Last Updated on May 12, 2023 by Catherine Tobsing

budg·er·i·gar
ˈbəjərēˌɡär
noun

A small gregarious Australian parakeet that in the wild is green with a yellow head. It is popular as a pet bird and has been bred into a variety of colors.

This article below about budgies was originally written on April 14, 2010. Fast-forward to the fall of 2016 when we acquired Bacon our first budgie.

Today our family includes 8 budgies, at one time there were 12. Some have passed (all rescues with no history). We consider 3 grandbabies that were hatched a few months ago.

“If you going to talk the talk then you must walk the walk” has been said an infinite number of times over the years.

April 14, 2010: Cleaning and feeding 4 millet-loving budgies and a Senegal on a daily basis provides lots of insight which allows me to understand what all of you go through daily to one degree or another.

Before resetting this journey:

Every morning the light over the budgie’s cage turns on at the same time due to the timer, and they instantly begin to chat, plan and plot their day.

It’s not loud, more like bursts of little chortles. You can hear the four different voices. Those 4 voices are easy to focus on and bring a smile to my face.

It somehow allows me to ignore the UPS truck’s emission noise in the sound of its downshifting transmission in the front as it slows for the speed bump and the occasional garbage truck making its rounds in the alley.

I stand in front of the cage with a grin. They all usually freeze when I approach and huddle in a corner as my arm goes in to switch out the water and seed dishes from the night before.

But I can sit at my desk 10 feet away and watch them. They’re always in motion

I like my flowers with wings.

Currently, all the budgies are flighted. It’s unlikely that three of them have ever really been out of any cage. Bacon who was extracted from a tree across from the Birdie Boutique did fly out of the cage once and flew directly into the screen of an open window clearly having plotted her escape in advance.

Toast got out once and landed on the crown molding 9 feet up in the air, which is why we keep a butterfly net next to the cage.

Because they are all rescues we have no idea of their precise age.

We allow them free flight.

But only when it’s cool outside as the 3 brats chewed holes in the fabric screens in our 3 awning windows.

I need to get to Crown Point and get them rescreened with industrial wire.

For now, they are on lockdown.

As you know we preach free flight but always with the bird’s safety in mind first hand.

Birds have been flying with no restraint for the past 99 million years. Then around 327 BC Alexander the Great was gifted an Alexandrian parakeet.

Think about it, have you ever approached a bird out of doors?

Pigeons in the city will walk away from you not fly but probably won’t engage you. You can have the fullest backyard bird feeders with wild birds happily stuffing their crops but they will fly off the moment you approach the feeders.

Whether you’re in the North American woods or the rain forests of South America, approach a bird and it will fly away.

So some guy who wanted to suck up to Al the Great said “That’s no fun, let’s put the little brother in a cage so we can watch it as much as we want because it can’t fly away, in a cage.”

Thus the caged bird-keeping timeline is now officially set to start at 327 BC and stops at – now.

That’s 2389 years of humans keeping pet birds, yet in the past 15 years, bird ownership in America has slipped from 5.4% of American households to 3.1% of American households.

It appears that 2% of American households simply turned all those birds over to rescues. Because all the avian rescues in America are now overflowing with unwanted pet birds and parrots.

So we can conclude that we haven’t learned a lot about keeping birds as pets in 24 centuries.

The Internet is awash with information related to the captive bird. Some are very good. Some of the information about pet birds is very bad.

What’s even more frustrating is, it’s hard to find a single repository of everything you need to know for keeping your particular species of bird.

For those of you who don’t know we have more than 1000 pages of information right here on our blog.

We see our bird care blog (and eCommerce website) not as a two-dimensional screen be it desktop, tablet, or smartphone. It’s an organic source of information always changing always updated.

You are reading this content from August 25, 2017, which is refreshing [the] original blog post from seven years.

Further, we encourage you to reach out on the top left side of our website “Ask Us Anything” asking any bird-related question you have. You will get a personal response quickly. 

We know whatever bird care problem you are having is not an isolated issue. Someone else is also seeking a solution. They may not be a regular reader of our bird care blog but hopefully, at some point, their query will be answered (or started) with a Google search-related link.

It looks like I’ve been off-road, so let’s get back to the main highway.

We learned this firsthand when we rescued Popcorn (our 1st rescue, an Albino cockatiel) from some bushes not far from the Birdie Boutique.

She had clearly flown’s out of somebody’s door or window because when we got her home she could fly but she panicked and flew into a wall and lost herself behind an entertainment unit (which is why we talk about stick training)

We also learned cockatiel’s wings grow back very fast, about 90 days and that they can fly very fast, up to 30 mph

We clipped her wings and after about four weeks I would start flipping her a foot away from the cage onto the cage, increasing my distance daily and weekly.

She caught on quickly and became a precise flyer. When you have a flighted bird in your home you learn to look back through the doors so you don’t crush a bird or slam a door on a bird’s beak.

One day I was walking backward, her cage immediately to my left. She was on the birdcage top Booda rope perch which meant we had about a 2-foot separation.

I got into the hallway and started to close the door slowly yet with only 6 inches of separation between door and jam she came perfectly perpendicular to the ground without a feather touching a piece of wood, indicating to me we needed to move through the house with more vigilance.

