As some of you probably recall, my partner and I have pet parakeets. Alias, my special little buddy among the three, lives in a cage by himself. It’s one of the older designs of birdcage with the pull-out bottom; when I clean said cage, I usually cut six or eight sheets of newsprint to the size of the cage bottom and lay them all down at once; that way I can change the top sheet every day or two without disgruntling Alias too much.
Here’s the puzzle: over the last couple of weeks he’s started doing this funny thing where he grabs a corner of the top piece of floor paper and pulls the whole thing about a quarter or a third of the way up so it stands up and folds over. When I take the funky pooped-upon layer of paper out, he promptly tugs the next one into the same position.
I know that 'keets will do some things just because they think it’s fun to do so; is this behaviour just another goofy game he came up with, or is it some instinctive impulse he’s following? Does it demonstrate something I should do to make his life happier and more satisfactory?
He has a new toy. Good luck persuading him otherwise.
Try giving him some other piece of fascinating paper to play with; some budgies are enthralled by the strips you tear off perforated fanfold computer printer paper. You give him a handful and get out of the way.
I had a budgie that played basketball. I didn’t teach him, he just figured it out for himself. He had one of those plastic lattice balls with a bell inside and he’d pick it up and fling it around the cage until it landed in one of his dishes. Then he’d do a little happy dance for a few seconds and go retrieve the ball and start all over again. They just seem to love to play with stuff.
Mine does exactly the same. I’m guessing it’s either some kind of game or some subversion of a behaviour that would make sense in the wild (maybe turning over leaf litter to look for fallen seeds underneath or something like that).
They just seem to like things with edges. I have a T shirt that is sewn together with the seams on the outside - he starts off gently nibbling and grooming the seams, but rapidly escalates into shouting at them, nipping and nodding, and stamping his foot on them.
My last vet said that this kind of behavior is nesting related. Makes sense, since budgies are cavity nesters, and it sounds like yours is creating a pocket. Shredding things is also nesting behavior.
Brian the Budgie doesn’t play, he stares - for hours sometimes. I’ve had to put a food bowl on top of the computer monitor, just so I can pretend he’s keeping me company rather than staring at me silently from across the room.
Mind you, he gets free range of the lounge while I’m at work and some days he* isn’t *in exactly the same spot I left him in the morning (most days he is though).
He does use the bars of his cage as percussion while he’s singing a particularly complex wee song. He taps his beak against the bars in perfect 6/2 time while squeaking and chirping madly. Sometimes he’ll reply when I tap on a table.
He’s a bit weird - fits right in with this family.
Bingo. Almost everything a bird does in captivity is related in some way to either feeding or reproductive behavior.
I saw a cockatiel once. The owner believed the bird had “worms” based on the fact that he would rub his cloaca on her hand, while perched there. Out of deference to the presence of her preteen son, I tried to gently explain that the bird was masturbating.
My gentleness was overdone, and she made it clear that she didn’t understand. Her son did, however. Eventually he sighed, and said, “He’s beating off, mom!”.
LOL! When I was a kid, I got my first budgie and I put jingle bells in the cage as a toy. One day, I found him on top of a jingle bell on the bottom of a cage, screaming and flapping his wings and making a fuss.
I was terrified. I thought he’d gotten a toe stuck in the bell and it was cutting him. So I got him off the bell, but he jumped right back on it. Huh? I pulled him off a couple of times, but he’d go right back at it. I thought about it and finally understood a bit more about the birds and the bees, so to speak. I ended up taking the bells out of the cage, though, since there was a real risk of him getting a toe caught, given how the metal was shaped.
Does he perch or sleep under/next to the flap of paper? My conure likes to have something soft and enfolding to sleep against; my guess is that it simulates another bird. I have a washcloth dangling down, and he edges up against it at night.
