Parrot Musings

Thomas had to work from 7 am Sunday to noon Monday again, which meant that I was home alone with the birds for most of the day. Calypso loves this, as he's not a huge fan of Thomas, but the rest of the birds miss him. Especially, as you might imagine, Rocky. After searching the house for him for a few hours, he realizes that Thomas isn't there, and settles into his cage.

Earlier that day, I had put a phone book on top of his cage, and you can see that he did shred it a bit. But, mostly, he sulks in his cage and waits for his mate to return.

All of my birds have foraging buckets on the outside of their cages. These are stainless steel buckets that I fill with toy parts and talon toys. I used to put some treats in there for them to find, but I found that they were just as happy to forage only for toys. Here is Max doing a bit of foraging in her bucket. This can keep her busy for hours as she'll toss things out and when she finds a special toy, she brings it to the top of her cage and plays with it for a bit. When she loses interest, she heads back to her bucket. I can refill the bucket with items she dropped on the floor and she has to start again! I do make sure to rotate the items in her bucket on a regular basis so that she never knows what she's going to find!

This is what the floor under her cage looks like after a bit of foraging. The talon toys in this picture are from TNT Toys. I buy many of their foraging components from Parrot Asylum and have placed an order that should arrive sometime this week, so I can show you more examples of their foraging at that time!

When Thomas plays video games, he sits on the floor under Max's cage. When she sees him there, she gets so excited, runs over to her foraging bucket, and proceeds to throw out all of the items in there -- directly at him! We think this is quite funny, so we laugh and encourage it. I'll try to capture that sometime!