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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The Complete Guide To Understanding Sleeping Birds
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The Complete Guide To Understanding Sleeping Birds

Mitch,

Have you written about “bird sleep”? I watched an eagle chick go from hatchling to fledgling and during the process, both the chick and parents seemed to sleep only periodically, preening much of the night.

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Lessons Learned From This Successful Captive Blue Front Amazon Pet Bird Keeper
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Lessons Learned From This Successful Captive Blue Front Amazon Pet Bird Keeper

Learn Amazon parrot care from one of Windy City Parrot’s customers – who gets it.

Hello, Mitch

I’ve followed your blog for quite a while and always appreciate your perspectives and insights. I was pretty much gutted when I read your article on Sunday … “Birds in cages suffer all their lives.”

I want my bird to have a happy and healthy a life as possible, but I read and hear so much contradictory information that I’m really not sure if I am providing what she needs— and I do try.

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The Secret of Do Birds in Cages Suffer All Their Lives?
selective focus of bright amazon parrot sitting in bird cage

The Secret of Do Birds in Cages Suffer All Their Lives?

I’ve often said the perfect size cage for a Green Wing Macaw is 30 acres. Many birds can and do suffer miserably in cages. There are ways we can offset the majority of the stress for our captive birds — but many of us do not.

Full transparency — I’m a companion to one Senegal parrot and four budgies. That in and of itself does not make me an expert. What makes me an expert in my 15 years of interacting with tens of thousands of captive bird owners while operating the Windy City Parrot website

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Do Hormones Control This Amazons Seasonal Regurgitation?
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Do Hormones Control This Amazons Seasonal Regurgitation?

Dear Mitch, Catherine, and associates,

First thank you for the opportunity to contact you about my parrot, who’s a BF Amazon, named “Dollar.” I wish to add, I adopted him at 6 yrs old, and he wouldn’t let me call him any other name than what it had been.

So, he’s a fabulously happy birdie, but several years in a row around this time of year, he begins to regurgitate and swallow, over and over again. He holds the top of a bell and raises and lowers his head like an oil well, only really fast.
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Does UV Light Really Help Produce Vitamin D3 in Birds?
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Does UV Light Really Help Produce Vitamin D3 in Birds?

Have you ever wished you could see the additional ultraviolet light spectrum that birds can?

I’ve been a strong proponent of using light cycles to interrupt the circadian rhythms of our pet birds 

I’m also fully convinced that no amount of artificial lighting over birdcage will help a bird produce vitamin D3 regardless of the lumens, quality of the ultraviolet spectrum emitted or the distance from the light source to the cage 

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Why Are Veterinarians Injecting This Poison Into Our Birds?
Why Are Veterinarians Injecting This Poison Into Our Birds?

Why Are Veterinarians Injecting This Poison Into Our Birds?

File under “Our vets are injecting this sh#t into our birds – really”?

The reason I bring this up is an article that came across my desktop recently having to do with a drug called “Lupron”. Popcorn our cockatiel received two injections (at $80 per shot) over her 12 visits with our vet.

I read about it a lot on Facebook – Lupron is used to reduce egg laying and calm hormonal changes in birds. Its use is widespread in avian medicine. It is also available for cats and dogs.

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The Challenge of Caring for a One-eyed African Grey
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The Challenge of Caring for a One-eyed African Grey

Aloha!

I am truly enjoying your email newsletters. Very informative.

Need some of your advice, I have a Timneh African Gray named “Saber”, now I think about 30 years old. I ended up buying him when he was about 3-4 years old. For several months I would visit the pet shop and always stopped by Sabers cage to play and talk with him.

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