- [Jamieleigh] Be right back.
- Okay.
(birds screeching)
Hey guys!
I'm drawing a picture of an ice cream cone beak.
(moaning)
(blows raspberry)
Is it a filming already?
- [Jamieleigh] Yeah.
- Okay. (laughs)
- Why, have you been making faces?
- (laughs) No.
(upbeat electronic music)
Woo, welcome to our conure Q and A,
you guys had a lot of questions about our sun conures.
Now, we have three,
even though it doesn't sound like it right this second,
but we do have three.
So I'm going to go ahead and answer your questions
and if they're really noisy and annoying during it,
you're just going to get a better glimpse
of what it's like to have a sun conure,
because they are known for being really noisy.
- Actually you'll realize how many is three.
- Yeah. - Thanks.
- So we're going to get started.
I started off with three,
but two of them are on one of my play stands,
so hopefully they decide to join us at some point.
All right, so one of the first questions
is "How do you build a strong bond,
trust and relationship with conures
in situations where they haven't been treated the best?"
And I would say that building a bond and a relationship-
(bird screeching)
Woo, hey, girly!
Oh. - Girly.
- That's not the best spot.
Baby girl. (lips kissing)
Good girl.
Good job, Capri.
- [Capri] (indistinct).
- (laughs) No.
What was that?
That was crazy.
- [Both] That was crazy.
- Okay, so I go about building my bond with birds,
whether they've had traumatic experiences or not
through trick training,
and usually through hands off trick training,
so things that you can do
without having to physically manipulate
or have your hands very close to the bird.
So something where you can drop a treat nearby,
you don't have to hand it via your hand,
and things where you can use,
oh, you're so cute,
the distance teaching.
- [Capri] Yeah she is cute.
- You're just adorable.
- (laughs) Okay, let's get back to the video.
- Okay.
"Is there any special training
that went into free flight training
since they're not one of the common species to free fly?"
Yeah, well, yes and no.
So since they're so brightly colored,
we have an easier time spotting them,
also since there's three of them,
they usually stick together,
they're a little bit easier to spot
and because they're so noisy,
it's really easy to know where they are
when they're free flying,
which is why, even though they're smaller,
they're one of the more common species
that you do see free flight trained
because of the noisiness and the brightness and the colors.
Now with that said we did free flight train them
a little bit differently and that's...
I'm not really sure why that happened,
I think it just was due to our lifestyle at the time
and the different circumstances that we were going through.
Big girls, go.
- Come on.
- Hurry up!
- Okay, cause you guys are being noisy over there.
(lips kissing) You're just being noisy over there.
Are you coming?
- Can I have her?
- Yeah. - Thanks.
- So one of the things that happened
when we were free flight training them
is we handled it all pretty similar
to how we normally free flight train our other birds,
but a lot of the time we were in Monticello, Utah,
and kind of training on our property.
And we were just really mindful and careful
because it wasn't the most ideal spot
to be free flight training,
and we were running into a lot of issues
of housing these guys where we normally house
all of our other birds due to their noisiness,
it was disrupting a lot of people
based on where we were traveling through and where we were,
so we were finding we couldn't have them outside as much,
which is a big problem when you're trying
to desensitize to the outdoors.
Hey girlie.
- Now we have we have all three of them.
- We have all three!
It's probably going to be short lived.
- Come here, come here.
Baby. (laughs)
- There we go.
So the free flight training, oh and she's gone,
really does work the same with the smaller birds,
but we're just a little bit even more picky
and mindful about where and when
we fly these guys.
With that said, though,
sometimes they can come out at locations
where we might be a little bit more uncomfortable
with our large birds.
So for instance, free flying in our front yard,
we're most comfortable with probably our galah Bondi
and then our three sun conures.
Are you taking the hair back?
Taking the hair back? (laughs)
- [Capri] Mom, come around with the baby birds!
- Why, what are we doing?
- [Capri] Just, you'll see. (laughs)
- Oh boy.
Why are you in the baby swing?
- Because, for the (indistinct).
- [Jamieleigh] You call them.
- Babies. (lips kissing)
Babies.
Wee!
(indistinct).
- [Jamieleigh] He's like "How do I land
on that moving object?"
- [Capri] (indistinct)!
(bird screeching)
- [Jamieleigh] Baby.
Hey, girly, you're all wet.
You are all wet.
