Would this be budgie jumping?
They can still glide, just can’t take off
Hope it’s OK to resurrect this thread with an update.
Our budgie is now quite tame; there’s still a bit of work to do to discourage him from nipping and he’s still a bit jumpy around hands, but he will fly straight to my shoulder when I open the cage and will spend lots of time interacting with us now.
He can mimic several phrases quite clearly now, including:
-“Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock”
-“Hello Caesar!” (that’s his name, BTW)
-“Hello bird!”
-“Hello matey”
-“Cheeky bird”
-“Squeaky bird”
-“Beaky bird”
Although quite often, he will sit muttering a long string of sounds made up of chirpy/chattery/raucous natural budgie sounds interspersed with words and complete phrases from his human vocab. Or sometimes he will mimic speech, but recombine the words in odd juxtaposition, for example “Hello mouse beak!” or “cheeky squeaky beaky beaky beaky bird bird bird, hello!”
All of this taming was achieved without clipping his wings; he has a favourite toy - a little yellow fabric flower that was originally part of a hairband and it was this toy that we initially used to lure him down to land on us; after a while, he lost the fear and will now land on shoulders and heads without a problem; he will also land on laps etc if we’re sitting down.
Sometimes when he is very tired at the end of the day, he will sit and let me tickle him around his neck and under his mask feathers - he seems to really enjoy this as he will ruffle up the feathers and go into a sort of rapt trance, but during the day when he is fully alert, he is still a bit too perky and wary of hands/fingers.
I feel sure that he will continue to get more tame with continued interaction.
Back again! hope nobody minds.
He’s really tame now, and will fly straight to my hand or shoulder when beckoned, and will step up onto my finger when it is held in front of his perch.
But he nearly died on Monday…
My wife phoned me at work to say that he was just sitting there, not eating, moving about or making any sounds and that he was generally listless, unresponsive and wouldn’t open his eyes properly. We made an appointment to take him to the vet that evening and she said it seemed to be a respiratory infection and that he had very little hope of recovery (apparently birds are programmed not to show early symptoms of sickness - would make them vulnerable to predation - so by the time symptoms are in evidence, disease is often quite advanced)
Anyway, she said it might be worth trying to dose him up with antibiotics, but that it would have to go in his water, because holding him to administer it directly might be too much stress in his weakened state, but that I should not raise my hopes too high.
So I took him home and put the medicine in his drink; later on he took some and I covered him up for the night.
The next morning, he was a little quiet, but his eyes were noticeably brighter and he was holding his feathers flatter and when I returned home from work in the evening, I could hear him chirping and talking as soon as I entered the front door. He made a remarkable and speedy recovery.
He’s still a little weak and underweight, so we’re feeding him cob millet and not letting him fly too much in case he gets exhausted. We have to continue the 10-day antibiotic course to the end and supplement this with avian-formulated vitamin supplements (apparently they normally derive a fair bit of their vitamin intake from their gut flora, which is inhibited by the antibiotics).
But it looks very hopeful now. I don’t normally get too attached to pets, but Caesar is actually my own pet - not just a family pet; I think I would have been quite upset to lose him so young.
Glad to hear that he’s recovering. Budgies are cool, and this thread makes me want one. We always used to have one or two when we were kids.
I hope he’s not jealous of your birdcam friends!
Maybe you or someone can weigh in on taming a budgie when you have two of them. We have a pair a couple years old, and they’re not at all tame. Not unnaturally, they prefer each other’s company to ours, and I don’t know if that can be readily overcome. They peck at us quite hard. Of course, they peck at each other too, and in fact one of them bloodied the other’s wing pretty badly the other day.
Any hope for us?
I think it’s most unlikely that you’d be able to to tame a pair of birds, especially adults, unless perhaps you spent every hour of every day in close proximity to them until they accept that you’re part of the scenery. Otherwise, they’re just too interested in each other to be bothered dealing with humans; it is also hard to tame a single bird if you let it have a mirror, for pretty much the same reason - it will socialise with the image of the bird in the mirror.
Really, taming pet birds could be classified as a kind of cruelty (and probably is by some), because it involves radically altering the bird’s natural expressions; it’s deliberately invoking abnormal behaviour. That isn’t going to put me off though; in as far as it is possible for a bird to experience a happy life (and there is much debate about what ‘experience’ means to non-humans), I’m confident that my pet bird gets the best available treatment; it may not be normal, but it’s a rich, diverse and hopefully fulfilling kind of abnormality.
I don’t see it as cruel if you are coaxing an enticing a bird to do what you want by offering what they want. My birds usually invent all of their own games and tricks, including “stick your face in a cup and scream” and “bottle cap hockey”. The environment is unnatural, but they apply natural behaviors and improvise. We tamed the conure even though he could fly (I thought his wings were clipped enough, but they were not), mostly by playing with treats and pretending to be more interested in other things then him. Once he decided we were companions, not predators, he seemed to feel it was natural to scold us, push at us with his beak, grab with his feet and hold down fingers that needed preening. He then advanced to marching all over me and demanding to have his head scratched.
It takes a lot of patience to tame a bird, especially an energetic type like a budgie, without clipping their wings - kudos to you! I’ve never been able to do that, and I’ve been handling and taming birds since I was 6!
Happy to hear Caesar is doing well. Quick observance of his illness and a rush to the vet saved his life, it seems.
A friend of mine used to buy birds from the newspaper classifieds. He would go out of his way to find “untameable” birds and pay bottom-dollar. He would then spend a month taming the bird, then sell it for a nice profit.
His approach combined careful food deprivation, wing clipping, and a closet. Basically, he would put the bird in this tiny closet with him, and sit in this tiny space with food offered by hand. This was all following a 24 hour fast.
Good luck with Caesar!