Parrots, Humans, and Stuff -- not for the faint of heart

Eupher

Eupher

U.S. Army, Retired
Location
Arkansas
Sorry - long post ahead.

I mentioned elsewhere that I'm first and foremost a bird guy. I've been involved with one bird species or another since the mid-1980s. I've owned (or have been owned) by a number of parrots along the way, but most notably, I've fostered even more. These run the gamut from macaws (blue and gold and green-wing) to cockatoos (these birds need a special kind of human to deal with them) to eclectus to Congo African greys (my favorite). Had fostered a lorikeet at one time (exceptionally nasty) and my first bird was a cockatiel. Let's not forget the Amazon parrots of various colorations.

A couple of photos for you, but let me say up front: parrots are not for everybody. They are messy, they require food that goes WAAAAAAAAY beyond the "Polly want a cracker?" nonsense; their housing in a cage or T-stand requires a deep dive into your bank account, and every part about these "pets" scream "exotic".

Which they are.

For example -- every five days, I make up a batch of veggies, which includes kale, carrots, sweet peppers, broccoli, apple, zucchini, yellow squash and rough-chop them in a food processor. That's not enough, though. I have to put the chopped veggies in a towel to absorb excess water, and then put the food in a container for a few days. About once per month, I make and cook a batch of what I call "perch mix". This includes field corn, three different types of beans (Navy, black-eyed peas, and split peas), sweet potato, long grain rice, old-fashioned oatmeal, a thin pasta, raisins, frozen peas (cooked, of course, but not very long), eggshells, and a cinnamon stick.

Jackie, my Congo grey, gets three tablespoons of perch mix and three tablespoons of veggies per day. She gets a bowl of water (in which she sometimes takes a bath), and I have at least two shreddable toys for her along with a pine cone, also for shredding. She gets an almond or two as a snack, then there's another cooked food item I make and freeze. Cooked chicken bones are a favorite (she eats the marrow), and tiny pieces of cheese are OK. No seeds at all.

She makes an ungodly mess, which I have to clean every day. Her cage also has to be cleaned every day.

Birds like Jackie can also be destructive. She did a great job in tearing apart a set of venetian blinds and she chewed through some dry wall trim.

She has a definite bedtime of 5:30 PM and if I don't see to putting her to bed in her sleep cage (another area that must be cleaned), she screams until I put her away.

Parrots are a challenge, but they are fascinating creatures. Think of one thing -- dogs and humans have been "together" for tens of thousands of years. Parrot and human interactions have really only been a thing for a couple-three hundred years. In essence, parrots are still fundamentally "wild" yet they have figured out how to interact with us. Humans, on the other hand, haven't quite gotten to that same level yet.

Phoebe (Congo African grey) in 2009: An incredible talker.

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Phoebe and Papagena with me while I practice bass trombone. Papagena has a suede "cape" on her to try and reduce her feather-picking. Didn't really work:

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Eupher said:
Sorry - long post ahead.

I mentioned elsewhere that I'm first and foremost a bird guy. I've been involved with one bird species or another since the mid-1980s. I've owned (or have been owned) by a number of parrots along the way, but most notably, I've fostered even more. These run the gamut from macaws (blue and gold and green-wing) to cockatoos (these birds need a special kind of human to deal with them) to eclectus to Congo African greys (my favorite). Had fostered a lorikeet at one time (exceptionally nasty) and my first bird was a cockatiel. Let's not forget the Amazon parrots of various colorations.

A couple of photos for you, but let me say up front: parrots are not for everybody. They are messy, they require food that goes WAAAAAAAAY beyond the "Polly want a cracker?" nonsense; their housing in a cage or T-stand requires a deep dive into your bank account, and every part about these "pets" scream "exotic".

Which they are.

For example -- every five days, I make up a batch of veggies, which includes kale, carrots, sweet peppers, broccoli, apple, zucchini, yellow squash and rough-chop them in a food processor. That's not enough, though. I have to put the chopped veggies in a towel to absorb excess water, and then put the food in a container for a few days. About once per month, I make and cook a batch of what I call "perch mix". This includes field corn, three different types of beans (Navy, black-eyed peas, and split peas), sweet potato, long grain rice, old-fashioned oatmeal, a thin pasta, raisins, frozen peas (cooked, of course, but not very long), eggshells, and a cinnamon stick.

Jackie, my Congo grey, gets three tablespoons of perch mix and three tablespoons of veggies per day. She gets a bowl of water (in which she sometimes takes a bath), and I have at least two shreddable toys for her along with a pine cone, also for shredding. She gets an almond or two as a snack, then there's another cooked food item I make and freeze. Cooked chicken bones are a favorite (she eats the marrow), and tiny pieces of cheese are OK. No seeds at all.

She makes an ungodly mess, which I have to clean every day. Her cage also has to be cleaned every day.

Birds like Jackie can also be destructive. She did a great job in tearing apart a set of venetian blinds and she chewed through some dry wall trim.

She has a definite bedtime of 5:30 PM and if I don't see to putting her to bed in her sleep cage (another area that must be cleaned), she screams until I put her away.

Parrots are a challenge, but they are fascinating creatures. Think of one thing -- dogs and humans have been "together" for tens of thousands of years. Parrot and human interactions have really only been a thing for a couple-three hundred years. In essence, parrots are still fundamentally "wild" yet they have figured out how to interact with us. Humans, on the other hand, haven't quite gotten to that same level yet.

Phoebe (Congo African grey) in 2009: An incredible talker.

