Hi guys, thanks for joining me, for this lecture, a guide to environmental enrichment for parrots to help educate our owners. So my name's Madonna Livingstone. And we have a suncorne here, sitting on my shoulder.

I just would like to dispel a myth. Parrots do not sit on their owner shoulders or heads to try and dominate them. Parrots sit on shoulders and heads because they like height.

And whilst I do discourage owners, especially owners of new parrots, from having parrots sat on their feet on their shoulders, it's nothing actually to do with the dominance. It's to do with the fact that when they're sat on your shoulder, you can't read their body language, and if that parrot becomes angry or stressed or frightened, it could bite badly and bite you and because parrots have. A synovial joint between their upper beak and their skull, they have a very, very, very powerful bite.

So I'm breaking my own rules a little bit because I know this bird exceptionally well and you can see that the birds are feeding me. OK. So what is a parrot?

So a parrot is any species of birds that belongs to the Cittiformis family, and there's roughly about 393 different species of parrots. Do you think I know all of them? Of course I don't.

There's absolutely no way I'm going to memorise 393 different species. But that's where your front house staff come in, because if they're trained to ask the species, and it's not a species of parrot that you're familiar with, then you can do a Google search or look on one of your textbooks. But the set of forms families of parrots is very diverse.

So it goes from the smallest species, which is your pygmy parrots, which are only about 8 centimetres in length, including the tail all the way up to the highest of the call, which measures approximately 100 centimetres. But they all have certain things in common. They all have this down curved hooked bill.

And they all have the zygodactyl feet. And zygodactyl meaning two toes forward, 2 toes back, so that makes it very, very good at climbing, it also makes them very good at grasping. Objects.

So you will hear some Avian vets, or some panic behaviourists discuss the difference between being tame versus domesticated, and when it comes to parrots. I would class them as obtain, not domesticated because much of the behaviour is actually still wild behaviour. So to understand the the pet's behaviour and the pet's requirements, we need to understand what the ethology and ecology of the wild birds.

And base one basis that that can come down to do we have a one species flock bird or do we have a multi-species flock bird? What I mean by that is your African greys, for example, tend to be single species, whereas your macaws and your coners will often congregate in much larger flocks with mixed species. Then you get your ground feeders like your cockatiels, for example, and will feed on the ground, which makes them a little bit more flighty, which makes sense because if you feed on the ground, you're at increased risk of predation.

So you need to be able to respond quickly to anything that could be perceived as a threat. Be a noise or a shadow or flash of light or some movement. And then you can get occasional ground feeders like your greys, which will feed in the trees, and they'll feed in bushes that will come down to feed off the ground.

And then you get your tree feeders like Eclecus parrots, which will spend a lot of their time in the canopy looking for fruits. So what's the significance? So you're single species flocks.

Tend to be quieter birds. That's quite relative to parrots, cos parrots are noisy. But it makes sense because if you've evolved to live only with the same species of bird, you don't need to shout very loud for your mate to hear you or for your specifics to hear you.

Whereas if you are a. And part of a multi-species flock where you, you maybe have two or three different species of parrot congregating together and you all speak different languages, you're gonna have to be shouting much, much louder so that your pal can hear you or your mate can hear you over this cacophony of noise that all of the parrots are are performing together. But single species flock birds tend to be quite a lot less sociable with other species of birds, which again makes sense because there's no evolutionary adaptation there for them to be tolerant of other birds, other species of birds, whereas the species of the multi-species flocks tend to be much more sociable because they've evolved to live with and around different species.

And cockatiels, for example, we already established that any species that feed on the ground are much more likely to be nervous, they're much more likely to potentially overreact to a perceived threat, and that includes night threats. That's why because cockatiels or any ground feeders if they get spooked, they're gonna take off vertically to get away from the predator. This is why cockatiels are much more prone to night frights, because if they're asleep and the cage hasn't been covered and a car comes round at the corner with its headlights on during the night and it flashes the cage, a lot of cockatiels will then take off vertically at quite a speed.

And then they batter themselves against the cage, and that can lead to fracturing blood feathers and the owner comes down and it looks like the hammer House of horrors because there's blood splattered everywhere. So really for us to think about what these birds require in captivity, we've got to understand what they do in the wild. This is a really, really good book.

I recommend it to my clients called Understanding Parrot's Cues for Nature, written by Rosemary Lowe. So what are the wild counterparts daily routines? What have we got to think about?

