How to Choose Your Bird's Cage - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats.
Hi, this is Rick Horvitz at Golden Cockatoo in Deerfield Beach, Florida and we are going to discuss how to choose the best cage for your parrot. The first thing to realize about parrot ownership, which you may already know, is that they can be a little messy, and they are extremely intelligent, and they are really good at getting out of things. So you have to be very careful to get a cage that takes these things into account. Such as, number one: door locks. Can the bird pick the front door lock? Number two: the locks for the actual feeders. Can the birds open those feeders and not only empty the cups on the ground, or escape? Those are two really important factors to look at.
The third thing is, do the feeders have a system so that the mess is contained? Are they open behind it with just bars, which means that you are going to have more of a mess around the cage? Another to consider is something called a skirt. It is not what you wear, it is what the cage wears. So it is a piece of metal that angles around the cage, comes usually up around four inches and out about two or three inches, and that does catch a lot of the food that the parrot will throw out. Not all of it. It helps. Personally, I do not like them. I am always bumping into them with my knees. You do not see them. They are below your eye level. So it is better to try to have a cage that is designed with a better cup and a better feeding system, rather than relying on the skirts of the cage.
Another thing to take into account is the bird that you have and the bar spacing. For instance, birds, as you have probably realized, have eyes on the side on their head, not on the front of their head like we do. So if you can imagine the bar spacing being smaller than the bird's eyes, the bird is not going to try to get its head out because it cannot. It is going to hit its eyes against the bars and it is not going to stick its head out. And then maybe, if it worked to get its head out, twist sideways and hang itself. So it is really important to get a cage that the bird cannot stick its head through the bars, indicated by the width of the head, dictated by the eyes.
The second thing that is important to realize is how big your bird's wingspan is. You always want the bird to be able to open up the wings inside the cage, and then some. So if you have a large Macaw, the minimum cage you should be looking at is 40 inches across, because their wingspan could easily be three feet, and that only gives them a couple of inches on each side, but it does allow them to at least open up their wings. The third thing to consider is the material, and that has to do with your budget, because stainless steel is the most expensive. Now they are making nice aluminum cages which are less expensive. And then you have the powder-coated cages, which are the least expensive. So you want to determine what your budget is, what you can handle, and what is going to work well with you with those three things.
Another element of the cage that is every important is whether or not it has a grill, which it should; it has a tray, which it should; and both are easily removable, because you will want to be able to take the grill out and clean it every day. The same with the tray. The tray you will want to take out and actually put a piece of paper down there, or some other substrate, that you can look at the bird's droppings to make sure your bird is healthy. That is one way you check on your bird's health, is by the droppings. Play tops versus dome tops. I have a dome top beside me here. Birds, being prey, also have a pecking order, like chickens do. So if the bird is up high, higher than your eye level, it tends to be more aggressive. For that reason, we do not condone the purchase of play top cages for younger parrots.
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how to build a parrot standby leroi214212,661 views
@xToXiicxT3RRoRx parakeets are very very comonly bred much more comonly bred than a conure or a cockatiel for instance. also parakeets are parent fed instead of hand fed. hand fed birds are much more expencive because it is much more work. parakeets are still okay pets even if they are parent fed. birds such as conures or caiques when not hand fed, will be aggressive and can definatly cause some flesh wounds.
51324588615 1 month ago
@xToXiicxT3RRoRx maybe because parrots can actually talk..but idk.
xxHelloLaurenxx 3 months ago
CAGE FREE IS A HAPPER BIRD I HAVE A BIRD ROOM JUST FOR THAM
BIRDANGAL 4 months ago
@xToXiicxT3RRoRx Maybe because parakeets are more common? Or easier to breed?
MooSho13 5 months ago
Why are small parrots more expensive than parakeets which are about the same size?
xToXiicxT3RRoRx 6 months ago