I know, you have read on countless websites about what a great pet budgies make and how easy they are to take care of. You have seen trained ones on You Tube doing cute tricks or singing songs or talking up a storm. Real Simple magazine even featured an article on 4 Ideas for Low-Maintenance Pets and the first pet they feature - Budgies. The article talks about how friendly they are, that they often talk and that they bond with the people in their house. It mentioned a "weekly" cage cleaning and that someone will have to hang out with then for an "hour or so" a day since they are social animals. It also talks about how cheap they are as a pet... the average bird costs about $20.00 and the average cage around $60.00.
I like the magazine lots, but I think that they need to check their facts and figures.
Over the years I have been the proud and happy owner of three parakeets. This is my current parakeet Chirp.
She is a beautiful bird, and yes, she can be very friendly. She is even learning to speak human. She does a few cute tricks too!
For all these great qualities, Chirp is like having an incredibly intelligent 2 year old destructive tornado around the house. And she just turned 1.
Today I thought I would edit some posts for future blogs. At first Chirp wanted to help me.
Is it lunch time? Can I have some?
That is not eggs. Her favorite food is scrambled eggs. (No, that is not cannibalism -think about it, what do you think birds eat before they hatch?) Parakeets need to eat a balanced diet. They should not eat seeds only. But it is tough to break this eating habit when that is what they eat in the pet store before you purchase them. Pellet diet would be better. We kinda do a mix. On average, we spend $10 to $15 a month on just "bird food." We regularly supplement with fresh fruits and veggies and the sides of my sandwiches. There are now bread crumbs everywhere.
Then we played a little with her toys. Hey, you have to spend an hour or so with them each day!
After all the balls (cat toy balls with little bells inside) and all the water bottle tops have been thrown on the floor with her exclaiming "Uh Oh" every time, she no longer wants to play with me, but would rather play in the Play House my daughter made for her out of a tissue box. She alternates between this and going in and outside her cage while I go back to work editing.
That is, until she sees her bird friends outside. She is in her cage when she sees them and she begins to flap excitedly, causing all the loose seed and feathers from the bottom of her cage to go flying EVERYWHERE! And I cleaned her cage this morning. As I do EVERY morning. If we waited a week to clean out her cage it would be filthy and full of seed hulls and enough feathers to make an entire flock! Imagine the mess I would have on my hands then! After "cleaning" her cage, she comes out to fly a few laps around the room and sing at the top of her voice. Her singing includes three different wild bird calls, the chirping noise that the living room phone makes when hung up and an assortment of chatter that sounds like "pretty bird." I hope the other thing she is saying is not a swear word.
All this flying calls for a bath. Birds generally require regular baths to help them keep their feathers healthy. Our last bird used to take showers every day under the bathroom faucet. This one prefers a little bird bath tub. Oh yeah, she did not get her morning bath. So she decides to take care of this in her water dish.
Only the third time today I have had to clean it out.
After cleaning out her water dish, I come back out to our three season porch where I am working to find that she is now playing with the window sills. Picking off the paint, actually. I shoo her off one sill and she flies to the next, where she immediately decides to pick holes in the screen. I put her on top of her cage and close the window most of the way, leaving a narrow opening so we can hear the birds outside.
Guess what! She can squeeze through the crack! Now I carefully open the window to get her out from between the screen and the glass. While I am double checking the screen to make sure she hasn't made any bird sized holes in the screen and that all is still firmly in place, she runs around the other side of her cage and....
pulls all the petals off one of the flowers on my Begonia and decorates the table and floor with them. Pleased with her work, Captain Destructo swaggers into her cage for a feather preening session. Exasperated I close the door behind her to keep her out of further trouble while I get the vacuum to clean up the feathers, seed shells, flower petals and sandwich bits.
Having cleaned up the mess, I grab a cup of coffee and sit down to do a little work. She preens and then takes a short nap. All that activity has apparently wore her out. But the nap doesn't last long. She wakes up and starts playing with all the toys in and attached to her cage. The little mirror that is hooked to the outside goes crashing to the floor and she starts squawking up a storm and rattling the bars like an inmate from one of those old movies. I give up, open her cage and retrieve her mirror from the floor. Thankfully it is not broke, unlike a number of "bird toys" that have been bought for her over the past year. I would hazard a guess that out of $50.00 worth of toys, she has broken or taken apart about half of them. She really is very good with that beak that she keeps well honed on a steady supply of cuttlebones that we purchase for her to chew on. I have taken to buying them in bulk.
Now that she is back out of the cage, I take some time to work on training with her. We are working on getting her to come when she is called. She is starting to get the idea, after all we have been working on this for about two months or so. It shorter than the time it took to get her finger trained and tame enough to come out of the cage. Well, mostly finger trained. She has a tendency to bite sometimes. This is ongoing training.
After this, I line up the table with her toys so that she can throw them all back on the floor with an "Uh Oh" and a lot of chatter. I completely don't know where I was in the editing process. She decides to help by cleaning my computer.
My daughter comes home from school and my work focus shifts. Chirp helps with homework by rearranging and chewing on all the sides of the paper. If I didn't know better, I would think she was teething. I will mention this to the vet at her annual check up this year... those run around $70-$90 dollars for a good avian vet. Hmmm, I thought this was an inexpensive pet? I am relieved to know in a few hours my husband will be home and he can take over the bird watching duties as he sits down with a nice cold beer.
I, on the other hand will be tallying up the cost of the figurines that she broke in the living room when she decided to clear them off the shelf.
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