Because in the wild. You know, parrots don't forage where they roost or where they play. But people that own parrots really usually haven't considered or recognised the fact that keeping a parrot on its own in the same cage, in the same position day in and day out fails to meet the parrot's most basic needs.

Another thing that we need to consider is, is this bird parent reared versus hand rearing, because. Unfortunately, in the pet bird trade, a lot of parrots are hand-reared, and the logic behind it is that they, they think that they're gonna get a much tamer animal or a much tamer bird and parrot at the end of it. It's kind of false logic, to be honest, from the point of view that hand-reared birds we know are much more likely to develop behavioural problems because they don't recognise themselves as birds.

So they can often end up with, sexual frustration and mate aggression. And if they do bond to to a specific owner, they are much more likely to, be extremely aggressive towards other humans compared to your parent reared birds that know that they're birds but are tame, and have bonded over time with their owner. In fact, the Netherlands, I think it's in 2016, banned the hand-rearing of of parrots for the pet trade because of the emotional and behavioural problems it causes them as they age.

So listeners are advised to check the legal obligations in in whichever country that they're listening in, but in the UK at least in the the 2006 Animal Welfare Act, you're legally obliged to feed your pet appropriately and you're legally obliged to keep it appropriately. And keep it in a way that we're freedom from suffering, and most vets are used to the idea of the five freedoms where animals that are in captivity should have freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom freedom from discomfort by providing suitable shelter, freedom from pain, injury and disease. Freedom to behave normally, so freedom to perform specific species specific behaviours and freedom from fear and distress.

So essentially we need to be sure the conditions that the animals being kept in and the handling of the pet is done in such a way to avoid mental suffering. So I want you to consider. Freedoms 4 and 5.

How many parrots do you know that have the freedom to behave normally? The prey species. It evolved to live in large cloths.

How many parrots do you know that have the the freedom to behave normally? And how many parrots do you know that are kept well and prevented from mental suffering? And it might very well be, you don't know, or you've not thought of it like that before.

But hopefully after this webinar, you will be empowered to educate our owners. So specifics on specifics is a requirement in parrots in the wild, in fact. Hernandez Eel 2016 actually went so far to state that keeping single pets, single parrots in cages alone most of the day is 100% against their anatomical, physiological and psychological well-being.

Because it's a safety numbers thing. If you're in a large group of birds that all look the same as you, predators are gonna find it very, very difficult to isolate one individual. So it means that you're safer on the basis that you've got a reduced risk of predation.

But not only that, parrots have evolved to be highly sociable creatures. They can't even clean their entire body on their own. They need their mate to clean the top of their heads.

Which is why parrots like the head scratches, OK, and if you've got a single a single parrot, that preening behaviour then falls to the owner. The owner needs to all cream, the owner needs to groom. The parrots can't even remove all the keratin sheaths properly from their pin feathers as they grow.

And yes, they'll scratch their heads and they'll get most of them off. But humans, when they're scratching their parrot's head, will also help remove those sheaths. Another way we can provide environmental enrichment is to to play noise.

And the wild is very rarely completely silent. Silence usually means there's a predator about and these species are prey species. So what options do we have?

Well, we could download background noises from the region of origin. The pat it and play that. We can play radio to help break up the silence.

But what do parrots prefer to listen to? Well, the studies that I've done have been shown that universally electronic dance music is hated. Parrots do not like it, however.

You do have to experiment to see whether they prefer rock music, whether they prefer folk music, whether they prefer blues or jazz or classical music, because they're all individuals, and some will prefer one over the other. But universally, what has been shown is that they prefer it to be played at a level that you can hold a conversation at, OK, because any louder than that, they find it stressful. So owners may need to experiment to find what their parrot enjoys to listen to.

In the UK, the minimum legal cage size requires that the bird is able to stretch its wings fully in all directions without touching the sight now. This is Isa, she was my parrolette, and the top cage, that you can see my mouth circling, that top cage was her carry cage. Apparently its maximum wingspan is 15.2 centimetres.

Legally I could have kept her in that top cage all of the time. Just think about that, that, that is wild to me, absolutely wild that legally we could do that. Whereas the cage below it was the cage that she spent her in her daytime in when I wasn't in, when she's got foraging toys and she's got .

Different materials to interact with. Normally the shutters are across guys, I've opened the shutters just to make it easier to see the picture. Because we obviously shouldn't be keeping these birds in full sun.

But essentially there's no such thing as too big a cage. So as big as the owner can provide, not just the minimal size legal requirement. But also if you've got more than one bird, it's gonna need an even bigger cage.

