The Bird Mama

Toy Making Ideas

Lucy with her artfully woven chains

Are your birds going through toys rather quickly?  Do they need more variety?  Toys can get get pretty expensive, especially if you have a flock.  If you have macaws and large cockatoos, they get really expensive!  These big guys love making toothpicks!  If you like making your big birds wooden toys, here’s a link to a list of safe woods that will be very helpful to you, http://www.birdsafe.com/woods.htm.  In the summer, I like to puruse the garage sales and look for baby toys that might interest my fids such as plastic chains and keys.

I’ve found that with a yarn needle (it has a large eye) threaded with string or twine, you can make many different toys.  You can string cupcake papers, beads, straws, plastic chain and lots of other things.  You can buy a bag of yucca chunks and string them.  You can buy a box (30 ft. roll) of woven palm leaf for around $4. and cut it in pieces and string it, alternating these with plastic or wooden beads, or weave several long pieces through the cage bars.  If you use wooden beads, be sure they are not painted or finished in any way.  They should be safe, ”naked” wood.  If you want to color them, dip them in food coloring diluted with water, as you would Easter eggs.  Take plain ice-cream cones and fill them with crinkled paper.  You can buy this paper by the bag if you don’t want to cut it up and crinkle it yourself.  Attach a string through the bottom of the cone (and knot it) before you fill it, and then tie the other end around a stainless steel hanger or plastic chain so you can hang it in their cage.  A person who makes these birdie cones to sell, tells me that she uses a bit of corn syrup to “glue” the paper in the bottom of the cup so it doesn’t all fall out, but it looks loose as it spills out of the top.  This way her glue is not toxic.  My birds love these!  Lucy also loves the plastic chains made for babies and weaves them in and out of her cage door.  For bigger birds you can enlarge a hole in a large wiffle ball, fill it with nuts in the shell, and hang it in their cage or from their play-stand.  Finnegan goes absolutely “nuts” over this and it occupies a great deal of his time trying to get them out!  I give him this “toy” only occassionally because  I don’t want him to overload on nuts.  He would eat them all if left up to him!  If you’re interested, here’s a link to a site that sells toy parts for all size birds,http://www.busybird.com/.

For other toy-making ideas go to a bird or pet store and look at their toys.  See what you could possibly duplicate or substitute at home.  I invite you to share your toy making ideas with the rest of us in the Comments section below.  Happy toy making!~

On Keeping Our Birds Cozy

All birds fluff up their feathers to trap their body heat, but what concerns me is having one’s furnace or power go out.  Of course if your power goes out the only thing that’s going to help you is having a generator.  That’s why I mentioned it at the end of my previous article.  A friend’s furnace went out last week in Florida when the temps got down in the 30′s.  My daughter’s furnace went out the week before.  Neither one lost power, but they had no heat. My daughter has a space heater that she put in her girls’ bedroom and put the birds in there for the night as well.  It was in the 20’s that night, but they stayed warm and cozy.

 When our birds, who are used to temperate climates, are abruptly exposed to a sudden drop in temperatures, down in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, maybe even the 50’s, I’d say that’s a danger to them.  I just think that we all need some kind of plan.  A heated perch or a space heater will only be good if your furnace goes out, but you still have power.  A generator is what’s needed for a loss of power.  It would not only help our birds, but obviously us as well.  My husband bought a small generator for about $300, one that would run the furnace and our refrigerator in case of emergency.  We got it a few years ago after we had a huge power outage in the late spring that lasted for almost a week, and we lost the food in our refrigerator and freezer.  Fortunately, my fids and I were able to stay at my daughter’s for the week.

I have a bit more information on heated perches.  The small size is not very small.  It’s about 1″ in diameter, smaller at the tip and a little larger at the end where it attaches to the cage.  Finnegan used it for a year until I got him a medium size one this winter.  Any bird from a small Amazon on down could be use the small size.  Also it’s irregular in shape for the benefit of your birds’ feet.  It’s smaller near the tip and larger near the cage end.  The medium size ranges from 1 1/4” to 1 ½”.  The large size would be for the bigger macaws and cockatoos and is about 2″ in diameter.  I know that they are expensive.  For this reason I started out with one and added more as I could afford them, ususally one per year.

