How do you make your birds get along so easily? Your new bird being friends with the Ringnecked parakeet so quickly and all your pictures of your birds preening eachother for instance. It seems like most people have a really hard time introducing birds together, have you had that happen to you, and how to fix it?
Oh, this is actually something I’ve been meaning to talk about on here! So I’ve always been a strong supporter of birbs having birb friends. Parrots are super social animals and always naturally live in flocks or monogamous pairs, never alone, and I don’t necessarily think that a human person can replicate that sort of bond, enrichment and mental stimulus.. BUT! I do get that having multiple birds is hard and that a lot of birds won’t accept another bird even being around, much less share a living space with one - so I want to state that I for sure don’t judge anyone who doesn’t successfully keep multiple birds! Hell, I myself even have only one bird of each species currently, even though my ideal would be two of each! (I mean.. I guess we can count Meg and Leia as conspecifics..) I might actually make a longer post about this topic later tonight, but to sum it up: Parrot owners here in Sweden always seem to me to have an easier time pairing up multiple birds than parrot owners in, say, the US. I’m thinking that may be due to the fact that most Swedish breeders don’t actually hand raise their babies anymore. Like, instead of having a breeder pair in an aviary and taking out the babies to feed and raise them on their own, if someone wants to produce tamed, social bird babies who likes people, they rather tend to have a tamed and social pair of birds breed, let the birds do the feeding and the raising, but still interact with the babies when they’re ready and the parents are ready. So they get to grow up learning how to be a bird, and then they also get to learn, mostly from their tamed and social parents, to interact with humans and that humans are pretty great. I feel like this makes for a really good foundation when it comes to birds interacting with birds. They already know how to. Of course, that’s not to say that a hand raised bird won’t get along with another bird! Miley and Alaska, my Senegals, were both hand raised and had both been only birds for their entire lives before Miley came to me - and they ended up bonding with eachother really strongly. (Miley more so than Alaska, who liked everyone, haha) I introduced them slowly and made sure they always had enough space and resources to get away from eachother should they want to (oh and also!! if you clip your birds’ wings they will for SURE be more likely to start fighting with eachother because they can’t actually get away from the situation - and if they DO start fighting, they might get a bad impression of The Other Bird and not want to try again), that they had their own lil’ spots to go to where I wouldn’t allow the other one, and.. That was pretty much it? It took a couple of weeks of Alaska being more interested than Miley, and then they just kind of.. Found eachother. And never looked back. :P Nicko and Meg were introduced before I got them (I got them together), but I’m pretty sure their previous owner just kind of got another Ringneck and put her in the cage with Nicko and it happened to work out, lol. …I guess that’s pretty much what I did with Meg and Leia too (but I of course made sure to have a back-up plan). Both were parent raised and spent most of their lives with other birds, and they are in the same genus, so they understand eachothers’ body language. It’s often a lot easier to introduce two birds of the same species (or at least genus) to eachother! Drogon was parent raised too and really really likes other birds. I’ve brought him to parrot-meetups to hang out with other amazons too, and he REALLY loves it (he’s way more intense than all of my other birds, so he doesn’t quite have as much fun when hanging out with them, haha), and I’ve always planned on getting him an Amazon friend when I’ve got the resources to do so, and to… uh.. put together a back-up plan in case they happen to not get along.. Haha. But I’m totally excited for him to get a friend even though it will probably be at least a year or so until then. :’) I hope that answered your question haha, but feel free to hit me with another ask if you’re wondering about something more specific!
