Make Bird Toys That Are Free – Cheap And Do It Yourself With These Videos
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Make Bird Toys That Are Free – Cheap And Do It Yourself With These Videos

Bird toys are to the bird cage, what leaves are to the trees your bird would be living in in the wild.

It’s said birds live by the 60/40 rule. They spend 60% of their time looking for food and 40% of their time trying not to be food. Looking for food is called foraging.

A Cockatoo parrot living in the wild will fly as many as 100 miles in a day. The bird will have several dozen stops and regular feeding places. At each stop they’ll use their strong beak (and claws) to look for food.

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How Windy City Parrot Looks At Our Bird’s Holistically
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How Windy City Parrot Looks At Our Bird’s Holistically

Pet food manufacturers as well as Internet “influencers” somehow associate the word “holistic” with “healthy” which indicates (to me) they clearly never read the definition of “holistic“.

 

ho·lis·tic – adjective

 

PHILOSOPHY – characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

 

Thus from this point forward, you will go forth and snigger the next time someone tries to sell you holistic anything.

 

When you interact with us,

 

whether it be here, on our website, social media, email, or any other form of communication, we try to introduce you to holistic bird health as a way of succeeding with captive bird care – meaning: 

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How Do Amazon Parrots Use Light to Synthesize Vitamin D Having No Preening Gland? And Other Captive Amazon Care Questions
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How Do Amazon Parrots Use Light to Synthesize Vitamin D Having No Preening Gland? And Other Captive Amazon Care Questions

How do Amazon parrots use light to synthesize Vitamin D having no preening gland?

As I was curating this post on Amazon parrot questions it got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects, full spectrum lighting and the synthesis of vitamin D in birds.

Amazon parrots are relatively unique having no preening gland (along with doves, pigeons and Hyacinth macaws).

The uropygial aka preening gland oozes a slippery goo which a bird rubs its head and beak against. Then spreads this oil over its feathered body.

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Why Do Parrots Enjoy Mimicking?
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Why Do Parrots Enjoy Mimicking?

How do we know parrots enjoy anything? Another question recently asked on Quora was “what do parrots do for fun”?

We know parrots prefer “working” for food versus simply eating from overflowing bowls of parrot food.

We know correlation does not necessarily imply causation but can we infer that work & play are one and the same for a parrot?

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Do Birds in Cages Suffer All Their Lives?
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Do Birds in Cages Suffer All Their Lives?

Do birds in cages suffer all their lives?

Define suffer? If you don’t know any better how do you know you are suffering?

As good as our intentions are met by many things, they don’t necessarily meet our bird’s “instinctual expectations”.

Define a “cage”. If you talking about a big metal thing with bars that sits in your family room? In reality the entire home is a (bird) cage because the bird is not allowed to leave it unless it’s in a smaller travel cage

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Congratulations – You’re No Longer a Caged Bird Keeper.
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Congratulations – You’re No Longer a Caged Bird Keeper.

You’ve been elevated to zookeeper

Dear Mitch,

I need advice in so many “bird” areas that I don’t know where to begin.  It seems that all the personal bird stores are disappearing and even the good vets are a rarity.  I have been involved with birds for almost thirty years.

I ordered a small crock on Amazon about a year ago and that is how I became “connected” with Windy City, your Sunday newsletters, etc.  It is the result of a vision “issue” that discourages me with the computer and I do much better “talking”.

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What Is the Best Parrot for an Apartment?

What is the best parrot for an apartment? The answers thus far have been pretty limited (on Quora).

We (Mitch & Catherine) used to (until 2019 when we migrated to Indiana) live in a three-flat apartment building, erected circa 1885 in the geographical center of the city of Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood.

It’s 1800 ft.² with 9 1/2 foot ceilings. The all-brick building is quite solid.

We like parrots. We are in the (caged bird) pet supply business. It’s our job to know about them.

For the record, we don’t sell any birds. We simply teach proper care for about 750 captive bird species out of approximately 10,400 species of birds on the planet.

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