Hi, my name is Madeline Franco and we're here to talk about birds, specifically, in this
segment we're going to talk about toys and how you might be able to make some simple
toys yourself from everyday household items, generally speaking. When we think of parrots
in the wild, we like to remember the sixty forty rule. Parrots in the wild spend about
sixty percent of their time looking for food and forty percent of their time trying not
to be food. Let's focus on the sixty percent. Because we have put them int he homes, our
parrots don't get to look for their food as they would in the wild. So foraging toys really
come in handy as a way to keep your bird busy, engaged, and interested. To many people, this
hear looks like a spent water bottle. However, with a little attention, ingenuity, and a
few moments of your time, and dropping a few peanuts and a couple of other things. I've
got in here a little toy made out of straws, some clothespins which the birds like to chew
on, and I'm going drop a few peanuts in there. And, you put that in your birds cage because
he can see that there's something in there that looks interesting. Many of the larger
birds, and believe it or not, even some of the smaller ones because this is fairly thin
plastic, it's also food grade so it's nothing harmful. They will start to chip away at this
and they will get to the toys and the peanuts inside. It's very inexpensive and it's an
inexpensive toy that also helps you to reuse and recycle. Other simple toys consists of
pine cones, which you can take off a favorite local pine tree, or you can them, and birds
seem to like to play with those. They preen them and sculpt them. They're a lot of fun
for them. And even just the caps of the bottle. These make great foot toys for some of your
larger birds. They'll hold them and chip away at them, and pretty soon there'll be nothing
left to them. These here are some jacks. Particularly small birds that are just learning to use
their beaks, these are plastic jacks, they can use these. A bird using it's beak as a
way to sense things and to discover it's world. So, even among baby birds, if you throw a
few of these in the enclosure, they're going to start mouthing these. They're going to
start working with them and it teaches them to teach their beak to grip. You may have
seen these, these are decorative balls, I buy the natural ones, they're made out of
reed. You can force a couple of peanuts into the center of them. Sometimes they're so small
and the peanut is so big you can only get one into them. And this becomes a toy that
your bird might like to play with. You can put a little peanut butter on the tip of the
Popsicle stick and that becomes a treat and also a toy to shred after it's finished. You
can take a simple, readily available paper bag, open it up, get some shredded paper,
put some in there, make a toy out of these straws, you take about four or five straws,
tie them together with another straw. You enjoying that? Make it nice and tight. It's
just something, some sort of surprise for the bird to find in the bag. And, if I put
anything foreign in my birds cages, they usually know there's a treat inside if I put a container
in, anything like that. You can use various things to contain treats and surprises. You
can even use small personal sized pizza boxes. You can make holes in them with a paper puncher,
you can weave leather through the holes. And you just put that in there, put some sticks,
put a few nuts, maybe a couple of these jacks, and some nuts, and you fasten that together.
You can either tie the knot tight or not tight, and you just put that in your bird's cage
and the bird will go and pick after it. A very simple toy can be made from wooden spoons.
You can actually just give your bird a wooden spoon. For a Moluccan, this constitutes a
toy. For other birds you can actually put an eye hook in the top and you can tie pieces
of cloth, and string, and rope, and beads, and all sorts of things. So, the spoon just
provides the infrastructure for whatever you want to attach to it. But, birds love wooden
spoons. Particularly the large birds. They would, wooden spoons and paint stirrers.