Category: Diet

Food and dietary information for Parrots.

Parrot Rescue

Some time back, a person who could no longer own her Goffin´s Cockatoo approached me. She was looking for a home for her bird.

The Umbrella Cockatoo

It was 1976 when I first saw the species. In the quarantine of George Kroesen there were hundreds. The birds congregated in the farthest corner, each trying to hide.

F.A.Q. About Breeding

During the past few months, I set aside several of the questions that I received via Facebook.

Principals of Aviculture

When I was a kid, I periodically visited the now vanished Sedgewick Studio, a bird store owned by the eccentric Erling Kjelland. He believed in ´witching´– the process of sexing birds by suspending a pendulum over its head.

Healthy Diet is Cornerstone to a Healthy Caged Bird

When I started keeping birds, information on diet was very deficient. A sunflower or safflower seed based diet supplemented with a bit of apple, endive and maybe a piece of carrot was deemed adequate. Fast-forward 40 years and our understanding of diet for cage birds has evolved considerably. Today we truly understand that to own a healthy parrot the cornerstone is a good, balanced diet.

Macaws

The common name ´macaw´ is used to describe a group of often very gaudily colored neo-tropical parrots that range from very large to small.

Amazon Parrots

The day was typically hot and humid. It was 1979 and I had been invited to visit Ramon Noegel and Greg Moss, the former the doyen of Amazon parrot breeding in the US. Noegel achieved what at the time was seen as the impossible—producing young from multiple pairs of Amazon parrots year after year.

Caiques

… The birds were Black-headed Caiques Pionites melanocephalus. The coloration suggested it was a pair and their three young. As is typical of many small parrots in the neo-tropics, the bird slept in the cavity. ..

The Sun Conure

I can recall that day in the 1970s as if it were today. I had walked into a quarantine station to see several pairs of a new species… a species that was commanding a hefty price– $800.00 per pair.

Blue and Gold Macaw

Over many months and two separate trips, I watched as a pair of Bue and Gold Macaws Ara ararauna nested in a dead standing Buriti Palm Mauritia flexuosa.