Should we get a budgie?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

Dunno about “rescuer” - he followed Morty onto the play tree a bit later, and when I tried to approach to put millet near him, he bolted and flew around the room a bit. Most recently he found his way back to the tree (from a different corner than before) and he and Morty were walking around a bit; when I tried putting the millet on one of the upper levels, he bolted again. At the moment he’s on a blade of the ceiing fan (which we NEVER turn on, so he’s fone there). He and Morty are chirping back and forth. He’s been there well over an hour - too scared and uncertain to move back to the cage, I guess. I hope I don’t have to bring out the butterfly net :(.

I got a short video of the two of them running around on top of the tree a little while ago; I’ll upload it when I get the chance. Morty seems to want to preen Rick a lot; Rick does not reciprocate but either tolerates it or runs away.

I think Morty is delighted with his new toy. He’s chirruping and doing a lot of head-bobbing, something he never did much before. It’s interesting seeing the size difference; I’ve always thought Morty was on the small side for a budgie, but Rick is tiny by comparison (then again, Rick is less than 2 months old). I imagine Morty has grown since we got him though I don’t recall him being that small even a year ago.

142

And Rick (like his cartoon namesake) is going to be a fair bit of trouble.

Morty, coming to us with clipped wings, spent most his time in the early days in his cage - and by the time he was ready to venture out, he took a while to learn how to fly. So he seems to really think of the cage as “home” - even when he flies about the room, he returns to his play tree quickly and even hangs out in the cage. He’s there now.

Rick… well, he’s gone back into the cage once or twice briefly, but other than that he’s hanging around outside the cage. Right now he’s been perched on a window frame for the past two hours. If I go near him, he’ll fly around the room, but does NOT seek refuge in the cage. I don’t know if I should just go to bed and leave it open for him or not. He does know that’s where the food and water are - in fact, when I had millet outside the cage earlier, I realized I’d better put it inside, to attract him (it worked; he did go back in briefly).

As opposed as i am to wing-clipping in general, in hindsight it did make it easier to let Morty go free early on - there was only so far he could get. Rick has never been clipped, and he flies quite well: he’s bumped into the wall a couple of times but never with the loud thud that poor Morty did a few times.

I just hope he comes to see the cage interior as a place of refuge, and soon!!!

143

Good luck with Rick. He’s a very unusual color, but very pretty.

144

Rick is settling in, I think.

The other day, I finally had to catch him by putting a large plastic bowl over where he was frozen on the windowframe, and using the lid to get between him and the window. When I put him in the cage, he didn’t want to leave the bowl! The next day he, and perforce Morty, were on lockdown all day. I actually got him to “step up” on my finger once or twice because the poor critter was so paralyzed; both times I simply moved him from one perch to another inside the cage. Since then he’s more likely to move away from my finger.

Since that day, I’ve had the cage open when I’m around. Rick is likelier to hang out on the tree while Morty sits inside, though there are times when they’re both on the tree.

I’m mostly giving them millet only in the cage, because I want him to associate the cage with Good Things. Though this morning when I opened to cage to get the bowl, he zipped out before I could reaxct.

This morning Rick bolted outside the minute I opened the cage to get the millet bowl out. But later on he went back in - in fact right now Rick is in the cage while Morty is out.

I figure in a week or so I’ll start working with Rick to get him used to getting millet from me, like I did with Morty.

145

Bumpdate: Rick and Morty are still doing well. We are beginning to suspect they are both female; Rick’s cere has never gone blue, and Morty’s has occasionally been outright brown.

And we accidentally adopted a third budgie today.

Someone had posted on a neighborhood chat - with a photo of a parakeet they had found on their street. It seemed tame, so they brought it inside onto their screened porch to keep it safe., and posted the photo, asking uf anyone could foster it. Our housemate spotted that last night - and this morning, friends of the finders posted the same photo on nextdoor dot com.

Someone chimed in THERE saying she thought it was one of hers, as hers had learned to escape. She’d take the bird back but if the finders wanted to keep it, that was ok.

The finders weren’t too impressed with that careless attitude, so they contacted us. I got a spare cage from our housecleaner, and the housemate anf I went over to fetch the visit
birdie. The rescuers had been keeping the bird on their screened in porch, having nowhere else safe (they have a dog). They were relieved the bird was going to a decent home.

Between the friend and me, we caught the bird and got her into a travel cage. We got her home, got the spare cage set up with food and water, set the whole travel cage inside, and unzipped the side of that so the bird could exit whenever she felt safe.

Her body is blue, a bit of a purplish undertone. Her wings looked white in the photo but are really gray barred. Her cere is not remotely blue, hence the feminine pronoun . Shr has a band on one leg, I forget which (and she’s perched in such a way that I can’t see which); it seemed to be plain aluminum. I’ll have to try to get get to an avian vet at some point to get that removed, for safety reasons.

I’ll post a link to a picture once I’m on my computer.

146

I never did post that photo.

We did take the new bird to an avian vet for a checkup (since we were concerned over what she might have been exposed to). She got a clean bill of health… then died suddenly, a week later :(. No clue what happened - I found her huddled in a corner of the cage, barely moving, then an hour later she was still in the corner, not moving at all. We wracked our brains trying to figure out if we did anything wrong - but she’d eaten the same food as the others, and was in the same room, so that ruled out stuff like fumes.

