Toys Your Parrot Will Love the Most - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats.
HI my name is Katie and I work at the Golden Cockatoo in Deerfield Beach, Florida and I am here today to talk to you about how to pick out toys for your bird. All birds love to play and when someone tells me that their bird does not like toys, what I tell them is they just have not found the right toy for their birds. My choice in toys is to choose a variety of different materials. Now these are two examples of my own personal birds and this is actually their perch when they are here at the store. And as you can see they really like to chew on this toy.
This toy started off looking like this and what it is, is a brightly colored wooden toy, has a little bit of rawhide on the bottom. It is big enough that they can get a good beak full but not so large that it is overpowering to them. And what I do is hang it on the tree and as you can see they chip away at the wood. Now I also like to have different types of material. This is called the pinata and it is made out of a vine type fabric. The coloring that you see is all natural, it is a food coloring as is anything you see on our toys. What they do with this toy is they start by preening on it, just like they preen their feathers. And especially if you have a bird that is a feather plucker, this is a great toy. Inside here is all of this material packed and so they will chew on it and preen on it. Eddie takes about 2 to 3 weeks with a toy this size and he will chew it until it is all gone.
Another toy that I really like is something that combines different textures. So we have something like this here that has leather and it has wood. What I like about this is that birds are very tactile and are always chewing at different types of materials. So with this type of toy they get different shapes, they get different sizes, and they get different materials. It is brightly colored and they can also hang from it because most birds love to hang. So those are three toys that I like. Now depending on your bird, you may choose other types of toys.
For instance, cockatoos love mechanical type toys. We carry a variety of toys that are plastic with nuts and bolts that they can actually unscrew, puzzles that they can literally take the pieces and put them back where they belong, forging toys where we can hid food inside the toy and then they have to work for their snacks. Quite often we become their toys as well as you can see, Eddie preens my hair and Dewy just likes to hang on me. Other things you may want to consider when choosing your toys is the size of the toy compared to your bird. If you have a cocktail that is about this big, you are not going to buy them a toy that is this large. Number one, you are going to frighten them, but also they are going to look at it and go 'that is way to big for me to handle. I am not gonna touch it.' So you want to go size appropriate and material appropriate.
You also want to make sure that you keep your bird engaged and in doing so, what you want to do is every two weeks or so, rotate toys out. They may not have destroyed the toy but it may be ready to go into the toy chest for a week and bring out a different toy, it peeks their curiosity and it keeps them very very active. You can have too many toys in a cage. If you find that your cage is so full of toys that your bird cannot move around a lot, you have got too many. For my size birds I like to have about 3 to 4 toys of a variety of different textures. And, you know what, my belief is a bird that destroys their toys is a happy, healthy bird. So do not be upset and go to the store and say, "My bird destroyed this toy" because as you can see, they are supposed to.
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Choosing a Parrotby geobeats5,838 views
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