There are numerous ways to implement captive foraging without spending a lot of money. The draw back for many parrot owners is the time commitment required to create an inexpensive captive foraging environment. However, the rewards of providing your companion parrot with this type of experience has exponential gains for your bird.
First, let me recommend purchasing the video Captive Foraging: The Next Best Thing to Being Free by Dr. Scott Echols, leading avian veterinarian. This video can be purchased at http://www.avianpublications.com/items/behavior/itemDVD10.htm and offers many great ideas.
Second, stop feeding your bird in a bowl. Birds in the wild do not find and consume their diets in one quick sitting. Foraging Ahead offers effective, reusable foraging feeders that require little additional time and reap great rewards for your parrots, these feeders can be purchased at www.foragingahead.com.
Other methods of creating a captive foraging environment can be as simple as wrapping their pellets and seeds in bird-safe paper products and distributing them in several bowls placed around the cage or buying a kitty litter pan from a local pet shop and filling it with some safe foraging materials (corn cob pan litter, sterilized pine straw, shredded newspaper, etc) and mixing their dry foods in with the foraging materials. Additionally, cutting branches from bird-safe trees and shrubs (http://www.plannedparrothood.com/plants.html) and sticking small chunks of fruits and veggies on some of the sprigs will also provide hours of fun foraging for your bird.
Captive-foraging is crucial to captive parrot's well-being. By taking just several extra minutes and spending a few extra dollars you can greatly increase the wellbeing and livelihood of your companion parrot.
Showing posts with label Foraging Feeders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foraging Feeders. Show all posts
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Monday, December 31, 2007
Bamboo the Wonder Weed
Foraging Ahead is trying to create a consumable foraging feeder-toy that will encourage the birds to chew the feeder up in order to get to the food items inside VS manipulating the food items like our PVC feeder-toy. Recently, after many hours of working with the grass I decided to hop on the good 'ole internet and learn a little bit more about it.
It is difficult to cut bamboo. A wood scrolling blade for a jigsaw creates too much friction burning the bamboo before it cuts through the moist fresh stalk. Cutting the partitions at the naturally occurring nodes with a large miter saw works for creating an effective bottom but we could not come up with an efficient way of cutting holes into the stalk to spark the bird's curiosity by giving it a bird's eye view.
Hoping to find pointers on working with bamboo in an artistic sense without using toxic chemicals, I came across a Giant Panda Crisis.
Surprisingly, this grass that has a reputation of taking over a garden is also a major cause of the declining Giant Panda population in China. "Most of the pandas' favorite arrow bamboo in a 217,000 square-mile region of Sichuan province is going through a once-in-60-year cycle of flowering and dying before regenerating," said Yang Xuyu, deputy head of the province's Wild Animal Preservation Station. So, the Pandas are relocating. China saw a huge Panda die-off in the mountainous regions of Sichuan.
Nature is incredible. Now when I am making the 2hr drive back from our Bamboo supplier I think of the hungry Pandas. Giant Pandas only eat bamboo, bamboo only regenerates every 60 years. That species has been boxed in an evolutionary corner.
For this reason, kudos to the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). I saw the Giant Pandas at Zoo Atlanta.
Birds still have my heart and always will, but I am grateful for the opportunity to have seen a Giant Panda safely from just feet away. *The USA does not own any Panda. The People's Republic of China leases them out for $1,000,000 a year* As I gazed at the baby I wondered if China would use her to be reintroduced into the wild.
As far as the bamboo drama goes, the solution has been found. We now have holes in the bamboo. Shortly we should have this product listed on our website, but our birds have some usability testing to do. No one has a free-ride in this household.
It is difficult to cut bamboo. A wood scrolling blade for a jigsaw creates too much friction burning the bamboo before it cuts through the moist fresh stalk. Cutting the partitions at the naturally occurring nodes with a large miter saw works for creating an effective bottom but we could not come up with an efficient way of cutting holes into the stalk to spark the bird's curiosity by giving it a bird's eye view.
Hoping to find pointers on working with bamboo in an artistic sense without using toxic chemicals, I came across a Giant Panda Crisis.
Surprisingly, this grass that has a reputation of taking over a garden is also a major cause of the declining Giant Panda population in China. "Most of the pandas' favorite arrow bamboo in a 217,000 square-mile region of Sichuan province is going through a once-in-60-year cycle of flowering and dying before regenerating," said Yang Xuyu, deputy head of the province's Wild Animal Preservation Station. So, the Pandas are relocating. China saw a huge Panda die-off in the mountainous regions of Sichuan.
Nature is incredible. Now when I am making the 2hr drive back from our Bamboo supplier I think of the hungry Pandas. Giant Pandas only eat bamboo, bamboo only regenerates every 60 years. That species has been boxed in an evolutionary corner.
For this reason, kudos to the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). I saw the Giant Pandas at Zoo Atlanta.
Birds still have my heart and always will, but I am grateful for the opportunity to have seen a Giant Panda safely from just feet away. *The USA does not own any Panda. The People's Republic of China leases them out for $1,000,000 a year* As I gazed at the baby I wondered if China would use her to be reintroduced into the wild.
As far as the bamboo drama goes, the solution has been found. We now have holes in the bamboo. Shortly we should have this product listed on our website, but our birds have some usability testing to do. No one has a free-ride in this household.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)