Not all birds will accept a new perch immediately.  With some birds you have to leave it outside the cage for awhile for them to look at and get used to.  With others, you can just replace their current sleeping perch with the new ones as I did with Finnegan and Bobbie, and they were just fine.  They aren’t afraid of new toys either, but then they may be the excepti0n and not the rule.

I also cover each of my birds’ cages at night with a black fleece piece of fabric so that they’ll have 12+ hours of darkness, and it keeps out drafts.  I think that covering them gives them a feeling of safety and security.  I’ll be writing another blog about our  cockatiel, Bobbie, and about she adapted to covering.  Watch for it.

Keep Those Tootsies Warm

A friend of mine brought up a good point the other day which was my inspiration for this article.  She happens to live in Florida where the weather has been on the chilly side.  Unfortunately her heat went out and she and her birds were living under a large pile of blankets.  How do you plan on keeping your bird(s) warm if your furnace goes out?

I live in Michigan and my birds have heated perches which they use year round.  After all, even air-conditioning can get chilly.  The nice thing about heated perches is that they are pre-set to a bird’s body temperature and are warmest at the end that connects to the electrical cord and cooler at the the tip.  In this way your bird can choose where he’d like to stand so as to warm his feet or not.  It also adds a TINY bit of heat to the cage when it’s covered.

Finnegan's heated perch

These perches are completely safe.  The electrical cord is wrapped in a metal coil and is on the outside of the cage.  It attaches like a lot of perches.  One end is threaded and has a indentation in it that you place on one of the bars, and the other end screws over it from the outside.  It’s very ingenious. They come in three different perch sizes to accomodate any size bird.  I have the small size for my quaker and cockatiel and the medium size for my eclectus.  I’ve used them for five or six years now, and my birds love them.

From numerous blogs that I’ve read I realize that many people are under the impression that if you cover your bird’s cage with lots of blankets, your bird will be warm just like we are when covering ourselves with blankets.  This is not true.  Lots of blankets do not produce heat, just weight.  The reason they keep us warm is because our bodies are producing the heat and the blankets are trapping it.  I suppose that if you could wrap your bird in a blanket, it would stay warmer because you would be trapping in its own body heat.  However, it won’t be warmer in the cage because there are blankets over it. The blankets will block out drafts and that helps, but you have to have a heat source to produce heat.  Your bird certainly can’t produce enough heat to warm its cage no matter how many blankets you put over it.  Therefore, a heated perch will help keep your bird warm since it is producing heat and warming its feet.

Heated perches are on the expensive side, ranging from around $32.99 to $49.99, with the smaller ones being on the lower end.  Do shop the internet because you can find that the same size perch can range $8. to $10.  The first one that I bought was used and was only $12.  It happened to come into our bird store in a used cage which was being re-sold.  The perch lasted for about three years.  So it turned out to be a very good buy.  Who knows, maybe you can find one on eBay.  If you have multiple birds and can’t buy several at once, you may want to buy one for your oldest bird first.  Our little Bobbie, who is soon to be 15, has arthritic feet and is enjoying her first winter with her heated perch.  She loves it!  I took her sleeping perch out of her cage and replaced it with the heated one.  She was only suspicious the first night.  After that, I usually find her on her warm perch in the morning.  She also uses it during the day for naps.  We’ve only had Bobbie for a year and a half or she would have had one sooner.

Another source of heat for your birds would be a heating pad placed under a smaller, table-top cage since heat rises.  Best of all though, is to have a safe, non-teflon coated space heater for the room in which you keep your birds.  It can’t be stressed enough that you make sure that the space heater you have or buy does NOT have teflon coated heating elements.  Many appliances today, including hair dryers, irons, ovens, etc., are teflon coated.  I would also strongly recommend having a generator, even a small, inexpensive one, in case you lose your power since these electrical appliances obviously won’t work if your power goes out.

I hate it when my feet are cold.  It makes me feel cold all over.  I tend to think that our birds don’t like cold feet either.  If you don’t have a heated perch already, give some thought to getting one, or two.  Keep your fids’ tootsies warm and cozy.  They’ll love it!