nestled into my chest. The remaining four seem to truly like getting wet, under the right circumstances.

For the conures and parakeet, a bowl, their own water bowls mostly, is the chosen method (see above). Senegal Beaker takes the plunge into a bowl of some sort too, but she likes showers. My younger Military macaw Theo like showers - now. I had to introduce the concept slowly, showing great enthusiasm for the practice and a demonstrated willingness to get just as wet as he did.

I take all but the truly offended two, Mitred Little Fred and Military Allie, into the shower with me, one at a time once a week in the winter time. In summer, more often. I adjust the water temperature to the cooler side of lukewarm which they seem to prefer, although I can't say I do. I freeze my tush off Dec-March. We bathe early in the day so they have time to dry before going to bed.

Allie is just coming around to baths in the bathtub, water an inch or two deep. We may or may not move onto showers. Again, going slow, steady and short is proving the way to his approval. I use a spray bottle on the gentle setting to keep his feathers neat and tidy in between bath forays. The conures, parakeet and senegal want no part of the spray bottle.

Little Fred takes a bath in his water bowl whenever he feels like it, and we leave it at that. I've had little Fred two years and my vet suspects he was a wild caught bird. His age, mid twenties, the tattoo on the under side of his wing, and his propensity to panic attacks are apparently telltale signs of a wild caught Mitred, which was a very popular conure to trap and sell. Fred is easily frightened to the point of terror, so if his water bowl is what he prefers, so be it. He dives in his bowl often, so I figure he's adequately clean.

Bath Dos

• Luke warm to cool water temp
• If you use a pan or bowl to offer a bath, keep the water level shallow, to an inch or two, depending on bird size.
• Bathe from morning to early afternoon only, so there's time to dry and preen.
• Introduce bathing slowly, keep at it steadily, and keep each encounter short and pleasurable. This could take months or a year or two. But slow is preferable to a permanent phobia of water.
• Show your bird showering is fun. Shower in front of your bird. He / she can watch from another place in the bathroom, or a perch in the shower but out of the water. Make sure your toiler lid is closed in your bathroom and the door is closed. The humidity from your shower will do your bird good.
• Shower together, if your bird likes it.
• Always supervise when your bird is bathing.

Bath Donts

• Don't point a shower or sprayer to their nares (nostrils).
• Don't put a wet/damp bird near a draft.
• Don't use soap, shampoo or anything but JUST WATER. Any stuff you put on your bird's feathers will be ingested during preening.
• Don't put your bird to bed wet.
• Don't force a bird to bathe a certain way. Experiment until you find a way he or she enjoys water. Baths should be fun and refreshing.
• Don't use a blow dryer which dries out feathers and skin, defeating the purpose of the bath in the first place. "Towel dry" your bird if you and your bird are accustomed to towels.

Birdie Byte
Adorable Quaker Parrot Taking a Bath

So, You Want a Parrot?

Gigi the Gymnast
I am very much in favor of adopting rescue birds before "buying" a parrot. That really goes for almost any pet. It's not that I'm against breeding cats and dogs; I'm against animal abuse, neglect and over-population. The unwanted pets -loving homes equation is simply too imbalanced, and rescues are overflowing with animals - cats, birds, bunnies, reptiles and parrots - as a result.

But there are factors that make parrots more prone to rescue than a cat or dog. Just a few are:

• much longer life span
• behavioral problems that are frustrating and confusing for most people to solve - screaming, feather to furniture destruction, self-mutilation, biting, hormones and more
• greater expense; greater care demands
• the reality that parrots are not domesticated; even parrots bred to be companions are only one generation removed from the wild and, therefore, require more education, even skill, to handle
• impatience
  

Unlike a cat or dog, parrots' natural behaviors don't really suit homeo sapien home life. They're built and programmed to fly, not sit in a cage, even perch on a play gym all day. So I'm not really sure parrots should be bred (unless to prevent extinction and in a very conscientious fashion). I'm quite certain they, and other animals, shouldn't be mass produced for people to purchase on a whim.
A parrot, even a canary or cockatiel, should be a very considered addition to anyone's life. I can unequivocally say parrots should never be acquired on impulse. Never.

Ok, so never say never, and knock me off my soap box, I did that very thing with my first parrot Gigi. Adopted her clueless. But the two things I know I do have is an incredible compassion and patience for animals and insatiable curiosity, both favorable attributes for parrot living.

How did Gigi's arrival come about?

I was working for a local land trust and a colleague announced one day she needed to find a home for her family parrot, a 3 1/2 year old Nanday conure. (A what? I'd never heard of a conure, or a Nanday) She had bought the bird for her son and daughter who were now teenagers who had become disinterested, an all too common situation. The little parrot lived in the laundry room (ugh).

I don't know what made me say it, but "I'll take her" came out. I had never had a parrot, never even thought about having a parrot. I knew nothing. It marked the beginning of what is becoming a lifestyle - parrot living.
After a compatibility visit - it was love at first site for Gigi and me - and three weeks of intense preparation and research, including purchasing every parrot book I could lay my hands on and visiting every web site I could find on the subject, I brought her home for good. Three years later, she remains the light of my life. She is a perfect bird save for a persistent and heartbreaking medical problem I'll cover in another post.

Each of my nine parrots are rescues, each were relinquished for different reasons, and it all started with this peach, this sweetheart, this exceptional creature, Gigi.

I am indebted to my colleague and my Gigi forever for introducing me to the wonderful world of parrot living.

Birdie Byte
Gigi recommends research and rescue if you want to befriend a bird, great or small.

Rescues that take in birds and find them loving homes:
Feathered Sanctuary, my local rescue in Holtwood, Pa., where I adopted all of my birds, volunteer and serve on the board.
Best Friends
Gabriel Foundation
The Lily Sanctuary
Phoenix Landing


Great reads:

Avian Enrichment Web Site

My little plucker, Mitred conure Fred. Very likely a wild caught parrot,
he's estimated to be about 25 years old.



I'll be short and sweet on this gem, Avian Enrichment.com, a fabulous e-commerce web site for parrot toys, games, training and information. I highly recommend their e-newsletter, and their collection of funny parrot videos is a hoot. There'll be more to come on this resource.


Birdie Byte
Check out http://www.cockatoorescue.org/ to see their exquisite aviaries that strike me as easy to build at a reasonable cost. They even provide detailed instructions on how to build one for your own flock.