Fussbudgie!
That describes the four that I live with.
I was hoping for some good bird stories. This thread made me realize I have a soft spot for birds. Maybe because we never raised them—and then ate them—on the farm. (Caged, indoor birds. Not the chickens.)
Mine beat me up yesterday. I told them they didn’t peck hard enough to tickle.
I’ve been meaning to video the “goodnight noise” and post it here in the hopes that dopers might recognize the sound and put us out of our “curiosity killed the cat” misery. Every night (or at nap time) when we cover D.V. up, she makes a funny noise, I can’t even describe it in words (but I’ll try). Sort of a soft growly "uhREE-uhRUh. The noise is almost never repeated at any other time than bedtime. We all call it “the goodnight noise”.
Good! Bird stories. Don’t more people keep birds anymore? Wasn’t it a craze back in the '50s and '60s?
I have a friend who had a myna bird. Facinating.
And another friend who raised cockatiels.
I don’t know a lot about birds except that they’re “delicate.” Conditions have to be right. And they can die of a broken heart. Which makes me want to get TWO birds (so one won’t be lonely) and let them fly loose in the house.
We usually keep multiple birds, it just doesn’t seem possible for even two humans in the same house to give a parrot all the attention it wants.
We give our flock quite a bit of time outside the cages, but they need to be supervised even in a “bird-proofed” room. Ours have suffered occasional accidents even with supervision. If you give them time to outside the cage and let them fly around you do get healthier, happier birds but there is more risk of injury.
I bet that she is sharpining/grinding down her beak, its normal for parrots to make that noise before settling down for the night.
Peace
LIONsob
It’s actually a sign of a happy, contented, and often well-fed parrot, actually. You see, when we grind our jaws it’s a sign of stress and bad stuff. When parrots grind their jaws, it’s a sign of happiness and good stuff.
Birds are weird. (I’m sure they think the same about us.)
Bird stories? Well we started feeding the doves. No problems. They coo and are a bit annoying but overall they are fine.
Pink and grey galahs turn up. They are lovely. Like little tin soldiers marching around the back yard. Not very noisy but eat a lot of sunflower seeds. Getting expensive.
Corellas turn up. Large white birds and extremely noisy Lots of corellas. They shit everywhere and screech at 4.30 am. The neighbours hate me. I don’t care but the food bill is now around $40 a week.
An eagle turns up and eats a dove. The cat and I hide inside. The corellas are ripping up the backyard for whatever reason.
Now there is a frigging ibis wandering around the backyard. The eagle comes looking for a snack every few days. The back yard is all dug up and there are huge piles of bird shit everywhere. The mowerman is not happy. I could put Nauru Island out of the phosphate business.
Aren’t birds magic?
Awesome. 
Bad birds are hilarious. That’s probably why I love my flock of horrible Budgies so much.
No…she does that too. This is an actual “word” (insofar as birds make words). FWIW, she’s a cockatiel. QUITE the character, I hand-raised her from about 3 weeks, so she’s ridiculously spoiled, but unlike the larger parrots she’s happy with attention from anyone, it doesn’t have to be just me.
She does some hilarious noises, but she’s absolutely horrible at whistling, she can’t carry a tune in a bucket! She imitates the microwave so perfectly, that if I’m nuking something, I’ll get fooled every time that it’s done.
She also does a perfect imitation of the dog’s squeaky toy, and completely understands that it’s the dog playing with the toy that makes that noise. When she sees the dog grab and play with a stuffed animal, she’ll start the squeaky toy noise.
She also “yells” the dog’s name, and “CAT”! Yeah, they get yelled at often. The cat for scratching the carpet, or eating a plastic bag, and the dog for chasing the cat when the cat gets yelled at. It goes something like this: I catch the cat trying to eat a plant, or scratching the carpet and I yell “CAAaaaT”!
Cricket then launches to her feet and tries to make the cat mind, and then I yell “CRICKET! stop torturing the cat”! Then a little bird voice says either “Cricket”? Or “cat!” often followed by squeaky toy noises. Yeah, it’s a riot.
