Meet the grey palace (and the continued amazement of co-housing parrots)
One day, I will write up an entire post on why I’m working towards housing parrots together. In the short term, this Youtube link from Natural Inspirations Parrot Cages makes a whole lot of my points for me (although I don’t necessarily agree with everything they say, nor do I think all parrots should be communally housed - but it should definitely give you some food for thought).
I’ve seen some amazing behavioural changes in Theo since he moved in with Tlalli, which I pointed out before. He’s more social, MUCH more willing to come out of his cage, is working on learning to talk, has begun flapping his mostly unfunctional wings to the point that he’s regaining breast muscle after years of atrophy.
But the most amazing one happened a couple of days ago. I took out Tlalli, then offered for Theo to come out. He didn’t want to, so I brought her up alone. An hour or so later, I went and asked him again, and he came up. I put him on the stand as usual, and then went and sat down at the computer.
A couple of moments later, I hear Tlalli say, “Hi! How are you?” in her cheerful greeting way, and look up to see if someone came into the room.
Nope.
Theo, who hates unstable perches, climbed up to say hi to his friend, the first time he’s climbed onto anything like that outside of the cage in the nearly 12 years that I’ve had him.
Our house has 8 foot ceilings on the main floor, so he’s well over my head.
They played with some toys together for a couple of minutes, and then he climbed back down on his own.
It was awesome.
Which is a perfect segue to this. A few weeks ago, we purchased an A&E double macaw cage with the intention of pair housing the greys. We finally put it together a few days ago, decorated it yesterday, and moved them in. It’s fairly large - 80 inches wide by 40 inches deep, probably 6.5 to 7 feet tall. ;)
Blurry end shot - there’s only one UV light on over it because the other bulb burnt out and my new ones haven’t arrived yet.
They are, so far, not particularly enthused about it. Cin has set himself up on one side and Keela on the other, and they’re mostly not interacting. However, they’re greys, and I don’t expect immediate joy of new cage.
The cage is definitely big enough for two pigeon sized parrots to share. :)
Cin would like it if I would stop being so mean to him by providing him with enrichment and new cages (and bossy obnoxious cagemates). Despite that, he’s already significantly more vocal and active just with Keela in the house - they talk and whistle back and forth all the time.
I’m so happy to have yet another pair of parrots set up together! So far, it’s looking like we won’t need the divider, but that’s always an option if they decide to take disapproving clacking to the next level. If that happens, we’ll put the divider back in, flip them from cage to cage every time they come out, and try again in a few weeks.
But so far, so good!
Originally published at Rational Parrot Blog. You can comment here or there.