Wanting to get my first parrot and seeking advice

[KimberlyAnn]

The OP said they had asthma so a cockatiel would not be great for that! Lol I'm bothered by feather dusk greatly. I just have to walk into a bird shop near the cockatiels and I'm in bad shape. Lol I help Emmi with her pin feathers and be covered in pin feather dust and not had a reaction at all. Thank god!

We've thought about getting another bird at some point. It may happen. Emmi is alone for about 24 hours total (In short bits) a week. But a cat or a dog...well I know I just could not handle that. I would worry too much about something happening. I know my own limitations and have enough trouble with anxiety as it is. Lol You have a HUGE heart to do what you do by fostering so many animals Pajarita! Not everyone can. I don't know how you do it! But I'm glad there are people like you who can.

Edited:

And this is why I should not watch YouTube at night when I wake up and can't go back to sleep...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfoHNnh ... ata_player

THIS is the real problem. Irresponsible owners. Not only is the cat grossly overweight, but it's being pinned down belly up (Any cat owner knows it's a privilege for a cat to show you it's belly) so that the little green cheek can bite his fur. Yes yes, unsafe for the bird, but look at that cat's face. Poor sweet baby. Don't even read the comments. This guy is not worthy of love from his bird and most definitely his cat. I think anyone that comes to this board seeking knowledge about getting a pet and keeping two different pets in the same household, can 100% do a better job then this guy.

[Raque]

Michael made a lot of assumptions and projections into my comments with "If a dog is ultimately what you want, a parrot will never fill the same role" or "Well it sounds like you are seriously considering or expecting to have one". I said nothing of the sort.

It is, again, not even something I have said I am planning on doing...just that I may consider it at some point. Parrots live a long time, in their life span I may fall in love and marry a person who has a dog... one or the other of us would have to ask the other to give up a pet and that is a lot to ask of someone. I took a friends dog once when their cancer got so bad they could no longer take care of their pet but wanted to be able to visit a lot. I am sure there are many more possibilities out there too that would also make me consider it, so ignoring the possibility would be foolish in my opinion.

Yes, bringing any two pets together has issues, especially a predator and prey species. But even two of the same species can cause problems as I am sure I could, without much effort, find horror stories of two parrots brought into the same home that sadly resulted in mutilation or death of one of them. Bringing any pets together has its challenges and risks.

Many people thinking not clipping a parrot’s wings is reckless. I don't agree with them, but they have some strong and reasonable points. Not to mention flying a parrot outside, even on a leash, let alone off a leash. I have seen two videos of predator birds going after parrots while they are ON their owner’s hands and I have never even tried looking up that topic. Not everything people do with their pets is 100% safe all the time.

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The separate issue of dogs and parrots aside...

As far as a bonded pair of Cockatiels goes, don’t they need to be opposite sex to be bonded? I don’t really want to have a mating pair or deal with baby birds. As KimberlyAnn pointed out, there is that Asthma thing. I will do a bit more research on them though.

My bigger concerns if I get a parrot are really in my first post. Most I am pretty comfortable with except my work schedule and sleep time for the bird. Many people here bring up good points, and while all pet owners make their pets bend around them to some extent (your parrots are living in cages rather than trees), I would want any pet I have to live a good and healthy life. While I think I would make a good owner for a parrot as I would genuinely want to play, interact, and even train it; I do have to acknowledge the limited time between my work and their sleep may not be the best for the parrot.

I plan on going to talk to some shelters in the area both about parrots in general and specifically about time with the birds. I figure with them seeing many problem birds and wanting to find good permanent homes for them they would have good advice (along with what I get from here).