So, in my opinion, this cage is too small for one macaw, never mind 2. For my call, I'm looking more at caged sides. Because ideally, we want the owners to be providing at least 3 layers of enclosures because we've already established that parrots don't forage where they preen and they tend not to preen too much where they play.

So we want different areas. So we want a small roost cage causes all the bird's gonna do is sleep and some owners will choose to take the roost case into the bedroom because at the end of the day, parrots sleep in a flock. But we also want a largest possible day cage with toys.

If the birds are caged, my current birds, I have two cockatiels, and they free fly in my living room, and they have 5 play stands. We want a minimum of 2 place stands to make the birds fly in between them, OK. Because if you just got one place stand, yes, that's good from the, it's good that the bird has a place stand, but the problem being that it may just spend all its day on that one stand, that's still sedentary.

Mm In a perfect world, we would have an outdoor ay as well. But unfortunately a lot of people aren't in the situation they can. That So you can see this grey parrot, Congo grey, has got different, it's got different textures, it's got different colours of toys to play with, it's got things that will make different noises, it's got swings, it's got different types of perches for it to to interact with.

But they are the mice in the bird world. They have an innate requirement to destroy stuff. Because in the wild, what the parrots will do is they will do a pre and post on aerial flight.

They'll shout to everybody to communicate, you know, did you sleep very well, let's go to our favourite food site, whatever they're chatting about. They'll go and forage, they can spend up to 8 hours a day foraging or 8 hours of their their waking time foraging. But they'll go in forage, they'll fill their crops full, and then they will go back to the tree to digest their food and to take part in maintenance behaviours.

And one of the maintenance behaviours is chewing wood, OK, because the beet grows continuously throughout life, and this can help regulate that. They are destructive, so give them an easy way to provide environmental enrichment. I give them branches to chew, leave the bark on them, with certain wood types you can leave the leaves on them as well.

Yeah, fruit trees, all the fruit trees are safe apart from cherries. Cherry trees you cannot give. The fruit trees are are safe to give.

Withaporett is an awesome free resource that you can use that you can download handouts. Of lists of safe wood types for parrots. And here we've got a Gallaco too, happily stripping bark.

But she's do it as well. If you don't want to for whatever reason, provide a branch, then you can still give small pieces of wood for them to destroy. If you're gonna give them a place stand, owners sometimes mistake.

Financial inputs their pet with love, so the place stands on the left is very expensive. But it's boring, it's barren. You've got to add a lot of stuff to it.

Whereas the place stands on the right, it's still probably quite expensive to buy, but it's, it's got a variety of different perch shapes and sizes, so we're exercising the feet. We can see that the, the, it's got at least one swing on it. We can add, but we can do better, we can add more things to it.

Some owners really go to today. So this is one that they've they've made out of plastic. It looks like pipe tubing, and they've added vet wrap to it to alter the texture.

They've added cargo nets for them to climb up and down. You can see they've got lots of different colours. We've got coup cups with food and water in them.

But you can also with the wood in place and you can drill holes in it and put human grade organic nuts and seeds still in shell within those holes, so the birds have to forage, find them. Remove them and eat them. And this is just an example of an outdoor evening.

Mm. And unfortunately, bird intelligence levels is massively. Underestimated, in fact, you know, we use, we call some of it being a bit birdbrained, and we're meaning that they're, they're not that intelligent or they're very forgetful.

And actually harrots are incredibly intelligent. Let's take the humble budgie, for example. It has the intelligence of a between a 7 month old child and a 2 year old child.budgie.

Right? Budges that are up internationally kept, sometimes exceptionally well, but a lot of the time on their own in a tiny garden cage with no interaction. And then your, your Congo grey has been shown to have the cognitive abilities of a six year old child, the emotional intelligence of a 3 year old child, and the general intelligence of a 5 year old child.

This is why they they take temper tantrums if they don't get enough sleep or they're being rats because they're or they're tired or they're scared because their emotional intelligence is only the same as a a three year old's. I strongly recommend my parrot owners to read this book, Alex and Me. So some of you may be familiar with the work of Doctor Irene Pepperberg, but she actually did studies in, I think it's in the 70s on intelligence, and Alex stood for aan learning experiment.

And Alex learned a vocabulary of, I think it was over 300 words. And he'd ask for what he wanted. You know, if you asked for a bit of apple and you gave him a bit of banana, he threw it back at you and shouted, no, want apple.

