by Michael » Mon Oct 11, 2010 10:22 am
Surprisingly they don't fly all that much. My biggest worry about a flighted bird initially was that it would be flying all over the place, all the time, and be impossible to catch. In reality, none of this is true. Having had experience with a clipped parrot and now flighted ones, I can compare them with some insight. 98% of the time there would appear to be no difference between clipped or flighted parrots in the home (psychological concerns may always be present but just for the sake of what we'd see, I think this is a good number).
Obviously in the cage the birds are good as clipped cause there is insufficient space to really take flight. In the aviary, flight gives them the confidence to hop from toy to toy. I definitely know from having a clipped bird previously, that clipped birds are too scared to make these kind of hops. Now in the open room, they do fly some.
A lot of the flying they do outside the cage was influenced by me. The flight recalls, tricks, and flights to the potty were all influenced by me and they probably wouldn't do all that flying on their own. Kili follows me around or goes back to her cage as she pleases. In one time out of the cage, this might be 10 flights averaging 25ft. I suppose this would be all of one minute out of an hour or two out of the cage. Truman is more comfortable in the air since he was never clipped. He'll fly around just for the hell of it sometimes. He's also more adventurous and flies to places he's not supposed to be to explore. Even with complete liberty to fly around, he probably doesn't spend more than 2 minutes in the air out of an hour.
The simple fact is, they have nothing to do while in the air besides fly. All the fun things they want are on the ground (food, toys, attention), so to them, flight is merely a means of getting there. Over short distances, they prefer to walk or climb. However, once the distance gets a bit too large they do fly. It's really funny playing fetch with Kili. If I roll the ball close she walks or hops to get it. But if I roll it a little too far, she flies along the floor to hurry up to get to it.
But then there's the flight recalls and training. Lately I've scaled it back a lot with Kili since she is having trouble flying with missing feathers. But I was doing as much as 2 miles of indoor flight with her a day by doing extensive back and forth recalls. When I was doing variable ratio reinforcement flight recall trials with her, she was probably spending as much as 10 minutes in the air out of an hour of training. Don't forget she must eat her treat and rest between flights. The actual flight goes by pretty quickly.
However, the amount of exercise they get during these short bursts of flight outweigh hours of walking around and stuff. It gets their heart, lungs, brain all going. By giving them the freedom to have indoor freeflight, you let them get the amount of flying in that they need/want. By encouraging them with some flight training, you can give them even more (think gym buddy). So unlike what I initially believed, they actually fly much less and it is quite manageable.