terryspear

I forgot to ask! Anyone else have ideas about toys that Greys like?

Hi NewMamma, I had to replace our Grey's cage at the beginning of 2022 because Corey was starting to bite the paint off her cage. I was very concerned that this paint could be toxic to her and it seemed she immediately recognized my reaction to this new development which made her more prone to bite the cage bars. I didn't want this to be a way for her to get attention. This meant I had to look for a stainless steel [SS] cage. As others have pointed out, SS cages can be very expensive. Kings Cage has very nice SS cages but they were more expensive than what we could afford. Here is a link to a SS cage I found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N94VTHF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 This cage was called: Prevue Pet Products Large Stainless Steel Play Top Bird Cage This cage is made in China but since it was made from SS, I wasn't too worried about the metal or paint it was made from. It has held up well for the last 2 years. The only thing I don't like about the cage is that the bars are a very small diameter but Corey has learned to navigate the bars just fine. My husband modified this cage with a few parts from her old cage so Corey wouldn't freak out when we got her the new cage [and fortunately she wasn't interested in eating paint from these parts]. The old cage and the new SS cage were exactly the same dimensions. Our bird doesn't really like change and the last thing I wanted was to spend $800.00 and have her reject the new cage. After my husband assembled the new cage [including adding a few parts from the old cage], we were able to switch the old cage with the new cage. Corey knew something was different but it wasn't THAT different and it all worked out. Good luck with your Grey, they are wonderful creatures. Corey's Mom

In the last few years, I have taken to saving paper brochures and magazines and making them available to our CAG, Corey. Corey bites and shreds the pages of these paper “toys”. They are easy to replace and if she poops on them, I just tear off the page. We let her stay on one of the counters in our kitchen so she can be with us [not the counters where we are preparing food] and I put these magazines/brochures on the flat surface there. When she tears them up, I simply sweep up the paper pieces. Also, I put them on top of her cage and fasten them there with 2” binder clips. [See picture/you can only see a small section of one of the binder clips that fasten the brochures to the top bar of the cage] When she wants to be on top of her cage, I frequently find her just resting flat on the brochures or magazines [if she’s not tearing them up]. I have never seen Corey actually consuming any of this paper material so [at least for Corey] this seems perfectly safe. Corey's Mom

That's an interesting idea, Kevin! Corey might be willing to try something like that. Corey's doing OK now. She's a little wobbly when she's first gets on your hand but if you move her toe back, she's better. Wow, coming from the Middle East, that's wild. I'll need to look here on your website to see if I can find some background. Thanks for your idea!

Funny, SR SeedBurners! I did think your explanation was "strange" but I didn't get the humor at the time. And, thanks again for more photos!

Wow SRSeedBurners, Huey looks great! I had no idea that they could adapt this well. Thank you for post and especially the photos. Like you, we've tried to push her back toe where it "belongs" but that doesn't last long. Corey continues to improve. She has probably figured out how to adapt to the change in the conformation of her left foot. We have an easier time of getting her to step-up and she doesn't seem to "ball up" her left foot as much when she moves. Thanks again, everybody!

Hi Everybody and LNCAG, I thought I would provide a bit of an update and it's good news! Corey seems to have done better these last few days. I'm not sure if it's the pain meds OR if it's that she is adapting to the rotated toe [to the front of her left foot]. She is much better when she comes to "step up" on our hand . It's kinda like she can get a better grasp. And, she seems to be vocalizing more normally and being more of her playful self. When we realized that she had a hard time perching [couple of years ago], we modified her sleeping cage and now the perch is only a few inches above a soft layer of newspaper. She seems to be doing pretty in this cage now. As has been pointed out to me, Greys are smart and thus adaptable. I am much less stressed now that I was a week ago. Thank you so much, Terry

Hi LNCAG, Thank you for your input: a ground perch! Who knows, we may have to go to this in the future. I have been thinking about how to fashion something that allows her foot to slope forward. She might not have a choice in the future. I do have to write that she appears more comfortable on the pain med now. Maybe, if we are lucky, and the sudden drop in her ability to perch and walk was a result of a bad fall [that we didn't see] we can more or less go on as we have been. Now, Corey doesn't seem so uncomfortable with the daily activities of life. Thanks for posting!

