I took my 11 yo daughter to the park today, and there was a lady doing face-paintings for $5, includes pics with parakeets.
She didn’t want face paint, just to hold the birds, and I paid the $5.
These birds were extremely tame. The lady had three budgies, out in the open air at the park. She’d hand them all off to children and resume her face painting.
When they did fly, it was a 45 degree angle straight to the ground and I wonder if something bad was happening.
She was trying to sell the “trained parakeets” for $120 each
I’ve hand fed budgie chicks. It’s a lot of work. The end result is worth $120, although I’ve either given them away or just added them to our little flock.
Budgies that are not only tame but comfortable around strangers to that degree require a LOT of intensive work from the time they are babies. They’re worth $120 each if they’re that well trained and socialized.
And probably they had their primary flight feathers clipped. It doesn’t hurt the bird, just limits their flying, and in a few months they’ll molt the old feathers and grow new ones.
When I was a kid we had a couple of pet budgies, imaginatively named Peter and Paul. They used to be out of the cage regularly, flying around in the house. One day Peter did, just like his nursery rhyme namesake, fly away because someone opened the back door. However he, again like the nursery rhyme, came back.
Agreed - if they could not fly horizontally, they almost certainly have clipped feathers, but as you say, that alone does not nearly make a bird hand-tame.
