- Hey everyone, Jamieleigh here from BirdTricks,
and today's video is about basic care for pet budgies.
- Not a budgie. - Not a budgie.
But adorable, ugh!
- Did you say a baby - Send me your baby birds.
To train. - Or a budgie?
- Just a budgie, budgie, seriously.
This is not about baby birds.
(upbeat techno music)
The number one mistake I see actually made
with pretty much all species of parrot
is the food that you get the bird on from the pet store
or whomever you keep it on,
and this is a really big mistake for budgies
because they usually come on a store-bought seed mix,
that is of very low quality.
So if it has sugars, fillers, dyes,
all of that sort of stuff,
you wanna make your own homemade seed mix.
I have another video on my channel just talking about
and sharing the homemade seed mix that I make
for my own budgie so please check it out,
and that should be the number one thing
that you change right away is switching
just that quality of seed mix
from the crappy pet store quality
to your homemade quality right there at home.
I do understand that this part can be very confusing
because a lot of pet store brands
and food label companies put labels on their pellets
or on their seed mixes saying, "This is a complete diet,"
even though it has dried fruit,
and all sorts of colored pellets.
I've even seen bird pellets shaped as dog bones.
What were they thinking?
Anyways, if you come across something
that is a complete diet and can be 100% fed to your bird
all of the time, research it.
Look at the ingredients on the label,
and check and see if that seed mix is brittle,
and if there's a lot of broken parts at the very bottom
cause usually, there are and that's a high sign
that there is something not so great about that seed mix.
Now, the cool thing about changing to a homemade seed mix
is not only the quality of the mix goes up,
but also the treat value of seeds in general
for your bird goes way up.
So now, you can suddenly use spray millet
as a reward for your small bird
that you may have gotten away with to some extent,
but not to the extent that you're about to progress with
now that you've switched to a homemade seed mix.
Now this part of the budgie care,
I won't dive in too deeply on
because I get a little crazy about this.
Me with birds.
Me with humans.
On my channel, if you've watched any of my other videos,
you know that diet is a big thing for me.
I want our birds to be
on the best, most high quality diet possible,
and that includes the little guys.
So yes, budgies can eat fresh food,
not only sprouts that you can even sprout at home
or buy in your grocery store, but also they need
a very good high quality seasonal feeding system
like the one I give in my cookbook recipes,
and this provides year-round nutrition
that kind of fills in the gaps with pellets.
So if you can really make an effort
to give the best diet to your birds,
small birds especially tend to like crunchier textures,
so make them part of the food prep and part of the funds
so they can discover and explore that head of cauliflower
and then how it's chopped into pieces,
and then how it's food processed in the end
so that they get to see it in all those varieties and forms.
It goes a long way in diet conversion,
and we need to be getting those healthy vegetables
and foods into our small birds just as much
as the medium and large.
Another thing that's really important for basic budgie care
is having a wider cage than you have tall.
Most birds will not utilize the space that is down here
on a tall cage because birds tend to be up high,
and they like it up high
because that means safety instinctively to them.
So the wider cage you can get,
the more active they will be in that environment.
So really think about that when you're looking
for the perfect and ideal cage.
Also, flight cages are awesome.
I prefer walking in aviaries myself.
I love when I can walk into the bird's enclosure.
I get that that's not usually
in the budget of budgie owners.
However, if you can do it, it's fantastic.
I screened in my outdoor porch so that in the nice months,
my budgie can just fly around to get fresh air,
and also get some desensitization on a daily basis
during those nice months.
So just remember that when you're cage shopping,
always go wider than you are going tall.
The other thing I wanna say when it comes to cages
is things that aren't cages,
so foraging trees, play stands, other cage-less environments
that you can provide around your house
for your budgie to have as play zones.
We all have plenty of no-zones in our house
that we don't want our birds to be at,
but we need lots of yes-zones too
so that they have a lot of variety
and could even help themselves to find
from which place they wanna be at.
