Hello, I am new and need some advice.

[InsanityShard]

My god, I just looked up pyrrhura prices. I can't afford any bird over $200 AUD, I'm sorry. Even a princess parrot is $100, and I don't want to get a bird that hasn't been hand raised, as I don't have the experience. I'll just stick with my original option... If you think pretty much all aviary birds are hard to train, then I'll stick with this one as my first. Thank you for all your advice so far, it seems I'll have a tougher time ahead of me then I thought, but I'm more than willing to put in that time and effort. Even if I can't train it to do all I want, I still get a nice pet.

[InsanityShard]

Mum just told me the big cage we used to keep all 4 of our Budgies in is a parrot cage. I thought it was a mini aviary for small birds.

[InsanityShard]

I've been doing more research and I've found that I can get 2 or 3 princess parrots at the same time so they'll be happy in a small flock with hopefully little to no fighting. I know it'll make them harder to train, but again, I'm fully willing to put in the time. I'm thinking 2 would be better than 3, and the cage is big enough for 3 princess parrots. Since my room will be a sort of indoor aviary/playground/training room, they'll get constant contact and attention from me. I've also run into a guy in the park walking his cockatoo, he was picking grass seeds for it and had it on a harness and everything- I now know at least one safe park. And so, how often should I take the bird out for proper sunlight? 1 hour twice a week? I can easily manage that safely, with no risk of it getting attacked by other birds such as magpies.

[InsanityShard]

Can parrots figure out how to work zips or velcro? I need to put in a flyscreen curtain (I know no magnets- too easy to get through) in my doorway to stop the parrot getting out of my room easily. I can't shut my door on account of a pet gate being there already that keeps out the dog and the cats, since my older cat can't see the top to jump over and my other cat is outdoors, the main worry is the dog, especially as we don't know how he'll react. The older cat has never gone after our previous pet birds, but I want to be sure the dog keeps out anyway. If the parrot can work a zip or velcro on its own, then I need to find some other option. There is enough room in my doorway to hang something like that, but I won't trust a curtain, especially with my window open, which it is most of the time during Winter. The rest of the year is full of midges, but I can take it to that park easily.

[InsanityShard]

I'm reading through the parrot blog with all the safety instructions, a lot I had already considered but others I had not. I notice it says to keep windows covered at least partially at all times, why is that? Here in Australia, if you don't know, nearly all windows come with flywire already installed, and in the case of the house I'm in it has diamond shaped bars over the flywire on the outside as well. Is there another reason I should worry about, such as the bird managing to break the flywire, or the wild birds scaring it? Or might it try to fly through the glass? We can't clean it properly so it's always a bit cloudy if that helps. If not, I can't use the blinds I have properly, I need to replace them anyway as I'm not sure if the material would be dangerous to the parrot. What kind of blind is safe for the parrot? I know I can't have the one that's there, it's one of those ones with vertical slats made out of something that\s like a weird cardboard and it only closes using long plastic irreplacable strings. I know my parrot could strangle itself on there, I'm mostly asking about safe blind materials.

[Wolf]

There are a great deal of things that I don't know about Australia and how things are done there. All of my windows that open have screens to keep out bugs and since I am in the room with my birds when they are out of their cages I can make sure that none of them can destroy the screens. One of the reasons for having windows partly covered is because all of my birds are canopy dwellers so they retreat to the trees and the shade offered by the canopy during the middle of the day while it is hot. This protects them from too much UV light and keeps them from getting too hot and getting heat stroke. It seems that people here in the US need to be reminded of these things or they would just place their birds cages directly in front of a window with no way for the bird to get out of the sun. Another reason for keeping the windows partly covered is to give your bird a place to hide from raptors like hawks and such. I have a lot of predatory birds where I live. Luckily we have some bushes that grow large enough to hide our windows from the hawks and eagles and the owls that could easily destroy the screens to get at my birds. There are probably some other reasons for keeping the windows partly covered but these are the ones that concern me the most where I live. With the fact that my birds windows look out directly over my dogs pen, which is the entire front yard, I don't have to worry about any ground based predators getting to my birds.

[InsanityShard]

Okay, thanks for the info about the windows! Seems it won't be an issue for me then, with the bird being able to roam my room and little actual sunlight coming through my window. Only the top of the cage would be in the sun if I put it there anyway. Magpies don't come to this place to bother the bird, it'd probably just get noisy minors chirping at it at worst. Right outside my window is a bottlebrush with a passionfruit vine growing over it, the cockatoos claw at the passionfruit in the afternoons and sometimes you can see them eating the palm seeds if you look to the side. Rainbow lorikeets eat from the bottlebrush sometimes when it flowers. And recently a pale headed rosella, one I've seen around here before but is always alone, was eating some wild beans on the fence. We get a lot of nice birds here that won't bother mine. Also an update on how my room is going- the back of my fish tank is now covered with a towel so there's no worry at all of the birds getting into that large tank, it used to have a turtle in it so it still has salmonella.

[InsanityShard]

There is one slight worry about the window, actually... Sometimes birds manage to crap horizontally. I never did figure out how to clean it off the flywire. We don't know how they do it, they'll do it even on windows with a good 7 or 8 feet of porch roof over it, and it still ends up on the windows. And no, only once in the 3 years I've been here has one crashed into the window, so it's not that. >_> Although for a little while one blue faced honey eater would come land on the bars and look in, but I haven't seen them for a few months. Also, recently, even though we have incredibly strict gun laws I found a pigeon someone had shot through the wing I had to take to the vet. That's how I know it was a bullet wound.