Because when she was. Bonding with him and he was growing up and she was teaching him, she taught him the way you would a human toddler. It's amazing what these birds can do.

They can count, they can tell the difference between shapes, colours and textures and materials. So what's the potential consequences of keeping these parrots? Well, if owners are not realising how intelligent they are, don't believe they're intelligent.

Level, therefore not providing for them, or they've just not thought about it. Well, you know, budgies can live 7 to 15 years. Your congo greys can make it to 50 years of age.

So longevity coupled with a high intelligence level means that we could have severe welfare issues leading to many, many years of suffering for these, these birds. And many parrots are bored because their basic daily behavioural requirements are not being met. And we as vets have a massive opportunity to help get these owners on board.

Because if you took a child. And kept it in a cage recovered. And left it on its own for 20 hours a day.

With no toys. No interaction. And the same foods day in, day out.

That child would have behavioural problems. And you would be prosecuted. Yeah, we do it to parrots.

They have an innate requirement to fly, but it does vary between the species. So we need to think, right, well, is it a nomadic species like your budgies and your cockatiels, because they can fly up to 250 kilometres in a day. Origin.

I'm looking, looking for food and water, whereas because it's 10s of kilometres in a day. So it it it does vary, but what doesn't vary is that they all fly. And flying, although flying is an instinctive behaviour.

And it is also a response to fear, you fly away if something frightens you. Flying well and landing are learned behaviours. And because most birds have an early morning flight pattern and a pre-roost flight pattern, that'll fit with many people's breakfast and dinner routines, so getting owners on board with, you know, when you're getting organised in the morning, let your bird out of the cage.

If it's not a free flyer, let the bird out of the cage. Let it interact with you while you're having breakfast, let it have a flyout. Train it to go back into its cage on command.

Put the time and effort in. Because this will help mimic. What they've evolved to do in the world.

There's a bit, I'm sure you guys get asked about what wing clipping. Because I certainly get asked about it, and there's various methods of wine clipping, none of which are permanent. When we're talking about clipping.

However, We know Schmidt Ael 2006 proved that. Parrots that are winglet are 2 to 4 times more likely to develop behavioural problems. So they're more likely to be screamers, they are more likely to self-mutilate.

They're more likely to be biters. Which makes sense, because if you cannot escape. Whatever's frightening you, if you cannot fly away from a perceived predator or fear.

Then you that you're gonna develop stereotypical behaviour to cope with that chronic stress. My opinion If you don't want it to fly, don't get burned. Oh Gard.

And I think it should be a bond built on mutual trust and respect. Not Stockholm syndrome. We we shouldn't be allowing owners to say, well, I want to clip my parrot's wings because it will tame faster.

And that's horrific, that's not mutual respect. Basically you're you're flooding that bird. That bird has no other choice than to interact with you, it's not coming to you because it wants to.

It can't get away from you. That is not fair. Yes, it takes longer to build a bond with a bird that's flighted.

Yes, it does take longer, and yes, you might, the owner might get frustrated and might find it you know. Get upset because it takes so long and they might get bored, but the people that persevere, the bond that they have with their bird is unbreakable. Whereas trauma bonds, which is the bond that you're gonna form by forcing that bird to interact with you because it has been wing clipped.

Are much more liable to break down. This is one of my clients, and she trains Paris to free fly outside. And Herbert's rescues.

But it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of effort. Under-recognized dangers that I, I educate my owners about things like cigarette smoke. I have parrot owners that stopped smoking, not because they wanted to stop smoking per se, but they've done it for their birds because birds have really sensitive respiratory tracts.

They don't have diaphragms, they've got 5 species dependent, but let's say roughly 9 air sacks per bird. And that act as bellows to bring the Inspired air through the lungs for the gas exchange part is. It takes 2 breaths to get 1 complete air change and an avian respiratory tract, 2 breaths to get 1 complete air.

Exchange change. So That's why they're so efficient. The repose track, but it's also why the respo track is so sensitive to anything that's in there, any aerosols.

That is also why the miners used to take canaries down the mines, because the canary would faint when it breathed in gas at a lower level than humans could detect. And when the canary fainted, the miners knew it wasn't safe to be in there anymore and they had to get out before there was an explosion. And we know in studies that secondhand smoke causes damage to pets.

There's a study done in rats that fractures healing in rats takes much longer if they're exposed to secondhand smoke compared to the rats that don't. But not only are birds inhaling it, they're eating it. Because the smoke lands on them and all those toxins are in there on it, and then when they preen they ingest it, so it's a double whammy, and some of my parrot owners will say oh but Madonna, it's OK cause I don't smoke in the room I'm in with my bird.