- I feel like this girl's the only one being good.
- Capri, what's your favorite thing
about owning sun conures?
- They're cute?
And I really like their colors.
- Yeah, that is probably the nicest thing
about having a sun conure
is the way that they look,
not so much the way they sound.
"Just how loud are they?"
They're really loud guys, right now they're being very good,
which I feel like every time I do a video
it's really not that bad.
But for instance,
when I first walk into saying hello to them,
they will just scream,
they're more and most likely to just be screaming and making
noise just for fun, it seems to be self-reinforcing,
they're also the ones that will lose their minds
over seeing something outside.
So I would say they're crazy loud,
we have more complaints over the years of having birds
about these guys than we do of our macaws.
(birds screeching)
And some people just hate the type of screech that they do,
you know, a macaw can get incredibly loud,
but they aren't usually doing it for the consistency
and amount of time that these guys are.
So even now,
just sitting here trying to have this conversation,
they go off intermittently,
especially with three of them, when one loses their mind,
all three of them lose their mind,
so it's tripled when you have more than one.
So just so you guys have an idea,
they are sitting in the window yelling about things
- [Capri] Which we don't know what they're yelling about.
- Commenting about things, yelling about things,
narrating about things, expressing themselves.
- I drawed one of them screaming.
- So as far as how I house my sun conures,
at the moment I don't have as much space
as I would like to when it's cold outside,
so when it's cold outside
and I have to house all my birds indoors,
the three sisters are usually together.
Once I can start moving the larger birds outside,
the larger birds are the first to move outside,
then I can separate my three sun conures.
Also when we travel, I do keep them separated,
so as much as I can, I try to keep them separated,
otherwise, for some reason,
these three girls tend to over-preen each other
on the top of the head,
especially the other two do it to Lily,
and it just doesn't look pretty.
So I do prefer to keep them separate,
but they are really great about being together,
and I think that's because I can offer them
some separation time, but for the most part,
they do find themselves together.
Even when free flying,
I do try to divide my time and take one or two out,
and not always all three, I try to just really divide it.
(bird screeching)
- [Capri] Baby!
(indistinct) the babies.
Girl!
- [Dave] (indistinct).
- [Jamieleigh] This is Phoebe.
- [Capri] That's what I thought. (grunts)
- [Dave] Good thing you're wearing a helmet.
(laughing)
- Baby!
You always go for the big ones, girl.
They wanna see the babies!
- [Jamieleigh] What you doing up there?
What are you doing up there?
(bird screeching)
Hey, Lily girl.
Detka, what are you doing?
(laughing)
- [Capri] It's not ready for you to play with it!
- [Jamieleigh] Go around that way.
- [Capri] I'm getting attacked!
(laughing)
- Ideally though, if I had the space,
I would have all three separated.
Right now, I don't know how I would do that
and give everybody adequate space that I would like to,
so hopefully some day.
- Drawed all three.
- Cute!
Oh, so this is an interesting question,
and it's about "What are some of the concerns we should have
about big birds interacting with small birds?"
So these people specifically have a sun conure
and they're thinking about getting a larger bird
in the future.
The thing about sun conures
is they are big bird personalities in little bird bodies,
so they really think that they are bigger than they are,
and when they get angry
they get super puffed up
and try to make themselves as big as possible,
they do some grumbling, you know,
they try to look as intimidating as possible.
So the problem that I've run into with sun conures
is that they won't necessarily always back down.
They kind of tend to pick fights with the bigger birds
and pick on them and kind of bully them,
and it can get them in trouble
because they are a lot smaller
and they can get hurt a lot easier.
So a sun conure your bite to a macaw,
may not be as devastating as a macaw bite to a sun conure,
now that's going to cause some serious damage.
So it's really important to be incredibly mindful of that
and mindful of how bullying you allow your birds
to get with one another,
you don't want it to be something that builds up
and goes on and on and on,
where one bird is just looking
or waiting for the opportunity to get them.
So it's something that we have to be
incredibly mindful about, especially when free flying,
cause we're out there to enjoy it,
the last thing we want is for the sun conures,
or any of our birds for that matter,
to get hurt from one another,
so definitely something to be aware of.
- I drawed a sun conure eating a hotdog (laughs)
- Can sun conures eat hotdogs?
