Bird Cage - Windy City Parrot - Windy City Parrot

Last Updated on September 30, 2023 by Mitch Rezman

Much has been written about the bird cage. Almost every web site that tries to sell you a bird cage will offer information on how to purchase the right bird cage. Proper bird cage bar spacing, proper bird cage size – every bird cage website has an opinion.

At the end-of-the-day, much of the bird cage information you read boils down to just that, opinion. Am I starting to ruffle some feathers – good? The reality is, a reality we’ve built after selling a bird cage to thousands of pet bird owners.

So for the purpose of this discussion I’d like to start – at the beginning. That’s where, you know – we take the birds out of the sky and put them in jails usually no larger than 12 square feet. You’ll read all over the web, that “you should get the biggest bird cage you can afford.” “Bird cage bar spacing should be this dimension for this particular species.”

Great information but we’re dealing with animals that would normally fly from 20 to 100 miles a day searching for food. Making dozens of stops along the way. Yet the questions are asked repeatedly – what’s the best bird cage for my bird?

There’s a point here somewhere and that is, the right bird cage for your bird works for both you and the bird. Let’s start with some of the features that have to work for you. We recommend a bird cage no smaller that 32 inches x 23 inches for African Grey size birds. That’s 6 square feet. Add another square foot for bird cage seed guards.

So you have to find a place for this bird cage which we’ve now determined is the size of a small sofa. And the bars. We talk about bird cage bar spacing because of the bars – lots of them. One inch bar spacing – a 32 inch wide x 23 inch deep bird cage means you’re putting roughly one hundred powder coated steel bars in the room.

“Honey, I’m out of room in the garage, do you mind if I stack a hundred 5 foot long steel bars in the family room? I’ll make sure they’re arranged neatly so I can contain an animal with 10,000 feathers and a really sharp beak we’ve been thinking about getting?”

Put’s it in a different light, doesn’t it? So, let’s start with proper planning. have you measured the space available for the bird cage? Bird’s like privacy, can you put it next to one, or preferably two walls? Is your floor ready for an assault of uneaten bird food and bird poop? Unless you have a solid surface floor, we recommend placing a. office chair mat or a sheet of linoleum, to protect the floor.

Can your bird reach walls, window coverings or lamp cords from within the bird cage? Do you have a play top bird cage? Curtains can be quite inviting especially if accessible from the top of a play area. Proper bird cage placement will help keep your bird out of harms way. And your home from destruction.

The color of the bird cage is purely a human choice, the bird doesn’t care. The bird really doesn’t see the bars. We feel platinum (light grey) hides bird poop the best. That said, the color of bird cage bars will make a big difference in how the bird cage is seen in any given room. If you put a large black bird cage in a room with white walls, it will look bigger than a large white bird cage in a room with white walls. The flip side is a green bird cage will detract less from a green bird. A white bird cage will accent a green bird.

Ok let’s circle back to the bird cage size discussion. One of the examples I like to use when starting off talking about proper bird cage sizing is when I made a particular bird cage delivery. It was a far south western Chicago, suburb. Because of the distance and late Chicago rush hour traffic, I arrived about 9:00 PM.

I bought the 2 bird cage boxes into the the “bird room” for the new addition, a Military Macaw. The new bird was the sixth bird including a Hyacinth Macaw, 2 Greenwing Macaws and two Blue & Gold Macaws. Each bird had it’s own cage. What’s really a amazing was the room was not all that big!

The biggest bird cage in the room was a beautiful antique round cage for the Hyacinth. Couldn’t’ have been more than 30 inches in diameter – collective gasp now. How dare they put such a big beautiful bird in such a small bird cage!

No sooner had I leaned the two bird cage boxes against a wall, the woman whose home I was in, clapped her hands twice, barked out “bed time” and all the birds, except the new Military Macaw, hopped right into their own cage (all bird cage doors were open). It was amazing to watch.

Before I could spurt out the obvious question, she began to explain that she worked from home. The birds were let out every day about 7:00 AM when she got up put coffee on. They stayed out until about 8: PM ( a little later that night because of my tardiness) and were quite happy to enjoy birdie bed time in bird cages that were relatively confining. The point here, there is no right size for a bird cage, it’s really between you and the bird.