- Blue!
In your own words, what are humans messing up?
Blue, excuse me.
He's like, "I got things to do, human."
Okay, maybe later.
Good interview.
Hey guys, Jamieleigh here from "Bird Tricks,"
and I'm here with my little budgie, Blueberry,
to talk to you about the top two mistakes
that people make with budgies!
So before we get started in this video,
I want you to comment down below
and tell me what you think are the top two mistakes
that people make with these tiny, but mighty little birds.
(bright music)
(splashing) (distant talking)
- [Child] Blue.
Little blue, little blue, little blue.
(singing)
Look at him.
Is he done? - Think so?
- [Child] You wanna come up?
I'm gonna stop, stop the water.
Offer him to come up, but he doesn't want to, so.
(splashing)
He's in the water.
And now it looks like he wants up.
Grab him, all right.
Boop! (Jamieleigh chuckles)
Blueberry! (flutters)
(giggling) He's like, ready to.
- [Jamieleigh] (chuckles) You can move around.
You don't have to stay in that one spot.
- Blueberry, Blue!
- [Jamieleigh] Wait 'til he's paying attention.
- Blueberry!
(flutters)
Blueberry!
(flutters)
(flutters) Blueberry!
(giggling)
- Well, you gave him the hand signal.
- Yeah, yeah.
Blueberry!
(flutters)
I'm gonna go--
- [Jamieleigh] Make sure he's facing you
and looking at you before you call, okay.
- Blueberry! (flutters)
- [Jamieleigh] Good, that was perfect.
(chirps)
- Over here.
(Jamieleigh chuckles)
Blueberry!
(flutters)
(giggling) I kissed him on the forehead.
- [Jamieleigh] I saw.
- Blue! (flutters)
- All right, so the top two mistakes
that I see most commonly made with budgies
is number one, not interacting right away.
And number two, believing that they need
to live their entire lives out on an all seed diet
and that they can never convert to pellets
or never convert to fresh food.
So, the first one I'm going to tackle
is the not interacting right away.
A lot of the times, when you take fear out of the question
or out of the picture for birds,
so say they are fearful of you
when they first get brought home.
When you first bring a bird home, everything's new,
everything can be very overwhelming.
And especially from a pet shop bird,
when you first bring it home,
it usually wants nothing to do with you.
(chirping)
(laughs) So the moment that you try to interact,
the bird of course is very fearful and pulls away
or flies away, or just tries to get away from you,
letting you know that it doesn't want to interact.
A lot of people choose to respect that,
put the bird in its new cage
and let it settle for about a week.
And what happens in that week, is that bird learns
to see its cage as a very comforting place
where nothing bad happens to it.
And any time the humans try to interact with the bird,
the bird's very resistant, very fearful,
and so the people just constantly back off
and say, "I don't wanna stress the bird out.
I don't wanna upset the bird."
And eventually it turns into,
"The bird doesn't wanna interact with me,"
and so they just leave it alone.
Eventually, enough time passes where this bird
is completely not tame and doesn't wanna interact
with people, that the people feel really guilty
that it has to stay in the cage all the time.
And the reason it has to stay in the cage all the time,
in that scenario, is because if they let it out,
they could never get it back in,
or it'd be so traumatizing to get it back in
that it wouldn't be worth it.
So a lot of the time, birds end up being caged all the time.
People feel guilty about this, and so they get it a buddy.
And now, this can go one of two ways.
The buddy can actually be a true buddy,
or it can be a little enemy, where they don't get along
and they're actually hurting each other,
in which case they have to be separated.
It's kind of a roll of the dice
when you get your bird a pal, because you're picking it out,
the bird's not picking it out, so.
Although I have heard of some people doing
some birdie dating services
and letting their birds pick the bird.
So, I think that goes on in some places.
If you've ever heard of that, leave a comment
so people don't think I'm totally wacky
for even saying that.
I have heard of it, I promise.
So then what happens, is if the birds take to each other
and they're pals, then they both decide to be fearful
of humans and the humans just kind of think,
"Well, at least I got my bird a buddy
and I don't feel so guilty for leaving it
in the cage all the time."
So now it's two caged birds, all the time,
and they never interact with people,
except to get food and water.
And usually, that food is the seed diet
that they come on from the pet shop.
So, the reason this scenario plays out the way that it does
is because the bird was never taught to overcome fear.
So for example, when the bird showed that it didn't want
to interact with a person, the person backed off
and said "Okay, I won't introduce the fear,
which is myself," for example, or the person.
So then I'll back off and I'll leave you
to do your own thing and as the time goes by,
the fear gets worse and worse and more ingrained
in the bird of yeah, that is a valid fear,
you should be fearful of that.
And the more that the person backs off
and doesn't interact, the worse the fear will get.
So, if you look at it from trying to overcome the fear
on day one, versus day 30, it's gonna be easier
to overcome that fear because it didn't have time
to fester and grow on day one, as it did on day 30.
That's why I'm so pro interact right away.
And interact right away doesn't mean force yourself
on the animal, it just means give the animal the opportunity
to show you that it wants to interact.
And maybe that's through feeding the bird in your lap,
or even next to you, and just doing some fun little things
with your bird. (chirping)
Birdie, you're kind of chopped off in this.
I need to like, figure out my camera.
Let me see, 'cause you're so cute, I want people to see you.
There, we'll just do a different angle
so they can see your cute little self.
(chirps) So, the cool thing is,
and I know I'm gonna get a lot of people saying
that maybe this is coming off anti more than one bird,
which I'm definitely not.
The whole thing though, is that I prefer somebody
gets one bird, tames and trains and works
with that bird, and then gets a second bird,
does the same thing, works, tames and trains with that bird,
and then socializes those two birds together.