[Pajarita]

my sennie sleeps from like 12am to 1pm. and my budgie sleeps from like 1am - 2pm (i sleep from like 5am - 2pm). from everything i read, it doesnt matter what times they sleep and wake up. what matters is the consistency (sleeping and waking up same times) and the amount of hours they sleep. mine gets roughly 12-13 hours of sleep and that allows them to feel fresh. If you dont allow them their idle sleep then they might wake up grouchy and the day might not go as good as they should. imagine you getting 4-5 hours of sleep. the day would not go as great as getting your normal 8 hours. its the same for birds. just remember that if its a continuous thing that they arent getting enough sleep then that might affect their health as well as mood. I think if you can somehow get them 10 hours of sleep, it might work out but giving them 7 hours probably will cause bigger problems later on.

also i want to add that its not just "quality but also quantity." i think people who say "quality" probably just have work so they cant let the birds out as much as they should. but 1 hour of quality out of cage is just not good enough in my opinion. So even though quality is important(as in you spending time with the bird and the bird getting exercise and sun), i also think that the bird should also get couple of hours at the very least to be independent out of cage and just do their own thing.

Yes, there are lots of birdsites that would tell you exactly what you said but, unfortunately, it's not true. It's not only how many hours they sleep is when they do it. For one thing, they need exposure to twilight to set their internal clock. This 'clock' is the one that sets the circannual and circadian cycles and it does it by the turning on and off the pineal gland through the change in spectrum that happens when the sun goes down and when it rises. No twilight = biorrhythms that are askew and that means a screwed up endocrine system.

See, the thing with birds is that they are all photoperiodic. Every single species, even the tropical ones that live in areas where the difference in light hours from one season to the other s only 20 minutes (unbelievable, isn't it? only 20 minutes make a difference to them!) This means that they regulate their glandular functions through light (photo means light) but it's not only exposure to light, it's the quantity and the quality of such light. We, humans, also regulate functions by light and that's why people who live in extreme Northern countries have so many people with S.A.D. while people in countries closer to the Equator don't. But we can't compare ourselves to birds because we are not only the ultimate domesticated animal (while parrots are undomesticated) we perceive light differently. Mammals have photoreceptors (cells that 'sense' light) in the eyes. We close our eyes, no light 'sensing' so we can sleep in the middle of the day same as if it was in the middle of the night. But birds have photoreceptors not only in the eyes but also deep in the brain and Nature made it so their craneal bones are so thin that light actually goes through them and is 'sensed' by the photoreceptors inside their brains. This means that a bird which sleeps during the day would still be registering light and there are many studies that show us that birds that are exposed to minute amounts of light during the night, would react to it (there are studies that show that urban birds which are exposed to light during the night have their endocrine system out of whack) even when the amount of light is soooooo very tiny that we, humans, would never even register it!

Sleep, good sleep is VERY important. It doesn't only aid us in learning properly, it actually affects practically EVERYTHING! I am talking cardio-vascular system, immune system, nervous system, it causes hypertension, obesity, even diabetes! (a condition that doesn't exist in wild parrots but which has become more and more common in pet birds).

Please do NOT take my word for it, do your own research and you will see that I am not exaggerating on this. When you think of a parrot's schedule, think of the chickens: up with sunrise, roost with sunset.

[Pajarita]

Raque, I have suffered from asthma my entire adult life but animals don't affect me at all. You would need to be careful about feather dust but tiels are small birds and they will need an air purifier as well as a humidifier during the winter months so that should take of the small dust they could produce. And no, they don't have to be male and female to enjoy each other's company but it's not that hard to prevent them from procreating, all you have to do is switch the real eggs with fake ones IF they ever lay.

[KimberlyAnn]

That's amazing that they can sense light through their bones! I had never heard that before. I can see why they need to sleep on schedule with the sun. My husband works strange hours and sometimes works graveyard. It really affects his body (he's a diabetic) in the worst ways. Artificial light is just no replacement for the sun's natural light. We've been thinking about getting him a lamp they use for SAD on the odd week he works graveyard.

Thankfully for Emmi, we have great light in the evening and she's been on a good schedule. Every evening, the sun hits part of her cage and I open the sliding glass door (we have a screen door) and let her sit on her perch after her bath to dry off. She loves it! Once we hit 105℉...this won't be happening so much! Lol but we do get morning sun. Just some mornings we wake up and it's already 90. Lol I will have to get her a sun lamp too.