It’s taken Peaches (our Senegal at the time) a bit longer (months) to learn landings. Fortunately, she’s very slow and deliberate although clearly isn’t making the same snap decisions on where to land that Popcorn did.

It’s as though she knows that when she misses that top Booda rope perch she has a fallback of her nearby foraging box or the cage cover left on top which gives her plenty to grip and cease flight.

We have a pretty clear idea of how you deal with the Breakfast Club budgie’s wing clipping and flight training process.

Feathered factoid: We rarely clip our bird’s wings but when we do it’s in the bathroom which leaves little room for escape.

Some tips on holding and toweling your birds.

We will allow them to sit on the top of their cage endeared to by our clipping on a big fat millet spray.

And then one by one begin some human-to-bird social interaction until they understand my name is not Freddy Krueger. I’m the guy who supplies them with millet a.k.a. birdie crack.

Take them off the top of the cage, and let them fly back to the cage and do that repeatedly.

And like I’m now encouraging Peaches to fly to various play stands where she knows she is safe all while attempting to teach her to fly back to me, I will be doing something similar with the four budgies.

We feed Peaches our Senegal parrot frozen-thawed vegetables daily and she digs right in. Although our budgies enjoy fresh romaine lettuce daily it has been hard to gain their acceptance of vegetables.

They haven’t touched the thawed frozen (too firm?) so we bought some canned vegetables, mushed them up, and coated them with millet seed which went over as well as a child with fresh Brussels sprouts.

The biggest lesson we have learned in dealing with our loyal readers and customers is that the best tool you can have with any bird is patience.

In the wild birds spend 60% of their time trying to find food and 40% of their time trying not to be food.

They instinctively suspect anything but another bird of their own species to possibly bring harm.

A constant feedback touchpoint we get is “My bird won’t play with his new toy”, “my bird is freaked out because I changed a couple of things in its cage”, and “Mine won’t touch any new food I offer her”.

Remember the bird’s life, change can take time. The flip side of that is the more change you offer your bird the more easily your bird will accept change.

Peaches eats anything we offer. Often from a broken open bag in deliveries. Even something like Goldenfeast Amazon parrot food, which we mixed with Higgins Safflower Gold and Hagen Tropimix.

I simply pull out the large nuts that she cannot crack and crack them so little goes to waste other than what she throws out.

Even though she does not like them, I leave in the dried chili peppers and cinnamon sticks from the Safflower Gold mix just to give her something more to do, ie “pick them out” which is a subtle form of foraging and enrichment.

The budgies enjoy a millet spray every other day. When introducing chopped vegetables, we smothered them in millet seed when it looked as though the mixture remained untouched over the day.

No millet sprays were served during the day although we did leave their basic seed which is currently Higgins Vita Parakeet, which we top with Higgins dried Leafy Greens (those always get eaten totally) switching off with Higgins egg food. The little buggers will not starve.

The one downside here is we are often vacuuming. Anyone who serves millet sprays to their birds know what I mean.

With that introduction, let’s check into the way back machine Video and see what I had to say seven years ago.

Begin original article

When we refer to parakeets we’re actually talking about the “Budgerigar.” The word comes from the aborigines of Australia, the Parakeet homeland. They’re closely related to lorikeets.

Budgies are small, seed-eating birds, and wild Budgies are found throughout parts of Australia.

They’ve been around an estimated 5,000,000 years and although they’re naturally green and yellow with black markings, you’ll now find them in blues, yellows, and greys and some even have small crests.  

They’re popular pets as they are inexpensive to buy and maintain. And although many young people start with a pet parakeet early in life, we don’t hear about longevity much.

I’m reminded of a local bird club meeting I attended several years ago. Dr. Karen Becker was one of the guest speakers. She told the story of doing intake on a new patient, a Budgie. The woman who brought in the budgie was older, in the late seventies, or early eighties I recall.

When asked how old the Parakeet was, the woman responded 26 years old. Not seeing a lot of double-decade budgies, the first question Dr. Becker had was, “How are you so sure of the age”?

The woman promptly took out a receipt from the (manila folder she carried) from F.W. Woolworths. She had paid $5.00 for the bird, twenty-six years earlier. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When asked what the woman attributed to the long life of the bird, her answer was “We’ve shared a cup of decaffeinated green tea every morning since I brought him home”. (We’ll reserve a discussion about tea and pet bird care in another article) 

Budgies can be finger-tamed with a lot of patience and could possibly have a vocabulary of 100 words or more. Growing up, my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Massey had a budgie that spoke phrases in Greek (she was Greek), Italian, Spanish, and English.

Budgies don’t need a big cage, although bigger is better. Like many birds, it’s easier to bond with your Keet if it’s a solo bird – that said budgies tend to be happier with another budgie or 2 (or more) in the birdcage.

We really like this Prevue birdcage for multiple budgies as the 26 inches of birdcage width allows a certain amount of flight. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Budgies are primarily seed-eaters but love all sorts of foods. A good seed blend should include millet, canary seed and oat groats. A seed-only diet can lead to malnutrition and may cut their lives short. Fresh foods should be introduced on a regular basis. 

Bird toys and Parakeet accessories should be size appropriate. For a complete selection of Budgie toys, accessories and bird cages.

Find Budgie Supplies here

Written by Mitch Rezman
Approved by Catherine Tobsing

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