We spent a wonderful weekend at the Nashville Exotic Pet Expo talking about our YouTube channels and educating people about bird ownership and care. Of course it is very difficult to go to an expo and not fall in love with many of the animals represented there. Hence, our flock got a little bit bigger yesterday. Meet our new sun conure, Mango!
Mango is already proving to be such a sweet and smart bird, so we can’t wait to share more pictures of him with you and hopefully train him to do some fun behaviors as well, which we will share on our YouTube channel. Here are a few more pictures of some of the fun things we saw at the Exotic Pet …
We’re so excited to say our new video is up on YouTube! It’s about determining gender for a budgie. This can sometimes be a pretty tricky endeavor, so we hope you enjoy the little tips and tricks that we’ve added to the video along with a few surprises. Check it out!
Have you met Sango and Sprite? These two are the newest additions to our flock here at The Parakeet Perch! Although we easily figured out a name for Sango, we were stumped on Sprite, our first green(ish) bird! I say greenish, because, she’s actually got a mixture of blue and green on her abdomen. Here she is with Sango and you can see a bit of what I am talking about.
We ended up running a naming contest on our YouTube channel, and one of our viewers suggested Sprite. We love it! The name actually fits both her color and her bubbly personality. Sango, on the other hand, could have been named Scary. He came to us very shy and nervous, hyperventilating often when I would try to handle him or he wasn’t near Sprite. Thank goodness we got them in a pair! He is coming around, now that he’s housed with my other two male parrots who have shown him a bit of confidence. We can’t wait to see how these two birds turn out as they move towards adulthood. Check them and my other birds out on my YouTube channel, The Parakeet Perch!
Photos of Lucky: Stephen Kenny (my brother-in-law)
The years after my divorce were pivotal ones for me. I came out of my shell and into my own. It’s not really that I learned to stand on my own two feet, so much as I learned that I had always been able to take care of myself.
How appropriate! Just a year after filming our budgie cage tour of the Prevue Hendryx flight cage, we have landed a brand new cage for our birdies. Check it out in our newest YouTube video!!!
Whew, it has been a while since we’ve blogged here at the perch! Busy schedules, a planned move to the city and new pets have all played a part in the absence, but we just had to take some time to share the exciting news. We have added a new budgie to our flock named Sunny! This little bird is full of fun and adventure, and we named her Sunny because she has a “sunny” disposition (you’ll see).
Here she is when we first got her…
As you can see, she looked a little rough! Notice how she sits low on her legs and doesn’t stand on a perch properly? We adopted Sunny, and our avian vet thinks that she probably had a birth defect in her legs that was never taken care of when she was a young chick. She may have also been picked on by other birds because her feathers looked so rough and misaligned.
Fast forward a few months, and look at her now!
Her feathers are looking much better, and she has a blast exploring things in her cage or flying around the bird room. She has also become a really strong climber, has the cutest birdie swagger when she is walking along, and loves to hang upside down!
Stay tuned to our YouTube channel for upcoming videos featuring Sunny and the rest of our flock!
This week we are bringing you another great budgie holiday enrichment idea. How about edible presents!!! Just go to your local hobby store or craft/wedding section of most discount retailers and get some plain boxes. No dyes, no embellishments…just plain. Don’t worry, you get to fun them up in just a minute.
Next, get some jute string or other means to tie presents which is safe (undyed/untreated) for budgies (raffia and sisal also work nicely).
Once you construct the boxes, place a fun treat inside (millet works well, as can Nutri-Berries) and wrap the presents in plain paper, black and white newspaper, or even kale! You can then tie them up and present them to your bird(s) for some edible Christmas fun!
EXTRA TIP: If you budgie doesn’t want to get inside the boxes, you can punch holes in the side before wrapping them to help your bird smell and see the treat inside! You can also present these boxes plain, without wrapping them, to make it easier for your bird to get inside!
Budgies love mirrors! Our Siri likes to hang out with her friend in the mirror whenever she gets the chance, and we don’t mind because she is just as sweet as Siri is!
One of the questions that we keep getting here at the perch is how to determine the sex of a budgie. Well, and occasionally we get pictures of budgies, ceres (fleshy part around a bird’s nostrils) front and center, with a plea to deliver the news to the owner…is it a boy or a girl? And we didn’t even deliver the baby budgie…it’s pretty amazing.
Anyhoo, we would like to shed some light on budgie sexing, in hopes that budgie owners everywhere can enjoy a little certainty about the gender of their bird. And, to a lesser degree, we would love to help you not name your female bird Larry (yes, we know of one).
Let’s start simply. Remember the cere we talked about earlier? That is a very important component of determining budgie sex. In many cases, if the cere is blue, you have a boy. If it remains brown or pink, it’s a girl.
Here’s and example of a handsome budgie boy:
And here is a girl:
Albino budgie via The Parakeet Perch
Not too hard at all, right? Well, there are a few other things to consider. First of all, age of the bird is important. Budgies can take up to a year to mature. and it can take that long for the cere to take on its final color! One way to know that you have an immature bird is to consider the barring (lines) that the bird has on the top of its head. If the lines are almost all the way to the cere, you’ve got a young bird (much like the blue one below):
Also, some color mutations can throw all of the aforementioned theories out of the water! According to http://www.birds-online.de:
“Examples for these difficult mutations are albino, lutino or fallow budgies . Also some pieds derive from the above mentioned rules.”
If your bird has a color mutation, a boy could look like a girl because the cere color is “washed out.” Oh boy….literally! Here is my budgie Segoe, a young male with a color mutation:
So how do I know (reasonably) that he’s a boy? I have determined it behaviorally. Male budgies tend to talk more often than females and they like to flirt with the girls. So if your bird does these things, you most likely have a boy!
A final note. You can have a budgie’s sex determined by a veterinarian surgically or genetically. Visit here for a great article about that process! It is a little more involved and does cost money, but it is also fairly accurate and very helpful if you are trying to breed your budgie(s).
Photos of Lucky: Stephen Kenny (my brother-in-law)
EXTRA TIP: If you budgie doesn’t want to get inside the boxes, you can punch holes in the side before wrapping them to help your bird smell and see the treat inside! You can also present these boxes plain, without wrapping them, to make it easier for your bird to get inside!
The Parrot Perch 