Peqaboo series
Wild birds spend hours a day finding food; a bowl handed on a plate leaves a pet bird bored. Foraging makes your bird work for meals, easing boredom, plucking and screaming. Here is how to start simply and build up.
Parrots are hard-wired to chew and shred, and a bird with nothing to destroy often turns to feathers, furniture or its own body. This guide shows you which materials are safe, how to build cheap foraging toys, and how to rotate them so your bird stays busy and happy.
Regurgitating on you, shredding paper, guarding a corner and sudden biting are often hormones, not naughtiness. Learn to read the seasonal breeding drive, and adjust light, diet, cage set-up and how you touch your bird to calm it down , plus the signs that mean it needs a vet.
Leaving background sound on for a lonely parrot feels kind, but does it actually help or just add stress? This article compares music, television and talk radio, explains what the research suggests, and helps you choose the right audio (and the right volume) for your individual bird.
Enrichment is a basic need, not a luxury. Learn the five natural drives, the toys and routines that satisfy them, the different owner approaches, target training, and how to read boredom signs before they become plucking or screaming.
Learn how to recognize the subtle and obvious signs of boredom in companion parrots, from feather plucking to screaming. Discover actionable enrichment strategies and a clear veterinary escalation tree to help your bird thrive.
Nearly everything that occupies a parrot is free: foraging, paper, cardboard and untreated branches. What costs money in a flat is space, and layout solves that. This guide covers no-cost enrichment, cage placement, out-of-cage stands, homemade toy safety, managing dawn noise for neighbours, and the hazards an open-pla
Birds do not dig. Destructive behaviour in a pet bird is either normal chewing, hormonal shredding and cavity-seeking, or frustration, and the three need opposite responses. This guide separates them, explains why nest-seeking is the one with medical consequences, and sets out what to provide and what to remove.
Boredom and anxiety produce the same complaints and need opposite treatments. How to read the bird rather than the behaviour, how to sort screaming, feather damage and biting, and why hormones and pain must be ruled out first.
Parrots replace feathers on a controlled cycle rather than shedding a coat, so mammal grooming tools only damage them. This guide explains how a moult is sequenced, why growing feathers must never be pulled, what bathing and diet do for feather quality, and how to read stress bars, retained sheaths and the line where s
A parrot and a small child cannot be made safe by good behaviour on either side, because the bite is faster than the child and the bird reads height as status. This sets out the three zones a household needs, how far back a cage has to sit, what a child can safely do at each age, the warning signals to teach them, and
Boredom and anxiety look alike in birds and are treated in opposite ways: a bored bird needs more to do, a frightened bird needs less to cope with. This guide covers the veterinary rule-out that has to come first, how to sort the two by trigger and timing, what to change for each, and the hormonal behaviour that gets m
Clipping does not make a parrot safe, it changes which accidents it has: keel injuries from crash landings, blood feathers that snap at the next moult, and floor-level hazards. What a clip actually removes aerodynamically, the clips that go wrong, the narrow cases where it is defensible, how to grow one out, and the do
A confident parrot that suddenly panics is showing a symptom, and sight loss, pain, heavy metal and hormones all present this way. This guide covers the medical differentials first, explains why flooding creates permanently phobic birds, and gives a distance-based rebuilding plan including the specific-person problem,