I go outside to smoke. I'll go, OK, that's fine. Do you change your clothes?

You can back in. And they most of them look at you in shock, and I'll say, no, do you have a complete change of clothes and you come back in. No, why?

Because I can smell cigarette smoke off you and you didn't smoke in my room. And if I can smell cigarette smoke off you it's because it's oozing out of your clothes and out of your hair. And that is secondhand smoke as well.

It's just a different way of looking at it. Birds also can see into the UV spectrum whereas we can't. Well, what, what's the significance of that?

Well, ripe fruit and vegetables look different under UV light. But also, if we're not providing them with UV light, it's a bit, it's condemning them just to see in black and white the rest of their life. And owners, most owners aren't aware that glass philtres out most of the UV lights.

So just because their parrot likes to sit on the window ledge and look outside, doesn't mean it's getting UV light. Not only that, UV light helps to With vitamin D3 production. Because vitamin D3 is an active form of vitamin D, and it's your vitamin D3 you you require for your calcium metabolism and species such as your African grey parrots, they're really prone to hypogly hypocalcemia and will sometimes just fall off their perches because of it.

And yes, you can supplement with vitamin D3, but if you give an oral supplement of vitamin D3, you give too much, it can cause metastatic calcification, whereas giving them access to UV light. You're not going to run the risk of metastatic calcification, because naturally produced UV it naturally produced vitamin D3. It has tightly controlled homestasis.

So you're not gonna get overproduction of it. It's got its own internal. Safety valve, as it were.

But not only that, UV light outside for us, it improves your mental health, doesn't it? It gives you that kind of feel good factor, it improves your the skin barrier, . It does all these things for parks as well.

So giving them access to UV a bird lamp. And you get, you specifically get bird UV lamps, and it needs to be positioned within 16 inches of the bird. And once we put on for 8 12 hours a day, you can have a timer, and we need to replace the bulb every 6 months.

And owners need to be told that because they will leave it because it looks like it's still working, because remember, we can't see UV light. So the, the lamp may very well look like it's working over 6 months later because it's still emitting visible light, but the the part of it that produces UVB is no longer producing adequate levels. If it's a free flying bird.

And you can put the lamp, the bird lamp on a standard lamp fitment. And have over their favourite play stand so that they're getting the most access to it. We need to be giving them bailey dating.

Sorry. Daily bathing. Because it mimics rain, and it helps with plumage care.

But if it's a bird that has never experienced before, it can find it quite frightening. Whereas other birds get really into it and owners have them trained to go in the shower with them. Which, let's be honest, it's a bit weird.

I'm not, I'm totally not saying that owners should be taking their parrots into the shower with them, given the fact that they're going to be showering themselves and using all sorts of things which could be toxic, the bird. But you need to remember that the human animal bond is not species specific and people bond very, very, very tightly to their birds. And there are owners out there that, that do things like that.

Other owners just have a perch in the shower room like this male clius here, where the the bird is trained it can come into the shower, but it. On its own and it has its own shower. Hm.

And then you've got species like your rainbow lorikeet here on the right are quite voracious, and bathers, and they really go to town and they play and they make a mess, which again makes sense because rainbow lorikeets are specialist feeders in the wild they'll feed on nectar and fruit and flowers. So their diet is very sticky, which means their plumage is potentially gonna get. Sticky substances on them, so they need to be voracious bathers to ensure that they've got good plumage.

Just bear in mind if they do not look after their plumage properly, they can die. So ideally we want to be telling owners to give them access to bathing first thing in the morning cause that means that they will be completely dry by the time it's roost the clock. We need to remember that the wild diet is often not fully known for these species that we're looking at, and it varies seasonally.

They do not eat the same thing day in, day out, like they do in captivity. And they'll spend up to half of their day foraging for food in the wild. So we should be providing these birds with foraging enrichment because it provides behavioural stimulation.

In captivity, they can get their entire day's worth of calories in 10 to 20 minutes at a bowl. So what are they gonna do with the other? You know, 7.5 hours that they would normally have spent foraging.

Well, that's when they're more likely to develop stereotypings, which includes feather damaging behaviour because they overreen cause they're bored. Here's Quincy, the the McCaw, Amazon, sorry, holding a sign saying that he will work for foods. They have shown that once parrots get to know what foraging toys are for, if you offer them the foraging toy or you offer them the food without having to work for it, most of them will opt for the foraging toy because they have the behavioural requirement to do it.