[Nir]

Pajarita: damn.. there goes everything i learned. i will surely look into it. what would you say would be the idle sleeping hours? Also you said how they register light through their senses but wouldnt me covering the cage take care of that so they would get actual complete dark sleep? But ya very interesting stuff.

[Eric&Rebecca]

Well some light still penetrates... unless you have a black out cover. Mine are up with the outside birds and go to bed with the outside birds. That's the best way to do it because they are birds too so once you hear them doing their last sing song... you know its time to settle down. This varies in summer to winter months. The sensing sunlight thing helps regulate molting, while the first molt of a cockatiel for example is dependent on hormonal changes the molts preceeding that rely on other factors to do with seasons which can be upset by oddly timed sleeping routines. Cockatiels though are slightly different as in the wild they can molt twice a year and rely on different circumstances to normal birds. Only found this out yesterday!

Sennies though go in cycles dependent on the time of year I believe, dodgy sleeping routines could confuse the body clock. Adjustment on this is a reasonably short time, just like getting over jetlag really

I just have to get up really early to uncover them and serve their breakfast.... then I go back to bed... and in the evening I put them to bed and move to another area of the apartment so not to disturb them.... this is a recent change for me but something I gained the same conclusions from Parajita, my birds look really well on it too. It also helped calm Edmund's hormones oddly!

Your routine will change slightly but there's no reason you can't go about your same routine just with adjustments for the birds

[Pajarita]

You would be surprised how little light affects them! I used to live in the Poconos, Pennsylvania, in the middle of a five acre property covered in old woods (except for the large clearing where the house was), my birdroom had three sides with large double windows with East, West and South exposure and ALL my birds did great! Breeding season started exactly when it was supposed to, same as molt which just lasted short of 8 weeks every year, nobody was hormonal, pluckers stopped plucking, screamers stopped screaming, not a single tiel had a night fright. Then I moved back to New Jersey, to the city and although I was still following a solar schedule, my handicapped tiels were not doing well - they would be restless at night, had a couple of episodes of night fright, were lethargic during the day, etc. and I was at a complete loss at what was causing it until I slept in the birdroom one night and saw that through the window where the tiels cage was placed, a small sliver of light from a corner lamp accross the street would shine. It was a completely negligible and very weak sliver but it was bothering their sleep. Once I placed black-out curtains there (which I would draw after dark and opened before sunrise -I get up VERY early in the am, I've had birds for a loooooong time -LOL), everything went back to normal.

Studies have shown that just 0.3 lux affected their glands! 0.3 lux is roughly the light a full moon would give but remember that we don't have full moons every single night of the year AND that parrots sleep in trees so the leaves and the branches would black out most of it.

I have birds in the living room AND the dining room and what I do is I uncover their cages when its still dark (well, to be completely honest, there is already a bit of light during the summer mornings because I get up at 5 am) and turn on their overhead full spectrum light (both cages are in front of windows so they also get natural light) AFTER the sky is completely lit; then, in the evening, I turn off their light when the sun is halfway down, and, once is dark, I cover their cages. And there can be no talking or TV after that (which my husband constantly complains about -he says his house is not his but the birds' -LOL) and I am very strict about that (I eat dinner and watch TV in the bedroom -second floor- and he does it in his study -third floor).

Keeping birds is not easy because they cannot adjust to us so we need to adjust to them and not that many people is able to do this.

