I don't mean to offend anybody, I am not trying to call anybody a liar or anything like that but I've been doing this for a loooooooong time and have come to realize that people often don't read their birds correctly and misinterpret their behaviors and reactions - I cannot even begin to tell you how many times the owners who 'knew their birds' were wrong about them! Now, I am not telling anybody to get another bird - that is entirely the owner's choice (animals are property and, as such, have no rights). And it is true that most people still keep a single one although there is a noticeable trend that this (as well as many other aspects of bird husbandry) is changing (in Sweden, for example, the law says that you cannot have a single one, you need to have two). And, in my personal experience (I have had, at the very least and off the top of my head, 60 - 70 budgies under my care), there is no such animal as a budgie that does not like another budgie UNLESS we are talking about an odd number (two males and one female, for example) or the bird is sick. Of the ones I had at the rescue, some came with other budgies, some came by themselves, and there wasn't a single one that did not like other budgies UNLESS the bird was sick- but even the sick ones liked the company of the other birds once they were better. I've even had severely handicapped ones (one wing, one eye, one leg, no feet, two sisters with the legs so splayed out that they actually had to rest on their bellies with their legs forming a V sticking out from each side of their bodies, etc) but even those that were in obvious inferior physical conditions loved the other budgies and even had mates!
The thing is that it's very hard for us to read a bird's reaction correctly and it's even harder to figure out what brought that reaction as well as whether it was something that we did that caused it. I inherited Paquita and Rajah Plet and, apparently, the male attacked the female so the previous owner had to separate them but this is something that ONLY happens in captivity (males in the wild are VERY loving and protective of their mates) so, obviously, it wasn't so much that this was a matter of "the nature of the beast" but that there was something not quite right with the conditions because they are fine with each other now. The very first lovebirds that came into my rescue were breeding show birds that had lived their entire lives (they were between 6 and 9 years old at the time) in separate cages and, because I did not keep birds in cages, I wanted to release them into the birdroom so they could form a flock. Because I had no experience whatsoever with lovies, I asked on several birdsites and all the 'experts' replied that it could not be done, that 'colony' setting did not work for lovebirds, that the females would fight between them and end up hurt. It did not make sense to me because these are birds that live in flock in the wild (I ALWAYS go by nature and not by what people think) so, obviously, if they did not kill each other in the wild, there was no real reason they would do it in captivity UNLESS, again, the conditions were not right so I started releasing one pair at a time (there were nine of them) and they LOVED it! I never had a single lovie fight with another lovie and I ended up with a flock of more than 30 of them. Another example, cockatoo breeders used to routinely split the beak of the males because it was very common that they would end up attacking and even killing the female but we then learned that the problem was with the kind of nest they were given. Once that was taken care of, males no longer attacked the females. Quakers were thought to be VERY prone to plucking but it was because people thought they were tropical birds and were keeping them at the wrong light schedule, once they realized these were parrots from a temperate climate zone and highly photperiodic and kept them at a solar schedule no quaker plucked again! See what I mean? In every single case of a bird's behavior going against an evolutionary pattern, it was not the bird that was 'different', it was us who did not know enough and were 'reading' the situation in the wrong way.
Just think about it...