For example, my budgie, Blueberry,
she actually lives cage-less most of the time in my home,
and she will tend to sleep in my room.
So she'll fly to the foraging tree in there,
usually around 5 pm or 6 pm and put herself to bed.
It tends to be the darkest and quietest room earlier on
in our day, in our lifestyle.
So that's where she prefers to sleep,
which is really cool that she can kinda tell us that.
So consider putting cage-less activities for your bird
that are safe around your home.
This next one is a fun one.
Now, I know a lot of people say
that their birds don't like bathing,
and they tend to try the wrong tactics
when it comes to small birds.
Small birds, if you notice them in the wild,
they tend to find wet grass,
or they find little shallow puddles
and they like to just brush around and roll around in it.
Now, you wanna implement that in captivity.
So you can buy wheat grass,
you can sprout your own wheat grass,
and if you just give it some spritz and sprays
where it's nice and wet, usually your budgie will have
a great time crawling all around and rubbing itself
around the grass and having a good old time
just as they would do in the wild.
Also, a shallow dish for bathing
goes a long way with budgies.
You can tap your fingers in there
and splash around a little bit to just to get them going.
And eventually, you can even use the spray bottle to train,
but usually the small birds,
they're a little bit more receptive
to these more instinctive and natural ways
that they would bathe in the wild.
So definitely give it a go.
It's also a great way to get them interested in fresh food.
If you make sure it's a little bit wet,
they're a little bit more receptive.
That's how I first got my budgie, Blueberry interested
in sprouts is I just spritz them down
and she came over and walked over 'em and had a great time.
So playing with their food is actually a good thing
in the bird world.
This next one will keep you really in tune
with your bird's eating habits,
and that is weighing your budgie every single day.
Now, the reason I say every single day is that way,
you can really get a good read
on whether you're having weight loss or weight gain,
and it can notify you of illness
before there's any obvious signs.
When it comes to birds,
when there's obvious signs of illness,
it's usually too late, which is just a sad reality
of having birds in captivity.
So getting in the habit
of weighing your bird daily is pretty important.
I've trained and conditioned my bird, Blueberry,
who is a blue budgie, that every morning,
when she wants breakfast, she flies to the scale,
and it's a really cute behavior, I love it.
I have gotten to the point where I can just tap
on the top of the scale
and she flies in from wherever she's at,
and this is something that I do before every single meal
for her so I actually weigh her twice a day.
It's really easy, I keep it on the island of my kitchen.
And so, it's always accessible.
Now, this is something that I have toyed with
if I don't have a scale readily accessible.
It's almost an out of sight out of mind thing.
So I would highly recommend keeping your scale someplace
where you are reminded to use it often enough.
The cool thing is I know exactly
how many grams she should be in the morning.
I know how many grams she's going to be after eating.
It's just a really cool thing where when you get
in the groove and understand the weight of your bird,
that you know when to interact
just by the weight of your bird,
and you know whether or not
they're gonna be receptive or not,
or if they're just gonna be so stuffed and full
that they aren't gonna do anything that you ask.
So it's kind of a cool thing where I can really gauge
if she's gonna be awesome at trick training,
if she's gonna be into flight training,
if she's gonna be content just to hang out with me.
It tells you a lot and gets you in tune health-wise
with your bird where you should be.
So I think this is something that goes not done as much
with small birds as it is with medium and large.
So please make sure you do this
as part of your basic budgie care.
Now I know budgies seem super tiny
like they shouldn't be able to give blood, (chuckles)
but in reality they can.
The first time I took my budgie, Blueberry
in for her annual, I was a nervous wreck,
just thinking because I'm used to having a bit larger birds
with my sun conures being part
of my smallest flock at 100 grams.
My budgie, Blueberry's only around 30 grams.
So the thought of her giving blood
was just stressing me out.
However yes, they can give blood,
and you should be doing annual exams with your budgie
to make sure that everything is looking great.
You don't need any supplements
or to make any changes to the diet.