Diets vary in composition and quality, so we need to be aware of that, and most parrot foods are too far, far too high in sunflower seeds. I mean that's basically death in the bag, guys, become seed junkies. Sunflower seeds, sunflower hearts or or peanuts, they're really, really good foodstuffs for wild birds that are gonna be migrating thousands of kilometres.

You've got a parrot that sits in a cage that gets out maybe twice a week if it's lucky. And it's eating a really high fat diet that's very low in vitamins. And you're gonna get liver disease, you're gonna get feather plucking behaviours as well.

So, and they can get completely addicted to them. So I do recommend considering a good quality pelleted food, but you can't just feed a a pelleted food on its own because that is behaviorally boring for these birds. We need to be supplementing them with fresh fruit and enrichment and human grade, ideally organic nuts and seeds and shell.

Make the birds work for it, they're social eaters. If they haven't seen a food item before, cos normally they would learn what's food off of watching their conspecifics eat it. So you're offering a new bit of veg or a new bit of fruit, and you're like, there you go, sweetheart, I've popped it in your food bowl, so you will automatically know it's food.

Well, no, they don't necessarily realise it's food. Eat it with your parrots, stand beside it, because any of you that have owned parrots will know that whatever you give them ain't half as interesting as what you're eating because they want a part of it. That was marketed as superior foods.

Peanuts. Birds love peanuts and giving them in shell to adult parrots is fine as long as they're human grades, and you're only want to give them as treats. The reason it's important in their human grades is because the ones that are bird grades specifically stay on them not fit for human consumption.

And the reason they're not fit for human consumption is because they've not got as as tightly controlled how you look after them. And how you store them, they're much more likely to have aspergillosis spores on them. So balanced diet should be, you know, your pal type diets with vegetables, fruits, and treats daily.

The papers That used to make the pellets die, they still do. I actually prefer their Nutriberries which are balls, so therefore the birds, especially your bigger birds that like to pick up. Their food and play with it and interact with it, then the only are they getting human grade nuts and seeds and pellets in it, they actually have a food toy.

Harrison's er bird foods exceptionally good, I really do like them, the high potency, fine grind, very good for your primarily seed eaters, your budgies and your cockatiels. But there are some owners that for whatever reason will not go down at the part of the pelleted diet, in which case I tend to recommend Tidy mix because it is. As species specific as we can make it, the birds that are more prone to liver disease or becoming addicted to sunflowers have minimal sunflower seeds in them, like less than 8%, and they're all human grade.

But they should be getting Quincy that I showed you earlier, that's the the Amazon that's the the design that will work for food. This is his breakfast that he gets every day. He gets a mixture of fruit and veg every single day.

Sprouting pulses and seeds are a great source of nutrition for birds. Owners just need to make sure that they're doing it correctly because we don't want to get any bacterial fermentation. Pomegranate is a great favourite of a lot of parrots, but it's very messy.

You can't be house proud and have a parrot because they're messy eaters and it is one bit for the parrot, and then the rest of it is decorated in the house. I mentioned that lorikeets are specialist feeders. They've got a brush to the end of the tongue and another reason not to let lorikeets stand on your shoulder is that it's a really horrible sensation when they stick their tongue down your ear.

But they are nectar and pollen feeders and fruits, they've got messy droppings everywhere, really, really watery droppings, and they still need water. The way that their stomach has evolved is they don't cope very well if they're fed primarily on a seed diet. So we've talked about what we should be feeding them, but actually now we need to look at how are we feeding them.

And I recommend making the foraging toys because they spend 2 to 4 times longer interacting with these homemade foraging toys than any of the expensive toys that you can buy. So think of the natural feeding patterns. So your ground feeders that your cocktails and your budgies, something as simple as a Tupperware dish with some shredded paper in it with the seed or the pellets diet mixed through it, so they have to sit through the paper to get to their seed, will increase the amount of time it takes them to eat their food.

Wrapping up their new strawberries and corn husks, so they have to chew through it. Using tissue paper, toilet tissue paper, to wrap their favourite treats up, to wrap some of their diet up. So that they have to destroy it to get to it.

Using paper bags on bits of twine or takeaway coffee cups or even paper cake cases, cupcakes or coffee philtres. Where you can put a definite. Good item in between each layer but have a bit of leather going through the middle of it, so that it swings as the bird interacts with it.