Hi Greytness, We have been thinking about how we can arrange her cloth perches in her sleep area. We now have a double cloth/braided perch to more mimic a flat surface. She clearly wants to be suspended in the air but as Timbersmom wrote: they can shift to something different. Thank you. t

Hi Timbersmom, Thank you. You did have an insight that was very useful for me: that given time, we might see Corey accepting a flat place to rest.

We’ve had our Grey, Corey, for about 20 years. We found her for sale in an aquarium store where she had been left by her previous owner. When we brought Corey home, we could tell that her tail was off to one side. We took her to see an avian vet and he told us that it was likely that whoever hatched Corey did not feed the parents or the chicks an appropriate diet and her bone deformity was likely a result of not getting enough calcium/vitamin D. These skeletal problems are obvious and even if Corey got a perfect diet going forward, the damage to her bones is permanent. The reason I am posting now is that she is having a harder time walking and perching. Normally, Greys have two toes forward and two toes behind. Recently the smaller, rear toe on her left foot rotated to the front of her foot. This new development worried me a lot. I think this is because her twisted spine has caused her left foot to twist so that it is rotated away from being parallel with her other foot. See photos. We took her to see the same avian vet who saw her many years ago. He did a physical exam on her left leg and determined that the joint right above her foot was “lax” but he did not think that ligament on that leg was out of position and there was no sign of a broken bone. I am sure that this is a result of the amount of pressure her twisted spine/hip has exerted over the years on this joint. He did not seem overly concerned about the back toe rotating to the front of her left foot. He said she might have injured in her left leg recently [we haven’t seen any serious falls for quite some time]. We really didn’t want to have her admitted to his clinic for imaging tests because I didn’t want to leave her there AND I just don’t think it would have told us anything his exam didn’t reveal. He gave us some pain meds [meloxicam/tramadol] and told us to keep an eye on whether she seems more mobile and comfortable. I was wondering if [when our vet saw the rotated toe] he would recommend removing the toe but that topic never came up. So here is my question: has anyone else dealt with this type of problem and was there anything you can recommend? For years we have tried to remove the perches in her sleeping cage so she can sleep on top of towels but she is just frantic/miserable when we have done that. We do have a “play box” we put her in for some time during the day that has soft fabric to stand on but she doesn’t want to sleep in this box. As I am sure everybody understands, I really don’t want to stress her out any more. Thank you for any ideas. Thank you for any advice or insight you may have. Terry

I would like to echo what everybody else wrote. I very much appreciate all that Kevin has done to keep this board alive AND I love the signature quote at the bottom of his posts. Thank you, Kevin!

So funny! I don't think this choice of words is merely coincidental!

Years ago, I had read some information about a parrot owner who so strictly "potty trained" their parrot [I don't think it was a Grey] that it died because it had been out of it's cage so long and hadn't been given the command to "potty" in a humane time period. I can hardly believe that someone just made this story up but who knows? One thing we did with Corey was to train her with the request: Go Potty. We did this by saying Go Potty whenever we saw her doing the "potty dance" and then rewarding her [when she went potty] by saying: Good Bird! The way that this helps us is that when we take her to any place in our house where we can't easily clean up a potty, first we take her to her cage [or any other place where she is comfortable going potty] and ask her: Go Potty. Often, she will go potty for us and then we know we have around 15 minutes where we know we are probably safe. If she doesn't go potty when we ask, it's not a big deal. We don't press the issue. It's not a perfect solution but it's something.

I share my office with Corey [a CAG]. She is usually talkative during certain parts of the day. Normally, Corey is not too loud but she can certainly increase the volume to get attention [or if I have a video playing on my computer that she feels she has to compete with]. A couple of months ago, my husband suggested I buy a set of noise-cancelling [it cancels the outside noise] headphones. I splurged and bought a nice, comfortable set of headphones that have wonderful audio. Now, I can escape the Grey chatter when it get too high by listening to some nice music. Totally worth it!