I wrote up the story a few years back of how I found Brian the Bolshie Budgie on the side of a path on my way to work.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with some friends about ‘why we buy pets’ and I realised that I bought Bob the Blob because Brib was looking sad.
I bought a pet to keep the pet that cost nothing company…
They are very happy together, whether preening, sharing a foodbowl or arguing loudly about who owns the perching stick outside the front door of the cage.
The Divemaster has a giant greenwing macaw named ‘Trigger.’ She is a very scary, very smart animal with the memory of an elephant. I hadn’t seen her for three years and then the Divemaster and I sort of returned to seeing one another out of the blue and I went to his place for a visit one evening.
The first time she saw me come into the living room, within minutes she remembered her name for me: Peekaboo. I used to play peekabo with her all the time. The Divemaster, who has had macaws most of his life, was blown away by it. I don’t know why. Trigger and I played that game daily for several years. I’m not at all surprised by her memory.
His German Shephard Rommel immediately brought his favorite toy to me to play ‘Toes,’ which is a sort of tug of war game we did together from the time he was a puppy. He takes one end of the toy and pulls. I have the other end, and while we’re tugging, I’m trying to tickle his toes. He loves it.
Animals are waysmarter than most humans give them credit for.
Thanks for this thread. I’m missing a little blue troublemaker of my own.
Our little disabled budgie, Scritch, died this past Saturday night in her cage. She was 7 years, three months, and two days old. She was descended from pet-store-bred parents who also died around the same age – budgies can live 15 years in a good home, but typically inbred pet store budgies live only 7 years, usually succumbing to tumors.
So she was elderly and could not escape her genetic heritage. It was not unexpected – she’d been increasingly cuddly lately, and hadn’t been preening herself well for a while, and she napped more, sometimes lying on her stomach because her deformed legs splayed out to the sides enough to make perching troublesome.
By luck, I needed to listen to many hours of podcasts prior to attending a discussion group, so I sat at the computer in the birdroom with her for hours on what turned out to be her last day. She crouched on a soft towel in front of the keyboard and gently head-butted me for attention and preening.
I called her “trouble” above, but to be honest she was a sweet-natured creature. I’ve known birds that will scheme, or punish their humans, but Scritch really only wanted to chatter to us, and to climb into anything we were eating, of course. And occasionally to fly – in the air she wasn’t hobbled and struggling, she was in her element, zipping around with a whirr, yelling “Ih-Ih-Ih-Ih!” the entire time she was airborne.
We raised her from a hatchling when her mother failed to feed the chicks reliably and one died. So we took over. I remember feedings every two hours, round the clock. We boiled water in one container, then mixed it with cooler water in another container, balancing a thermometer in the glass, pre-heating the syringe full of mash to the precise temperature a mother budgie’s crop, our kitchen looking like the lair of a medieval alchemist. I remember how the smallest chick failed to thrive, little Peanut fading away and growing still in my wife’s hand while we were on the phone with our avian vet. “Just eat,” I urged the last survivor, “and we’ll take care of the rest.” She dind’t understand my promise, but Scritch pumped her beak on the syringe like it was a matter of life and death, which indeed it was for this palm-sized, pink and purplish dinosaur with twisted legs.
We tried to fix her developing legs. I remember taping them closer together with veterinary tape, which was supposed to be nonadhesive and easy to release – nonadhesive or not, it was stronger than her tiny, soft bones. So whenever we had to re-tape, removing the previous tape was terrifying – the tape would stick and her little matchstick legs would start to flex. Then we’d get the surgical scissors out and try to cut the tape away without cutting her translucent skin, the occasional urgent warning cry “TOE!” ringing across the kitchen. We cradled her in “sock donuts” to help her find her feet. Ultimately it worked only partially – one of her legs reached an almost normal angle, but the right one forever kicks out to the side.
