Talking Parakeet

Parakeet carrying on a conversation from outer space, or at least that’s what it sounds like. Broad range of words and sounds. (3:41)

Tips for Choosing a Pet Bird

An excellent short video covering things you need to consider before bringing a pet bird home from the store. It’s not as simple as putting the bird in a cage and enjoying your new pet. Most of the more popular birds require proper training if you’re going to give your bird and your family the best shot at an enjoyable relationship.

Singing Cockatiel

Short (49 seconds) and sweet singing Cockatiel.

Teaching Your Pet Bird Tricks

One of the great things about having a pet bird is that you can actually teach them to do quite a few interesting and amusing tricks. Aside from talking, there is many a bird trick that you can get your feathered friend to perform that will delight and amuse both your friends and yourself.

One fun trick that you can teach most any bird very easily is too played dead. In order to do this you need to get your bird used to having his back and head area touched. Spend some time accomplishing this and once he is very familiar to being touched here you can approach the trick in this manner. Have your bird perch on one hand and then take your other hand and cup around his back while cradling his head between your thumb and forefinger gently. And then, ever so gently tilt him over onto his back. At first he’ll probably struggle and if he does you should set him back upright immediately but gradually he’ll get used to this tilting and you can increase the angle and amount of time you leave on his back. After awhile he will be perfectly happy to stay on his back and thus, play dead.

Once you’ve taught your bird to play dead, you can expand on this trick by teaching them to tuck himself in. Once you have your bird in the “play dead” position cover him with a small piece of cloth and give the command “good night”. Then you can encourage the bird to take the cloth in his beak and pull it a little higher. This actually might be natural and your bird might even do it right off the bat without any encouragement.

Another bird trick that’s always fun is the ring toss trick. Birds naturally love to throw things so you simply need to harness and reinforce this behavior. Start off by just encouraging him to throw the rings. When he has this down start working with him so that he tosses the rings onto a dowel or stick of some sort. An offshoot of this trick is to teach your bird to shoot hoops. You can use a small ball and make a little basketball hoop out of a ring fastened to a dowel. The two tricks are very similar so what’s the bird learns one he will probably take together quickly.

No matter what type of bird you have there is sure to be a bird trick that suits your bird’s intelligence and personality and that you and he will have fun performing over and over again. Birds are naturals at doing tricks and they love to do it because it keeps the mind busy. Working with your bird to teach him tricks is a great way to spend time with your feathered friend.