[Eric&Rebecca]

[quote]Yes, bringing any two pets together has issues, especially a predator and prey species. But even two of the same species can cause problems as I am sure I could, without much effort, find horror stories of two parrots brought into the same home that sadly resulted in mutilation or death of one of them. Bringing any pets together has its challenges and risks. /quote]

Yes exactly, inexperienced people do that. There's way it can coexist but you'd have to keep them completely separate forever more. For example, I can't bring an African Grey into the house now I have cockatiels, or even a cockatoo which is the same family. All parrots are different some are flock orientated while others are best as single birds. If people don't research that before it happens then yes there are accidents so this is why people are trying to give you that knowledge before you make the mistake we've seen others make. That doesn't mean to say you couldn't have a dog and a bird but you would need to consider many factors if this was something you planned on in the future.

[quote]Many people thinking not clipping a parrot’s wings is reckless. I don't agree with them, but they have some strong and reasonable points. Not to mention flying a parrot outside, even on a leash, let alone off a leash. I have seen two videos of predator birds going after parrots while they are ON their owner’s hands and I have never even tried looking up that topic. Not everything people do with their pets is 100% safe all the time/quote]

Yes, however have you considered the following as strong or reasonable points. It's not reckless but its certainly not OK for a bird that's perfectly healthy. If the bird is handicapped or very old then of course it might be best for their own safety to prevent injury but other than that I really cannot see any reason to clip and I'm one of the most bird paranoid people about EVERYTHING!

1. Birds are flying creatures, just like humans are walking creatures, as are cats and dogs. If I said to you i've kneecapped my child/parent or my pet dog so it can't walk would you think that was ok?- no. It's no different for birds!

2. Clipping won't make a parrot any safer than not clipping: Clipping does NOT do the following:
a. Prevent your bird from breaking its next by flying into a window- firstly, this is nearly impossible given the anatomy of the bird, they have hollow and flexible bones and unless your room is a straight corridor nearly a mile long the bird physically cannot get the momentum to break its own neck. There are stories where this has happened but I can assure you its extremely rare. It is YOUR job to train the bird NOT to fly into the window or by concealing with window. Not remove the ability to make it more convenient for the owner. Additionally, you'l also find several stories of birds falling keel bone first where they try to fly and can't because they are clipped or get hurt because they can't move out the way of something fast enough. Birds weren't made for walking! Would you prevent a child from taking its first steps because oh it might hurt itself... no so again why do it to a bird. Like with a child you adapt the environment to limit accidents, the same should be done for the bird.
b.Prevent your bird from flying away: again no it won't do this. Its not OK to leave a clipped bird outside, birds can adapt surprisingly well to flying even with clipped wings. In fact a lot of birds are lost and die because owners think oh its ok it can't fly. It only takes one gust of wind or one or two days past the clip and bye bye birdie. A flighted bird has the same risks too, so why clip. At least a flighted bird can be trained to fly back to you!
c. Prevent your bird getting hurt by other animals: The stories of owners getting their birds caught by predator animals has nothing to do with clipping or not clipping. That bird would have got caught either way. If you have a cat or dog or any other animals at least the bird can fly away faster than it can run or hop! In fact the animal stands a better chance of survival if it can fly.
3. Psychological issues- there are expert behavioural and avian vet articles everywhere on this. A clipped bird often suffers psychological issues which can lead to plucking, self multilation, depression, aggression and biting, hormonal imbalances, trust issues with the owners (which means little hand tameness and training in the long run) not to mention the health issues of underdeveloped muscles, fatty blood and liver (due to no exercise) and strict implementation of a highly calories controlled diet... A bit like if you say still all day playing video games and eating.

Again, if you're bird is handicapped then I really can understand clipping under AV advice but a healthy bird... why?! Flight is such beautiful thing, why would you want to take the essence of the bird away. It won't help tamneness or faster training at all or make the bird safe... I just cannot cannot cannot understand why people would FULLY clip a healthy bird.

I'm sorry if that's rude or harsh but look at some Avian Vet or Behaviourist articles, people love the horror stories so yes you will find them without searching because people feel the need to justify clipping far more than you would people who keep their birds flighted. If you keep a bird you take the responsibility of its nature, not restrict its nature so you can have less responsibility.