Later, when she was moving from the fuzzy to the feathered stage, she’d warm up her wings, flapping them like a hummingbird in my hand. One day she generated enough lift to take off for the first time. A day or two later she caught me by surprise – during a feeding, she zipped up and out of my hand, slid across the stove, and fell into the gas stove burner which was heating the water! I yanked the heavy pot of near-boiling water off the burner as fast as I dared, and there she was, somehow down beside the flames. I stuck my hands in there and retrieved her. For a second she appeared unhurt, but then the smell of burning feathers filled the room. We turned her over and over, inspecting for damage, and found none. Anxious moments later, we realized I’d singed off the hair on my OWN hands and wrists.
As she grew, we thought she was a boy. Males have blue or purple ceres (the flesh above the beak where the nostrils are); females tan or peach. Scritch’s cere turned blue, then bright blue, then a rich purple. Then it began to fade. Finally one day when she was around two years old, she laid an egg in the lid of a box, clarifying things a bit, and her cere turned tan. Kids these days!
She loved the water. Baths or showers, she’d stay soaking longer than any of the other birds. I called her our little waterduck. She’s wade into a plate of spaghetti with the same gusto.
Our birds are typically only caged when they sleep. The bird room was mostly bird-safe, but apparently not entirely. One day I came home from work and she was nowhere to be found. Eventually I heard a muffled peep, and found her wedged firmly between the floor-to-ceiling bookcase and the wall. Birds have no diaphragms and need to be able to expand their ribcages to breathe, so this was dangerous. I proceeded to make it worse, by tilting the bookcase out from the wall. She immediately slid farther down. Now I was stuck – if I let the bookcase return to the vertical, it would crack her like a walnut; but I could not reach her and support its weight. My cell phone was out of reach and there was no one else home. I held on for as long as I dared, debating what to do, listening to her muffled peeps of alarm. Then I heaved the bookcase out away from the wall, wedging my foot behind it to keep it from kicking back toward her. Hundreds of pounds of books and knickknacks thundered to the floor and dust went everywhere. A moment later, Scritch waddled out from under the bookcase and looked at up me curiously. What was all THAT noise about?
And now at last The Bird Who Lived is gone. It was a decent run for a little bird with bad genes, a small, sweet-tempered parrot from Australia born into a world of fire caves and bookcase traps, a small world, only a few rooms, for the heir to a continent. A world where the big monkeys controlled the access to food and wonderful, wonderful water. But it was a world big enough for a small bird to sing and fly and splash and eat and explore, so she was always kind to the big monkeys, ready to sing into their ears and preen their stringy feathers every night.
Who knows what goes on in the mind of a big monkey? Do they miss her? It’s hard to say.
Surprisingly hard.
That made me cry. You must just be devastated. I’ve had a long string of budges that I’ve loved, and the death of each one hits me hard. I love their gusto for life, and the completely unexpected things they take such pleasure in. How I’ll proudly bring home a new budgie toy from the pet store, only to watch them squabble over…who gets to play with the twist tie holding it up. How you don’t eat the leafy greens, you take baths on the leafy greens. How they’ve made friends with all manner of shiny pots and lids over the years. I love how, as long as you treat them kindly, they’ll love you back with all their heart. More than you can say of most people.
In obedience to the immutable laws of posting, I present the waterduck, may she splash in peace (she’s the one stretching up toward the water, her dad is below her):
Scritch and Navajo showering by Pinfeather Photos, on Flickr
Scritch closeup:
Scritch fluffed by Pinfeather Photos, on Flickr
A good view of how badly her legs were splayed:
Spaghetti for my birthday! by Pinfeather Photos, on Flickr
Oh, my - we have a splay-legged lovebird named Junior for a long number of years. Awkward as heck on the ground, I think the happiest day of his life was discovering what his wings were for.
Birds can be such sweeties, can’t they?
Oooh, she was adorable! I like this quote: “One great thing about being a parrot is you can throw your food and nobody stops you. It helps if the pile of food is bigger than your entire body; it’s “all you can eat AND throw” night!” One of our parakeets would regularly take mouthfuls of whatever he was eating and run and drop them off the edge of the table. I always thought he was planting pasta trees for the next generation…