"When you buy the best, it only hurts once!"

This is the slogan of a company that makes deer feeders. (Yes, we're already planning to feed the wildlife at Chateau Plumage.) What a succinct way of phrasing what I have been telling customers of my air conditioning company and we have been telling potential parrot buyers for years.

Parrots are non-domesticated animals. They have all of the instincts of a wild bird. What's the difference? Imagine a wild cat outside your home that has kittens. If you leave them for their mother to raise you will get several equally wild babies. If you were to capture one of the adult babies you might be able to tame it over time and it may become a good pet but it would not be the same as a domestically raised kitten.

Now, imagine you got one of the wild kittens at three weeks old and handfed it and raised it in your home. You would have a loving cat that is perfectly compatible with your family and totally tame.

Parrots are exactly the same. We take babies from their mothers at three weeks and as far as the babies are concerned, they are little "parrot humans" by the time they are weaned. The more attention we give them, the tamer and more socialized they become. The challenge of raising baby parrots is to give them as much attention when they are three months old as when they are three weeks old.

This is where there is a big difference in breeders. If you are buying from a breeder that talks about the number of babies they produce each year it should tell you something. Likewise, if you are considering a breeder that keeps their birds in a separate facility it should tell you something.

When a person visits our home, they are visiting our aviary. If our kids visit, they visit our babies as well. If we have friends over, the babies have visitors also. If our dog barks or our cat meows, the birds respond. Socialized? When our birds go home with their new owners they are going from one cozy, happy place to another. Hopefully, they don't notice the difference.
- posted by J-Birds @ 6:00 PM |