Parrot boredom is a preventable situation that should be managed in the early stages of your pet’s life. Providing him with varying levels of physical and mental stimulation will help to combat boredom and the unwanted behaviours that are triggered by it. Biting, plucking and screeching are all behavioural symptoms of a bored parrot. If left to escalate, any one of these behaviours can become detrimental to the health and well being of your parrot. But by providing the stimulus to prevent parrot boredom, these issues can become minimized or even non-existent.
- Place a treat in a paper cup, paper towel, empty envelope, coffee filter or other nontoxic item, and close it by twisting or crushing the container. Then you can punch a hole in it, and hang it in the cage, or hang it on a skewer. For more difficulty, the wrap can be offered as a foot toy or hidden around a parrot’s cage.
- This is an excellent technique for the beginner forager. Place a paper towel on top of the bird’s treat bowl so that all it has to do is pull it off to get to the reward. Once the bird is doing that without hesitation, go a step further. Use masking tape to tape the paper towel to the edge of the bowl so now the parrot has to tear through the paper to get to its treat.
- An excellent variation of this is avian veterinarian Evelyn Ivey’s “Popsicle Sticks.” Lay one or two popsicle sticks (or tongue depressors) on top of your parrot’s food bowl. Once it flings them off, quickly tape them down with masking tape but leave space between so your bird can still see its food. Add more and more popsicle sticks as it gets accustomed to this game, until it has to happily splinter its way through a solid layer of popsicle sticks to get to the treats.
- Fill a bowl with appropriately sized, well-scrubbed pebbles (large enough that a parrot cannot swallow them and small enough that it can move them around). Sprinkle a couple of teaspoons of small treats over the rocks, and jiggle the bowl to get the tiny morsels to drop below the pebbles. My Sam loves this game and will spend as long as an hour chuckling to herself while she rummages around in the metal baking dish, trying valiantly to find all the precious sunflower seeds she saw me bury there.
- Spear a small paper cup on a parrot skewer, then a small paper plate, then another paper cup and a coffee filter, etc. Food treats hidden in the paper cups make it a foraging toy. You should also check out this bird aviary for sale since parrots need a large living area to roam around.
