Grey interactions

Though it's certainly not right for every house, living with two greys is so much more interesting than living with just one. As I've mentioned before, their interactions are fascinating. I believe that a big reason why Stella made such huge progress from the scared, mutilating parrot we first met to the happy, confident parrot we have today is Max's presence and their innate flocking tendencies.

Both greys love nuts, and when they are able to reach the containers in which we keep our human nuts, they will attempt to help themselves.

This video is a bit longer than I normally post; about 45 seconds. However, they were being so fascinating. Max wants to help Stella get the nuts out; Stella uses her body language to order Max away; Max complies.


I don't think it's possible for Stella to get at the nuts without ruining the container, so after several minutes of watching her trying to get at the nuts, I allowed her to get one. Look at how excited she is -- she runs over!


In other grey news, Stella is still obsessed with digging in the carpeting near our shoes. This is scrap carpet, so it doesn't bother us too much. Our main concern is that we don't want to encourage any egg production or undesirable breeding behavior in her. I think it's adorable when she perches on a shoe, though:Thomas has been reminding her that she is not a shoe, but it doesn't appear to be sinking in.

And here they are on the stand they gravitate towards. There is an identical stand next to this one which is mostly ignored. I'm not quite sure how to explain what they do, but they both do little things to irritate each other. Ideally, they should be on separate levels of the stand. However, one will often climb to the cup holders, as Stella has done here, in order to gain closer access to the other grey. In this case, once Stella had gone to the cup holders, Max went up to the top level. Although she looks innocent here, the reason for that is so she can try to hit Stella in the head with the toy.
I'm not sure if they're jockeying for position within the flock, playing some sort of game, or just trying to get a reaction from the humans in the house, but we closely watch them to make sure no one gets hurt.