Cardboard boxes, you've got like this cake quite happily destroying the cardboard box to get to the seeds inside. Something as simple as using egg box cartoons, and a lot of newspapers these days, the ink is quite safe. For them to destroy and birds don't have saliva really, so it's not like they're gonna chew up the bits of paper and then swallow it, that would be incredibly incredibly bare, as in I have never seen a case and I've never found a case reported in the literature of a foreign body in Paris due to wood or paper or cardboard.

To use the egg box carton with millet spray in it, or we can use the paper and turn it into a foraging toy. I really, the list is endless, and here's a a grey. Chewing up this is toilet roll inserts.

With veg in it. Or pine coins, so all things that all the only thing that's gonna cost the owners's time. Pine cones, owners can clean them, they can bake them in the oven if they're worried about pathogens, and then you can give them to the birds and you can see here I've put cashew nuts and cashew nuts.

I've put an almonds in there, blueberries, bits of pepper, you put bits of carrot in. Not only is the bird gonna pick through the food and eat stuff, it's gonna spend a lot of time happily destroying the pine corn. And here was work for one of my pads, it's a paper bag and I've used a piece of ribbon to tie it.

OK, we can have lots and lots of different ideas. Here's a suncorne with many cups. It has to pull the cup up to get the tree it's stuffed in between it.

And here's a cockatiel because we'll get very various grasses to chew through and play with. Now he's a Hans McCall with one of the foraging wheels. I tend to find parrots get bored of this quite quickly.

And they are quite expensive. But some part it's like. So we've talked about foraging toys, but what about just toys in general?

Well, we want to be providing them with brightly coloured, we want lots of different textures, we want them to make noise because we got stimulation, but yeah, different textures for them to destroy them and to chew to help with their beaks. But please, please, please be aware they're all different qualities. So you can see that this toy I've highlighted here.

And the ring is soldered, well that could be, if there's a lot of solder on it, then we could have problems with zinc toxicity. And with some of the cheaper toys, then we need to make owners aware that if we've got poorer these caring biers, they are screw on there, but they're flimsy, the parrots can screw them off quite easily and it's. It's not rare for them to then become impaled through the beak and out through the mouth.

So owners do need to be aware of these kind of dangers. So if the owners are bringing their birds in and carry cages to you and you see these types of toys in there, just it might be worthwhile highlighting the dangers. So really what we do want, is if we're using a hanger, is to have these much heavier duty stainless steel cos the birds find them harder to unscrew.

Young cockatiels, I will say that's it's one thing that we need to be aware of and it's not common, it's rare. I've seen it twice in 21 years, however, In the literature they are overrepresented. You cockatiels, cockatiels less than too late to pick cotton fibres.

So a ropes produce or rope toys are common for parrots and they do love playing with them, if you've got a bird that keeps regurgitating and it's a young cockatiel and you feel it and it's crop feels like putty, please be aware that could be a foreign body. OK, it could be a foreign body. So what I tend to do with those ones is I put a bit of surgical spirit on its skin, because even skin goes translucent with surgical spirit.

The crop is very, is quite thin and often at least if it's highly coloured rope that's been used, you will see the rope through it. And this is one that I had to do fairly recently, it was a referral case, the bird kept regurgitating, and it was regurgitating because it had this mat of cotton fibres that it had and over months been pulling out and swallowing, you can see that there's the seeds mixed in there as well. Owners should play with their birds.

They're really intelligent, and they enjoy the mental stimulation, they monkey about and play in the wild with each other. So trick training is a really good idea because it makes the birds think and it tyres them out. So you can train them to play hoops with you.

And charity shops are a great place by book toys. Kids' toys, you know, you want, but you don't want brittle plastics and you don't want to be supervising them to make sure they're not chewing bits of rubber off, but they, they work really, really well. Here's a Mcca with with a kid's toy, and it was quite happily pulling the doughnuts off and chucking them everywhere.

And if you wanted you could even train the bird to put them back on. Looking recycling. They are just basically toddlers.

We all people that have got kids know that you'll spend a fortune on this amazing toy that you're really excited on Christmas Day or on that child's birthday for them to open. And then they spend more time playing with the, the cardboard box and they play with a toy because they can use their imagination and that cardboard box has now become a castle or a fort or a, you know, a racing car or a horse. Parots are the same, actually give them a cardboard box.

Put a hole in it if you want, chuck some toys in it, and they will spend ages destroying it and playing with it. Old catalogues, they love it. You know, the local, catalogue shops probably hate my practise because a lot of doers will go down and get the free catalogues and use it in as environmental enrichment.

