Did you know statistically 96% of dogs turned into rescues have had no obedience training?
We haven’t found the statistics for birds and parrots but we suspect they are just as high.
Many people get infatuated with only the bird. The beautiful feathers, the possibility of speech and having a lifelong companion.
The Police featuring Sting, one of my favorite artists (and groups) were singing a great little ditty the other day on satellite radio and it got me thinking. The name of the song was Canary In A Coal Mine.
The theme of the song was “you live your life like a canary in a coal mine”. We’ve all had friends like that, but I digress.
For the unindoctrinated or too young to know about this, years ago caged canaries were brought down into coal mine shafts.
They acted as the first warning sign that oxygen was being depleted and replaced with dangerous gases such as methane or carbon monoxide. Their method of warning the coal miners – was to die (in most cases).
Recently Science magazine ran an article entitled “Parrots, songbirds pack more neurons into their forebrains than most mammals”.
Now some scientists are saying that birds are way more intelligent than we ever thought because they somehow counted the total number of forebrain neurons – with soup (we’ll get to that in a bit)!
The study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that 28 bird species have more neurons in their pallial telencephalons, the brain region responsible for higher level learning, than mammals with similar-sized brains.
Not all “ parrots” scream.
South American birds including conures and macaw parrots as well as some Australian parrots like Moluccan cockatoos can be quite noisy. Conversely, African parrots from the poicephalus family are fairly quiet like Senegals, Myers, and Red Bellies.
Big birds like Moluccan cockatoos can scream quite loudly literally at levels that exceed the noise 747 Jumbo jet landing ( approximately 157 decibels).
A clear theme that emerges after reading endless threads on Facebook bird groups is “my bird won’t play with toys” – “my bird doesn’t play with toys” “my bird only wants to chew the keys off my notebook computer”
From Wikipedia we learn Ho·lis·tic – hōˈlistik – adjective – characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.
Another way of putting it is “we are not connecting the dots” Bird food is connected to bird toys which are connected to bird cages and bird stands and everything has to work together.
There is a large overlap of caged bird keepers who claim the birds will eat nothing new nor with a play with toys – which is the problem and the solution – we need to combine the toys with the food – for starters.
My bird(s) will get proper lighting using a timer to provide an accurate light cycle
I will work with my flighted bird to make him or her a better flyer. If my bird is not flighted I will consider allowing the wings to grow out for a more confident bird that screams less. (more…)
It is opaque to me as to why caged bird keepers refuse to embrace clicker training. We spend hundreds (thousands) of dollars on birds, equipment, toys, accessories, and food (thank…
In a recent post, I mentioned learned helplessness and promised you a detailed explanation of what it means, its impacts, and how it happens so that you can avoid making…
We just wanted to say hi, I’m David Jones and this is my 10-month-old “Blue Headed Pionus” whom we believe to be a male at this time. His name is “The Shriek of Araby”, but the vote is still out…!! He is sweet and naughty at the same time. Any tips on what to do when they shriek?
Thanks, David
Hi David,
and Why It’s Essential
This is a follow-up to our recent post about learning how to restrain your bird using the zombie death grip.
The grip goes hand-in-hand with toweling a bird when you need to restrain it for maintenance like nail trimming or a first-aid emergency.
Speaking of emergencies. You have to love technology (or not). It’s been a very wet summer so far much of which has come in the form of storms.