But we have another accidental adoptee this week. Same source as Rick and Morty: our cleaning lady had rehomed most of her budgies a year or so back due to allergies, but she wound up with an Indian Ringneck a week or so back that had already been rehomed, twice, in recent weeks (longish story). And she found that she really COULD NOT tolerate the noise (she’s very sensitive to loud sounds).

Luckily, the sound does not bother us too much. Rio is still pretty spooked - being on his 4th home in a few weeks would do that to anyone - and won’t take treats when I poke them through the bars of his cage, though he watches carefully and goes right for them if I put them in the cage and then close the door. My son is spending a lot of time whistling at him and talking to him, which is good - given their lifespan, it’s quite possible he’ll eventually inherit Rio.

We’re hoping that we can find out more about his history - right now we have no idea how old he is, for example. Supposedly he does get along with budgies - the cleaner still has two, and they were all free-range. Rick and Morty are ignoring him completely - which will change when we’re ready to let Rio out and about.

147

Rio‘s a pretty bird. Hope he settles in well.

148

So thankful for your updates, Mama Z!

But for any other potential pet-owners, I’ll quote this in case you missed it:

Amen. We’ve had budgies as well as dogs. We always had two, so they were less lonely.

But we had pets when we were young(er), and didn’t mind some chaos and responsibility in our lives. We’re petless now, and in an attempt to live a less chaotic life we’re not getting another pet (so stop asking, Mrs. Leipner!).

It is lovely having some flexibility in our schedule, without a living thing that we need to get home to feed.

149

We are home 24/7 with rare exceptions - so while we’re not in the birds’ faces socializing them whether they like it or not, they definitely get a lot of verbal interaction and attention. My son is spending a lot of time with Rio, whistling back and forth, and we’ve started clicker training - though just ( the clicker arrived late yesterday).

Which turns out to have been fortunate. He’s still terrified of us, and will NOT approach my hand for food, and freaks if I get too close - but if he sees me put a treat in a specific spot, he will go for it as soon as I back off. So we’ve started using the clicker when I do that, to start building that association.

And some time last night, he managed to escape from his cage. My husband went downstairs in the morning and found Rick and Morty (the budgies - who are both female contrary to what I’d been told, but I use male pronouns out of habit) hanging on their play tree - alongside Rio.

We’ll want to swap out Rio’s cage - there’s a door at the top that is held closed by a swinging metal disk - and he apparently managed to open that during the night. The other cage we have does not have a removable base (which is only an issue if we ever need to transport him somewhere) and has much more secure doors.

Anyway - I tried clicking, and holding a slice of apple toward him on the tree, and even though I didn’t get all that close, he freaked. So I put the slice in the usual spot in his cage, and clicked, and he made it over there shortly as evidenced by the slightly-gnawed apple slice I found on the floor an hour later.

We’ll need to figure out what other things are “high value” treats for him, and train him to go back to the cage for them - apples are inconvenient for that usage. The plan has always been to allow him to fly in the house (like the budgies) but since I get the impression he’s more venturesome than R&M, we really need a way to coax him back to the cage at night.

As with Broomstick: for other potential owners: Absolutely you need to consider the best way to socialize the bird, and if you cannot commit to that, don’t get one! We initially got just one budgie, but I was working in that same room of the house, so he had near-constant company, and actually got pretty acclimated to me though it took months before he voluntarily approached me. He never did really bond that well to me, and I needed to start working in a different part of the house, so we got a second one. They’re still in the thick of things - family room and kitchen are all one big open space, so they see a lot of us. i debated bringing Rio up to my office (my daughter’s bedroom) so he’d have constant company - but that only works for work days. If he ever bonds well to me to the point where I can transport him up and down the stairs, I might try that in the future.

150

Oh yeah: Rick and Morty are probably peeved at me: they had both gone into their cage, and so I closed it up - I don’t want Rio finding food anywhere but his own cage for the moment.

151

Rio looks like a lovely bird. :slight_smile:

152

Bumpdate: Rio’s most recent owner - also the same person who gave us Rick and Morty - assured us that Rio got along fine with her budgies.

That has not proven true here. Mostly it’s been chasing the smaller birds away from treats: I’ll give Rio something, then give the same thing to thw budgies elsewhere, and Rio will drop his treat so he can chase the budgies away from theirs.

Recently Rio has gotten worse. He injured Morty’s beak and possibly one of his toes. Vet took a look and didn’t think either was an emergency but cautioned us to be on the lookout for signs of illness. We decided we had to move the budgies. The other evening we finally caught Morty and put him in the cage - and Rio immediately got on the outside and tried to get at Morty through the bars - which was a whole new level of aggression.

My son caught Rick that same evening and got him into the cage with Morty; the two budgies have had several days of confusion wondering why they are shut up.

We had some prepwork to do (and more still to come) to make my office safe for (and from) birdies; I put a big sheet over the bed to protect it, and took down some pictures from the walls, so that when we’re ready to let them loose, they can’t destroy them. I bought some gauze to drape over my computer “rack” and a few other things I don’t want them pooping on.

But we did move them today. I’ll need to start spending time in my office on weekends to keep them company. During the week, of course, they’ll have me around 8+ hours a day.

My daughter suggested that Rio may be hormonal. Could be- he’s right about 3 years of age (we found out he was born August 2020). Maybe so, but we definitely cannot allow him to harm the others.