Last Updated on January 6, 2024 by Mitch Rezman

There are never enough hours in the day to achieve all my goals.

This theme is stuck inside my head and requires further exploration.

Not too long ago I posted this video of Barney, visiting Catherine in the morning.

So he had something to do, she gave him some ponytail tie-backs.

Barney now knows rather than flying to the top of my office chair or headboard and being bored for hours until I awake, he has a choice.

Most mornings, if Catherine’s reading light is on she will be his first stop because she’s more entertaining than I am.

Keto (ringneck) and Chili (Quaker) can’t be out of the cage at the same time due to Chili’s aggressive personality.

When that occurs Chili will squat in Keto’s birdcage whether they’re upstairs or downstairs.

To refresh, the two big boys go downstairs Monday through Friday from when I get up and remain there until 4:00 when the shop closes and they “return” upstairs.

As I’ve often said birds can tell time with the accuracy of a Rolex, they just don’t know what day it is.

They have adjusted but are just not completely OK with having breakfast brought up to them on Saturdays and Sundays, they still think it is a work day.

I let Keto and Barney out when I uncover the cages at 7:00 AM 30 minutes before all the lights come on.

Barney will busy himself but the others are left to their own devices.

Barney can see Catherine across the great open expanse upstairs.

Catherine goes down to the office at about 8:00 AM and inevitably Keto will follow on his own just to get away from Chili.

Keto (and Chili) have their flight path pre-visualized so they may fly downstairs where Keto will happily occupy himself with some sunflower seeds in his cage.

After a couple of hours, I’ll retrieve Keto, and then Chili will fly down. Despite having both office cage doors open, 

Chili will make a beeline to Keto’s cage where he’ll be content for a while until he feels the need to rearrange the S-hooks in his own birdcage.

In the last post, I spoke of a macaw brain vs a macaque monkey brain so I’d like to take the previsualization idea a bit further with another example of a mammal with 1/3 of a parrot’s brain power.

From AI (Monica)

“The keyword ‘chimpanzees planning escape’ refers to an incident that occurred at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden in 2019. A group of chimpanzees managed to escape from their enclosure by using tools and cooperating with each other. 

The incident raised concerns about the welfare and security of animals in zoos and sparked discussions about the cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills of chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees are highly intelligent primates known for their tool-using abilities and complex social structures. 

In the Furuvik Zoo incident, the chimpanzees demonstrated their intelligence by using sticks to break a lock and open a gate. They also worked together, with some chimpanzees distracting the zookeepers while others executed the escape plan.

The incident highlighted the importance of providing appropriate environments and enrichment activities for animals in captivity to prevent boredom and frustration.”

It also raised questions about the ethics of keeping wild animals in zoos and the need for stricter safety measures to ensure the security of both animals and visitors.

Now we come back to parrots having much more brain power than the monkeys cited in part 1.

Many leave birds with all that computational brain power alone in a birdcage, surrounded by quiet for hours a day while at work.

Then you wonder why your bird exhibits negative behavior like feather self-destruction and screaming.

Couple that with a bird’s innate ability to tell accurate time while we put them in front of giant windows that go dark at 5:00 PM in the winter while your bird can’t figure out why it’s dark when they are expecting 3 to 4 more hours of daylight.

Here’s a simple fix for that.

Speaking of bad behavior, we’ve had Keto for six years. He never has and never will, stop trying to bite any square inch of flesh coming within 2 inches of his beak. We feel he was mishandled by his last caregivers.

I mentioned earlier that he and Chili have cages on 2 levels.

How is it I can move a “biting bird” between cages a floor apart ~ there’s an app for that?

Keto chooses his toy over biting someone every time.

BTW the toy came to us with him, thank goodness.

Also not always in the video, Chili knows where to go every step of the way from my shoulder to his cage, the path any lazy bird would take.

In the coming weeks, we’ll look at other top-level interesting thought processes Germaine to our birds.

Written by Mitch Rezman
Approved by Catherin Tobsing

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