So you have a very confident
and comfortable relationship with each bird on its own,
versus trying to work with two birds.
That usually works against you,
'cause one's more fearful than the other,
one wants to interact while the other one doesn't.
And it can just get a little bit chaotic,
trying to train more than one bird at a time,
and you moved out of the frame. (chuckles)
Blue, Blueberry.
They wanna see your cute little self.
Oh, so I put him right where you can't see him.
He's there!
Or she, we're still not going by male or female,
'cause we don't know.
Oh man, that toy is right in that spot.
Blue, I should've set the scene up for this.
He's like, "What are you doing, human?"
Okay, how 'bout we take that toy off so they can see you?
All right, so what does interacting right away look like?
A lot of the times, when birds first come home
from the store or the breeder, they're pretty full,
so food doesn't really go a long way.
But letting them just get used to what goes on
in your home is really awesome,
especially when they're out of the cage.
So I like to do my first day home out of the cage.
Now, this is something you have
to be super mindful of if you have other pets.
I do not, I only have birds.
So it was really easy for me to have Blueberry
out of the cage all the time on the first week,
really, while we worked with her.
And not worry about a dog, or a cat
or anything getting to her.
So, made it pretty awesome for us.
That will be something that you have to play by ear
in the safety of your own home.
But it was something that really worked
for us and was a lot of fun.
It also leans itself to a lot of opportunities
where you get to help your bird in a positive way.
So for example, Blueberry was clipped when she came to us
from the pet shop, and she would end up at places
that were nerveracking for her,
she didn't wanna be there. (chirps)
And we could go over and offer our hands
and scoop her up, and then take her to the place
that we knew she wanted to be or was comfortable on,
which was a lot of these stands.
But the cool thing about these stands,
is that they're out in the open
and we have them all around our house,
so we could change up which one she was on.
And just out of natural curiosity,
the bird tends to go places
and it just leaves you opportunity to be able
to physically interact, as well as just go over
and talk to the bird.
And then also, what we did is we
constantly offered food options.
We would make food, we would do a lot of things
where she could get into things that she wasn't supposed to.
She actually was, (chuckles)
but when birds don't think they're supposed
to do something, they're all about it.
So we did a lot of that and it just lent itself
to a lot of interaction opportunities,
where I don't feel like letting a bird settle
into a cage for seven days does that.
It really just teaches the bird
to believe its fear of people.
So that's the number one thing I would say
that people do wrong with budgies.
The second thing is the diet, as I mentioned before.
A lot of people think that they go
and they get from the pet store a complete diet,
and it's a seed diet.
Now, these guys can suffer greatly from all seed diets,
and they live very short lives because of it.
So, I will say that with small birds,
I found they prefer crunchy textures.
And because they're tiny, you don't have to make fresh food
in huge batches like you normally see me do
for my medium and large birds.
Holy molting, man.
All these feathers just coming down.
And so you can do it in smaller sizes
and you can do it more often,
so you can just make a little fresh batch
on the go, every single morning
and toss it into a little food processor all at once
and get it going for these guys.
I notice that she definitely loves the crunchy textures
and she'll go to town on a full green bean
or something like that, she just loves playing with food.
So give these guys opportunity to play with their food.
I know that a lot of you, I hear and I see comments of,
"My bird's just wasting the food.
He's not actually eating it,
he's just picking it apart and destroying it."
That's the first step to converting a bird
to a good diet, is teaching them to play with healthy foods.
No matter how they're interacting with their healthy food,
as long as they're interacting,
you're golden and you're on your way.
Another tip for small birds is giving them fresh greens.
Now, I know Blueberry loves sprouts.
That's something that you can offer
that's really, really fun for them.
And especially if they're a little bit damp,
they tend to like to roll on it and rub themselves on it,
so that they can kinda get wet and take a bath that way,
as they would in the wild, so.
Little bit of wet grass goes a long way. (laughs)
So the other thing is pellet conversion.
I know this can be a lot harder,
but once you get a bird on fresh food
and eating fresh food, you can then implement pellets
by just powdering them (chirping)
and sprinkling that powder throughout different recipes
that you try for your bird.
For instance, Blueberry loves eggs.
She loves when we cook eggs and about every morning,
my daughter and my husband have omelets.
And they will make Blueberry a little side omelet
and they will sprinkle all of her favorites on top,
including pellets, and that's one of the ways
that we got her onto a healthier diet.
Even if you guys have to do this for a total
of six to nine months, it's completely worth it
and it's totally normal.
These guys can take a long, long time
to convert solely over to healthy foods.
Now, keep in mind, I do keep seed as part of their diet
but that part comes from us, or it's used as a tool
to get them to eat those other foods.
So, (blows gently) that was a feather, loose feather.
(chuckles) So we try to use the seed to our advantage,
as tools to either get the bird to eat healthier foods
or to do some really fun bonding
through training. (chirps)
Which is super fun, yeah.
The other thing you can use it for is other healthy things
like teaching them to forage, which Blueberry,
whoa! (flutters and chirps)
Did you get scared?
Blue, Blueberry!
She's back on top, I might have scared her.
But Blueberry never showed any problems understanding
how to play with toys, so we didn't
have to do too much of that.
Although I did spend a little bit of time training her
to accept different textures of toys
so that she wasn't picky about which one she played with.
Which as you can see, she's pretty open to any type.
And this one's really fun, it's our Three Suns Exclusive Toy
from parrotJOY that she made for us
to represent our three sun conures.
Which you're probably not understanding,
'cause you didn't see that there's three. (laughs)
Oh, and Blueberry is demoing.
Eating good stuff, woo, wrong way.
Eating good stuff, Blue?
All right guys, if you are enjoying this content
with this cute little nugget right here,
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(bright music)