There are clipping options which simply slow the bird down but it can still fly. If you're still absolutely insistent on clipping then why not try that FIRST or at least consider it before you disable your bird. Sorry but essentially that's what you're doing unless there's a damn good reason medically for a bird to be clipped. No one can make a bird 100% safe but you CAN make you're bird 100% healthy! Mentally and physically.

I apologise for any people who clip on the forum, I just do NOT believe in it. I've never found an avian professional half way decent who does either!

[quote]As far as a bonded pair of Cockatiels goes, don’t they need to be opposite sex to be bonded? I don’t really want to have a mating pair or deal with baby birds. As KimberlyAnn pointed out, there is that Asthma thing. I will do a bit more research on them though.
/quote]

No they can be of same gender. Cockatiels are flock animals, I right now have a pair of bonding cockatiels both male (1 is DNA sexed and the other has molted into male plumage). They preen eachother, play together, sing at eachother... so no you won't have to deal with baby birds providing you have a DNA sexing or buy them after their first molt. Hey why not rescue a pair! I have asthma too, I'm ok but I've had a strong allergy shot for it which cost a bomb but has pretty much cured it apart from minor wheezing during molting. This can be remedied by humidfiers and regular cleaning.

Finally,

[quote]t any pet I have to live a good and healthy life. While I think I would make a good owner for a parrot as I would genuinely want to play, interact, and even train it; I do have to acknowledge the limited time between my work and their sleep may not be the best for the parrot./quote]

Parrots aren't entertainement... although they can be. If you have limited time and you know it might not be best... don't get a parrot just yet. Circumstances change though so it doesn't mean you can never have a bird... just not night now maybe.

I have criticized you to hell, I apologise but if you listen and take it on board that's all i ask and believe it or not I do want you to rescue a bird at some point Just make sure you're clued up. Especially on the clipping, reading birdsites, aside from this one, won't help. So much of the WRONG information spread around hugely so it MUST be true... it's not! Listen to people like Parajita or long term bird owners and more important AV's or avian experts.

[Strawfrawg]

Raque,

I am not one of the most experienced owners here by any means, but I would say you may not have time for a Sennie. I have had both a 'tiel and a Sennie and the difference in percentage of my time the Sennie requires to be happy is considerable. I agree that a pair of cockatiels would be a better fit for you (please not just one). I'm not assuming you think this way, but a Sennie's small size can be deceiving...they have "big bird" brains and need to be kept well stimulated. Everybody else here covered sleep very well. Bottom line, they have to sleep on their schedule, not the owner's. Keeping to natural sleep conditions is a cornerstone of health for any animal, including humans. We can make sacrifices, but we shouldn't expect it of our pets.

I have to chime in on the dog issue...I'm sorry, I know you didn't mean for it to draw such focus. I lost my cockatiel to a friend's dog and know very well what a horrible death that is (not to mention the psychological impact on the owner). On the other hand, I have two small, elderly dogs that are genuinely good with smaller animals (it's my bird who is the concern!) though I supervise things closely for good reason. So I don't think owning a dog is out of the question...but certainly the breed and background of the dog is a very big consideration and you may find that none of the breeds you favor would work even with reasonable precautions taken. Any sporting/hunting, ratting (all terriers), protection, or coursing breed should be completely out of the question. That's a huge majority of breeds right there. You just can't train them against what they were bred for, or at least you can't be assured of it. People here rightly jumped on your dog comment, distracting as that was to your mission here, because it really is such a risk, especially if you're not home much. My bird was killed by a friend's very easygoing dog that opened a shut door by the knob...a trick that shocked the owner...and then bashed its way into the cage.

There is also another huge consideration that I don't think I saw mentioned here...if you have a full-time job, you won't have enough time to give a parrot if you ever get a dog. It wouldn't be fair to either animal. You sound like you're considering everything very thoroughly across the board and it's realistic that you might end up in a relationship with a dog owner. But its also realistic that this may exclude you from owning a parrot. You never know what breed or temperament some future loved one's dog will be.