View attachment 363407

Phoebe and Papagena with me while I practice bass trombone. Papagena has a suede "cape" on her to try and reduce her feather-picking. Didn't really work:

View attachment 363411
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I'd love to see videos of her, especially while talking. Do you have a YouTube channel?
 
You sound like my late sister.....her parrots ate better than most humans, healthier at least. Between the vegetable "slaw" and the "bird brownies" (no chocolate, of course, but everything else), she was almost running a bird restaurant.

She had a breeding pair of Solomon Island Eclectus and hand-raised the babies. Of the pair, the male was sweet and well-behaved but the female was a witch-with-a-B. She did produce some lovely young'uns, though.

I could have never done it. It was a LOT of trouble.
 
Quick story about Phoebe.

For about a year, we lived in a rental house in Mississippi. Phoebe's cage was situated next to the door leading to the carport. You can see the setup in the video above.

One day I came home from work, opened that door, and immediately marched back to a bedroom where we had our office set up. The hallway leading to that bedroom was quite narrow and dark. I walked in the bedroom and sat down to take care of some business at the computer and in a minute or two, I could hear Phoebe flapping down the hallway, making a hard left turn into the bedroom, then settled on my shoulder. (She was an excellent flier, fully flighted.)

Without missing a beat, she inquired:

"Whatcha doin'?"

That is the mark of a "wild" animal who was in tune with her human companions.
 
jujube said:
You sound like my late sister.....her parrots ate better than most humans, healthier at least. Between the vegetable "slaw" and the "bird brownies" (no chocolate, of course, but everything else), she was almost running a bird restaurant.

She had a breeding pair of Solomon Island Eclectus and hand-raised the babies. Of the pair, the male was sweet and well-behaved but the female was a witch-with-a-B. She did produce some lovely young'uns, though.

I could have never done it. It was a LOT of trouble.
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As I said above, owning a parrot isn't for everyone. It's not often when you can have a pet and have them converse with you -- in context -- which makes the effort worthwhile. Please see my quick Phoebe story above. Lots of stories like that one. Papagena never talked, but she did puke for me on a regular basis (the hallmark of a parrot who has selected her "mate" and is trying to feed him/her.) Uh...no, thanks.
 
jujube said:
You sound like my late sister.....her parrots ate better than most humans, healthier at least. Between the vegetable "slaw" and the "bird brownies" (no chocolate, of course, but everything else), she was almost running a bird restaurant.

She had a breeding pair of Solomon Island Eclectus and hand-raised the babies. Of the pair, the male was sweet and well-behaved but the female was a witch-with-a-B. She did produce some lovely young'uns, though.

I could have never done it. It was a LOT of trouble.
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I had to look them up... what beauties!
iu
 
RadishRose said:
I had to look them up... what beauties!
iu
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The eclectus parrot (several subspecies including Solomon Islands, Red-sided, Grand eclectus, Vos Maeris, and maybe one or two others), is one of the few parrot species that is sexually dimorphic -- meaning the males and the females have completely different colorings. In the case of the African grey, the males and females are so similar the only way to determine the sex of the bird is to be an avian vet who can check the cloaca or through blood testing.
 
Talking about birds being time-consuming.....once I had to babysit Eggbert, a hatchling who was being hand-raised. He had to be fed every two hours or so (a small syringe full of baby-bird-glop squirted down into his "crop").

That normally wouldn't be a problem but I needed to be away for a few hours. So I packed up a syringe full of food, wrapped Eggbert in toilet paper and gently placed him in my cleavage, where he would be warm and secure, a walking incubator so-to-speak.

Problem was, Eggbert was a peeper and a squawker, a quiet and well-mannered one, of course, but there were definitely sounds coming out of my neckline. I had to giggle when I saw people looking around trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from.
 
jujube said:
Talking about birds being time-consuming.....once I had to babysit Eggbert, a hatchling who was being hand-raised. He had to be fed every two hours or so (a small syringe full of baby-bird-glop squirted down into his "crop").

That normally wouldn't be a problem but I needed to be away for a few hours. So I packed up a syringe full of food, wrapped Eggbert in toilet paper and gently placed him in my cleavage, where he would be warm and secure, a walking incubator so-to-speak.

Problem was, Eggbert was a peeper and a squawker, a quiet and well-mannered one, of course, but there were definitely sounds coming out of my neckline. I had to giggle when I saw people looking around trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from.
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The intense care that hatchlings/nestlings need is one reason why parrots are so freaking expensive. Out of curiosity, I priced a hand-fed, hand-raised African grey about 3-4 years ago and I was blown away by the cost -- $2,000 for the bird. A breeder I knew 20 years ago had a hyacinth macaw (incredibly beautiful, the largest of the macaws). She told me at that time that a hand-fed, hand-raised hyacinth macaw ran about $10,000 per copy. The issue is, these particular parrots are apparently very difficult to raise and the size of the clutch is very minimal as well.
 
Eupher said:
We'll have to agree to disagree. I reject your argument because birds/parrots can and do form bonds with humans. If you had experience with these animals, you'd see what I'm talking about.
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🦜 And that is why your one parrot is pulling its feathers out, stressed from not being free, not being in with a flock of other 🦜s and doing what parrots do in the wild
 
GoneFishin said:
🦜 And that is why your one parrot is pulling its feathers out, stressed from not being free, not being in with a flock of other 🦜s and doing what parrots do in the wild
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Sigh. No further comment to you on this subject. It's not worth it.
 

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