- No. - No. (laughs)
So a lot of you have been wondering,
because Comet my camelot macaw, looks like a sun conure-
(bird screeching)
looks like a giant sun conure,
if they have any sort of method of treating him differently,
if they treat him like the sun conure king and all of that.
They pick on Comet the most out of all of my macaws,
and I think it's because Comet
makes the least amount of effort to defend himself
or do anything about it, he just kind of takes it,
he's a very nice guy.
So they take advantage of him in that way, but no,
I don't think they think he's a sun conure king,
I think they just like an easy target.
I'm the worst person to ask
on what a good price is for a bird,
I have not actually bought a bird in nine years,
which is how old these girls currently are
at the filming of this video, although maybe they're 10 now,
so these girls were, I think, $350 each,
if I remember correctly. (coughs)
A lot? - That much?
- Yeah.
You think we made a bad decision
spending that much money on sun conures?
- They're loud.
But they're really cute, and just a little bit deadly.
(laughing)
But I really like flying them.
- Yeah, that's pretty accurate.
What's this?
- A sun conure eating ice cream. (laughs)
- Can sun conures eat ice cream? (laughs)
Let's see.
- Girly is like "Give me ice cream!" (laughs)
- "So when free flying your conures,
do you mind the weather and how much wind is outside?"
Yes.
One of the days that we had a great day at the dunes,
it started to really pick up and get too windy,
and the sun conures, when it gets incredibly windy,
they quit, and they quit by either burrowing into somewhere
in like the back of your neck, under your hair,
in a safe place in your clothes,
or they'll literally put themselves away
into a travel carrier if we brought along one,
or they'll just simply fly back to the truck,
and even if they can get inside the trailer,
they'll wait inside the trailer.
When we were flying at the Mesquite Sand Dunes,
there was kind of a bush nearby,
it was a large tree-ish bush, but not super tall,
and they all knew that we were heading back
and they beelined it for that
and just waited in the little branches in there
so they weren't getting blown around
because trying to carry them down the dunes
and having them just hang on was not working out for them.
So yeah, they can only handle so much wind
before they just start getting shoved around,
and it's no longer fun.
What would you like to show?
- A conure eating pizza. (laughs)
- Can they eat pizza?
"How did you train three birds at once?
My three green-cheeks will not train together."
This is kind of something
that you have to play by situation and scenario.
For us, Lily gives us the best training response,
she's the one that will initiate wanting to work
for everything and wanting to learn,
and if we just focus on her,
the other two tend to use observational learning,
where they watch what Lily does to earn a treat
and they will start participating that way.
So it's something where if you have more than one bird
and you're trying to train them,
but you're struggling in that scenario,
just focus on one and the others will follow suit
and it won't be as much pressure on you.
"How can I tell them apart?"
So this is an interesting one,
it's very subtle,
and it's mostly by my conures behavior
more than how they look,
they all look very similar.
Lily is kind of the one
that is likely to start everything first.
She is the one that will be the most eager
to come out of the aviary,
be the one that's free flying the best,
be the one that's taking initiative on everything,
she's also the most yellow
out of the three sun conures of mine,
she is just vibrantly yellow all through her back.
And then Detka is the baby,
she is literally the youngest of the three
and she's usually the one that will follow suit with Lily.
So she'll usually,
whichever bird initiates doing something first,
Detka will be soon to follow
and she's kind of our runner-up in a sense,
she just tends to copy Lily to a certain extent,
she has a little less interest in training,
but she's still there,
and she's probably bonded most to Dave,
out of the three of us, and sometimes Capri,
whereas Lily's very bonded to me.
And then Phoebe is our middle child
and she's the one that personality-wise,
she's just less willing to participate,
she doesn't really want to,
she'll be the one that will hang back in the aviary,
she'll stop free flying earlier than the other two,
she'll be the most likely to just find a person
that will tolerate her burrowing into your neck
and playing with your hair,
she loves to preen hair
and just kind of being on you and hanging out,
she's not as interested in flying or training.
She's probably our most cautious,
she's the one that will alarm call to everybody else.
She is the one that, yeah,
she's just our very cautious girl.
Now Detka has a little bit more orange and red on her back,
and Phoebe's just kind of the one
that looks like a normal, typical sun conure.
So unless you see the extra red orange,
then you know it's Detka,
if you see the bright, bright yellow,
then you know it's Lily,
and if you don't see either of that,
then you know it's Phoebe.
(calm electronic music)