And they'll put treats or bits of food in between the pages. A word of warning, guys, if you're recommending to owners to use this method to use these old catalogues or phone books to destroy, please also point out to owners never to leave any books lying about, because if they do, the the parrot's gonna destroy them because it thinks it's just environmental enrichment, you know, it's just a parrot toy, that's all it looks like. I've learned that the hard way because my parents have chewed up a couple of my textbooks that I stupidly left in the living room.

And the owner interaction that, you know, the bonding with them, we need to be aware of it, that both the positives and the negatives I'll go on to the negatives in a wee minute, but spending time with them, get to know what this bird prefers, get to know what games it likes, what's its favourite favourite trick training treat. Sunflower hearts are not good as part of their main diet, but they're a brilliant high value treat for trick training. Training outside for free flight is time consuming, training for harness wearing is time consuming but not as time consuming, so there are plenty of owners out there whose parrots are harness trained and they can take their bird outside for a walk.

So there's Quincy again, and his owner who is. An RBN she has, she has got him as a rescue, he had been badly abused and when she first got him, he was highly aggressive, and you couldn't get, you know, and now he's harness trained and when she's out walking her dog, Quincy can quite often go out for a walk on her shoulder. But remember if they're giving access to fly about and they're bored and the owners don't give them something they're allowed to chew, they will make their own fun and they will destroy the house, and the problem is, is that if the parrots are doing this.

And the owners aren't understanding why the bird is doing it. Owners take this personally, and they think that the bird is trying to punish them. For example, and that can lead to a breakdown in the human animal bond, and then that leads to the birds being locked in the cage for even longer.

OK? So here's one bird, that had been destroying the wallpaper and the woods, so they put a plastic box in front of it. They didn't give them an outlet, the bird an outlet for normal behaviour because this is a normal behaviour, so you need to give them an outlet to redirect it onto.

So the bird just chewed up the plastic box. Some parrots are neophobic, so they are frightened of new things, and it often is your single species, folks like your African grey that are gonna be more prone to that. So that might mean if they, their bird is neophobic, they have to take it really, really slowly when they're introducing new toys and new concepts.

And some birds will not innately know how to forage, especially your hand-reared birds. You'll need to teach them how to forage. And it's not enough that the owners just make some foraging toys and buy them all these, these really nice toys and then give them them all at once, and that's it.

The they'll lose value, so at least weekly we should be rotating some of these toys. They, they don't get them all at once. We need to maintain the high value states.

We do get over bonding between owners and their parrots, especially the hand-reared parrots, because your hand reared parrots will not identify as birds, they often identify as humans. And there's some rainbow lorikeets mating, and I just want you to have a look at where the male bird is touching. It is tramping on the the female bird's back, and where do owners like to pat their parrot on the parrot's back.

That is sexually stimulating. Yeah, this is basically parrot porn. It just it stimulates them.

And the problem with that is, is that when they're babies and they're not sexually mature, you get away with it, and, and the bird's really cuddly and it's, it's enjoying the interaction because in the wild baby birds are tactfully touched by the other birds in the nest and touched by their parents and touch is really really important. The problem is when they become sexually mature that touch means something different, OK? And that's when you start to get sexual aggression, sexual frustration.

Because especially these hand-reared birds, they're all hormonal, they're being sexually stimulated by their owners, cos the owners are stroking their back, they're stroking their tails, and they're not following through. Because the hand-reared bird has now become sexually bonded to the owner and does not understand why nothing else is happening, and that's gonna increase aggression. It's going to increase screaming, it's going to increase stereotypical behaviours.

So here's Isa the parrot let, who I'm touching in an inappropriate manners, purely for photographic reasons, so I was touching her back, stroking along her flanks. And stroking her vent. These are all areas we should be advising against touching.

So we need to be educating our owners about parrot erogenous zones, OK? Really, the only safe place to pat them is the head. Because anywhere else, the birds can interpret that as sexually stimulating once they are sexually mature.

So in summary, Parrots are toddlers that never grow up, so they are a lifetime commitment. The age to which the bird lives will vary dramatically depending on the species, even your cockatiels, which are really commonly kept in captivity. The average lifespan is 15 to 25 and the eldest one I worked with was 32.

So if we're not providing our owners with the education, or at least signposting them to places that they need to go to to improve the mental health of their birds. Then we're missing a massive opportunity to relieve really severe er suffering. Thanks for listening.

I hope you've enjoyed it, and I hope you've learned something from it. Feel free to email me any questions.