It's something that you should be on top of
with your entire flock, big or small,
and make a yearly thing.
It's called an annual exam for a reason.
So please be on top of that.
It just ensures that you're doing right
by your bird every single year,
and gives you time to make changes if you need to.
One of the things I hear
about for people not doing the annual exam
or any exam is that "My budgie seems perfectly healthy."
That's a great time to do your annual exam.
That way, you have the best numbers
and the best blood work possible to compare to
when you have an inkling of a feeling
that your budgie is just not feeling right.
So ideally, when your bird is feeling great,
those are the stats you want
so that you can compare them later on
when you have a scare or year-to-year
to make sure that you're actually keeping on track.
This is one we encounter all the time with small birds,
and that is giving a small bird a mirror,
mostly with budgies,
but I see it with other small birds too.
Now, my budgie, Blueberry was on a road trip with me
and we were staying at a hotel that had a closet
that was just mirrored doors.
And when she discovered that, she flew to the ground
and was obsessed with her image.
What this does is it leads to extreme hormonal behavior
where birds will actually start regurgitating
on the mirrors, they get excessive egg-laying.
They just go into hormone overdrive
and it leads to a lot of issues,
especially with female birds
if they do start the egg-laying process.
It's a scary thing if it becomes a really, (groans)
chronic thing.
So please avoid triggering hormones if you can help it
and don't intentionally give your bird a mirror.
Now this is different than your bird understanding
where the bathroom is in your house
and finding its way there.
I'm talking about the little mirrors
that you actually place as a cage toy.
I would highly discourage you guys from doing that
as well as anything reflective such as bells
or what have you.
It's much better to give birds, especially budgies,
things that they can actually destroy.
Blueberry's, one of her favorite things is Qwerk bark
and mahogany pods, which are two materials
that we love incorporating
into my organic exclusive toy line,
which is my BirdTricks toy line,
and it goes into my BirdTricks boxes.
So if you want to ask specifically for a custom box,
you can always special request things
with certain size requirements,
or certain materials that your bird is really receptive to.
Another thing that Blueberry really likes
is yucca wood or the kabob line that we carry.
So definitely check out my bird toy boxes
to see if you can find something
that your budgie loves to destroy,
versus something that it loves to puke on.
Speaking of toys, I actually came out with a tiny toy box.
Now, this was inspired by my budgie, Blueberry
because she actually plays with all sizes of toys,
but it made me realize that my small toys
were actually pretty darn big
in comparison to her little 30-gram body.
So I thought, how many other bird owners
are feeling this way and let's make an exclusive line.
Now, my toys are still a little bit big
because we had a hard time sizing them down.
We just got overly excited in the creation process,
but if you have a special design
that you want to give us,
that inspires something that's made exclusively,
we love getting that kind of creativity sent our way
so that I can pass it on to my toy designer
and we can make something really unique and special.
So we're always open to that,
but in the meantime, check out my tiny toy box
that comes with eight tiny toys for your tiny bird.
Did I say, "My budgie, Blueberry" way too many times?
How many times did I say that?
Think I can say it three times fast?
My budgie, Blueberry, my budgie, Blueberry,
my budgie, Blueberry, (chuckles)
yes, I nailed it!
- Nailed it! (chuckles)
- You try.
- [Dave] My budgie, Blueberry, my budgie, Blueberry,
my budgie, Blueberry.
- It's not that hard.
Turns out, it's not that hard.
- [Dave] That's what she said!
Oh! - Oh!
On that note, please like and subscribe
if this video helped you.
I'm always excited to read your guys' comments.
So please leave them down below,
and check out the video description
for a link to my tiny toy box.
PS, can you do a PS in a video?
Anyways, I'm doing it.
PS, if you join my mailing list over at birdtricks.com,
you'll be the first to know about upcoming promotions,
including when things are brand new
and go out for the very first time,
and get in on those special discounts.
So don't forget to go over to birdtricks.com and subscribe.
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