Updates and Musings About Life with Parrots
Thinking of Adopting a Pet During Quarantine? Pets can be wonderful companions during great times and even more so during bad times. I know first hand that animals are a great comfort. Heck, even the CDC and the NIH acknowledge that there’s something about pets that can just make us feel better. That’s why it’s…
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The conventional wisdom is that delayed gratification (that is to say: the ability to hold off on an immediate pleasure) is a predictor of future success. That conclusion came from a famous psych study called “the marshmallow test.” The Marshmallow Test If you’re not familiar with the marshmallow test, here’s the story: Researchers gave children…
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A couple days ago, I posted about serving my birds a variety of foods, including fresh vegetables. I haven’t always done a great job of mixing up where food goes in their cages. Usually, pellets go in one bowl over here. Water goes in another bowl over there. And I generally serve fresh foods the same…
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In 2010, I wrote a blog post about Stewie’s and Mika’s favorite foraging toys. I recently found that post again and wanted to do an update. Their favorite toys have really changed! All new Stewie- and Mika-approved recommendations for 2018: Homemade Parrot Foraging Toys Homemade = cheap. Hooray for cheap. Here are our favorite toy…
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Earlier this month, Deb White the founder of Super Bird Creations (a line of high-quality bird toys available for wholesale to retailers) as well as a number of other sites dedicated to enriching the lives of parrots, came to Phoenix Landing for a special lecture on the important role that “play” serves in the lives…
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In our last post, we just had some fun posting pictures of us opening a box of Kris Porter’s “Fantastic Foraging Blocks.” But what do the birds actually think of their new wooden toys? It turns out that they love ’em! Mika likes the little wicker accents. She’s big into textures and accents. I appreciate…
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Last week, Kris Porter of ParrotEnrichment.com asked if we’d give some feedback on a new foraging toy she has developed. Of course we jumped at the chance! (Are you kidding? A foraging toy developed by the guru of parrot enrichment? Yes, please!) The box arrived Thursday night and we couldn’t wait to open it. Check…
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It’s time for another in our interview series and this time we’re talking to Kris Porter, author of the Parrot Enrichment Activity Books, which are available for free as PDFs from her website. She came to Phoenix Landing last year to give a parrot enrichment seminar, which gave us all tons of ideas for integrating…
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I attended another great Phoenix Landing seminar this weekend. Saturday’s class featured Kris Porter, all the way in from Alaska, to talk about parrot enrichment, specifically focusing on captive foraging. Kris Porter is the author of a great web site about parrot enrichment and two free e-books, the Parrot Enrichment Activity Books (which can be…
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In my last post, I talked about making wooden DIY parrot toys. But I only made one for Mika and got tired of drilling holes into the wood scraps. I rationalized that Stewie doesn’t really like wooden toys nearly as much (he has some untouched ones in his cage as we speak). But then I…
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Foraging toys are a wonderful way to enrich your bird’s life. There are a lot of great DIY foraging toy ideas out there, but in this post I’m going to concentrate on a couple of our favorite commercially available foraging toys. In particular, I like to use acrylic puzzle toys to encourage Stewie to work…
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