Jane08

We also ask the questions and then would say the answer. Now we ask him what is your mane and he says my name is Rangi and then he asks what is your name. He also says good bye and you ask him when he is coming back and he says coming shortly.

Bella sounds like the female verison of our male. Jabber jabber jabber all day. He even has his head in the food bowl and talks away. He talks as he falls asleep and then suddenly wakes up and has that look of right where was I and starts to talk again. He seems to like the echo that it makes when he puts his head in something and talks. He sits on the container of beads and sticks his head inside and then talks. He also walks himself completely into a cardboard box so you can only see his tail and then he talks. The most amazing thing though is when he is sitting on me and I am touching him and he talks and I can feel the vibration in his body. It just blows me away that he is actually talking and understands what I say. It has even got to the point where he knows what I am going to say before I even say it. I just put my hand up to him and he goes "c'mon up" and then steps up and says "good boy". That is exactly what I say to him. If I forget to say up or good boy he repeats it to remind me to say it.

Totally different thing with Tui, he tok her outside and did free flying. The majority of us have our greys flying in the house so there is no danger of what happend to Tui happening to us, as long as we are careful with the doors and windows.

I tried something sort of like that with our greys having them in the bedroom at night for the months that the sun didn't go down as we had blackout curtains in the bedroom. They flat out refused to go in the bedroom and wanted to sleep in their cage in the living room, much to my disappointment. I even got them in the cage in the bedroom and they wouldn't settle down and then as soon as I opened the door they flew to their cage in the living room and promptly fell asleep. Must admit though I didn't persist with this which I am sure would have worked after many tries and a lot of patience.

Oh yes they are messy and they will redecorate your walls for you given half the chance. We gave them bluberry bushes one day without really thinking about it and came home to find blueberry's all over the walls, not to mention blueberry stains on their faces. Wait until he decides that your shirt or the furniture is a good place to wipe the food off of his beak:)

Yeah they do have accidents when they first learn to fly, but like lovemygrey said they learn really quick, you just need to make sure you supervise them and when they do have an accident don't make a big deal about it. I know with ours they are both flighted and they even have accidents just sitting on their perches or playing, like falling off. It is amazing though how fast they learn and the manouvers they do. Our female is an incredible flier and seeeing them both fly around the house together is such a pleasure. For me there is nothing more amazing than our greys flying directly to me and seeing the wings out, hearing the flapping noise, watching the movement of their bodies, seeing the look in their eyes and then having them land on my hand.

Sounds as though you are doing a great job by checking up on him every so often. He will wake in the morning and just think it was a nightmare and forget it. Just keep doing what you are doing and it will all be fine. We mishandled our grey when we brought him home as well, which was a lot worse than what you did and he got over it. I feel ashamed of what we did now...we used the press on the abdomen method to get him to step up and he hated it and hated us.

It seems that a lot of greys prefer to practice by them selves when they are first learning. I know our male grey would fly into another room and sit there trying to talk for an hour or so. If we walked into the room he would stop. So we sat in the other room and strained our ears to hear what he was saying and repeated the words to him from the other room. When he got up the confidence he then started to talk in front of us. He then really thrived when we praised him for talking and got excited. He thought that was the best and kept repeating words. Now my boyfriend has talking sessions with him. He sits on my boyfriends arm and just listens to him talking and learns. We know this because our grey repeats things he says within a couple of days. Also my boyfriend speaks Swedish, so our grey speaks Swedish, much to my disappointment as I speak English and I am the greys favourite person.

So really your grey is getting you today, because he picked you. There is your first lesson, greys are smart and like to get what they want. He knew exactly what he was doing with the look and the lick as he had picked you:) Good luck and try not to be nervous. I have never had any experience with birds at all and now we have 2 greys.

Our male does the hold on and flap thing. I think with him though he does it as he is molting his flight feathers and he holds and and flaps to make sure everything is ok.

Our male was 7 months old when he started his first molt. I remember it clearly as this is when the neck feathers started to look really bad and he nearly had bald patches on his neck. Here is a link of what his neck looked like and it even got worse than that. http://www.greyforums.net/forums/african-grey/44845-skin-condition.html He aslo dropped tail feathers at that age as I remember putting them in a frame to save them (sad I know, but they were so beautiful). He finished it when he was about just over a year old and he then had nice thick neck feathers and then he started with the flight feathers, lower chest feathers and more of the tail feathers. That is still on going as I found a flight feather yesterday and he is now 16 months old.

We also have shoulder birds. My little man sits on my shoulder and snuggles under my chin for a scratch. He also likes to hold my nose in his beak very gently and have a scratch. The best thing is you can walk around the house with them and do stuff at the same time. Many times he has been just content to sit there and watch me do stuff around the house. He especially likes it in the bathroom as many funny things happen there, brushing of teeth, eyebrow plucking, make up on. His eyes go wide with all the funny gadgets that come out particularly the electric tooth brush.

I guess the only reason we have ours on is in case we lose the birds. Then if someone calls the police to report it the police will know how to track us down. Otherwise I would also get rid of it.

Try not to freak out as well with the quantity of feathers as I know when our male first molted I thought somehting had got him in the night as there were so many feathers around. He looked really scruffy as well. What also shocked me was that when he molted around the neck he really molted and I could see right through to his skin and the back of his neck nearly had bald patches on it. I was not prepared for that and freaked out a bit. Also the length of time the molt went on for amazed me, months and months. I thohght it would never stop. Now he has beautiful thick neck feathers.

I found that we had to try so many different things to find out what was right for our greys. We also had to try with different water temperatures. People say they like cold water, but our female likes it to be luke warm. They finally decided that a plant base filled with water was the way to go. We made it into a game and played with their toys in and around the water, gave treats when they got in the water, put treats in the water we splashed water and laughed and praised them. This took months and months of doing this every weekend. Our male now hops in straight away and splashes around and we also mist him. Our female is still learning and fluffs up all excited and hops in and hops out and just plays around and has fun. She also is scared of the mist bottle so I just bring it up once and mist her and give her a treat and she is getting used to it. We just gave our greys time and never forced them to bath, just made it a fun thing to do.

We got a second grey for the sole purpose as a companion for our first grey and it has worked like a charm. We felt guilty about leaving our first grey all day alone while we worked. Took us 2 months to socialise them to be together and in the same cage. They are young greys though so I think this was an advantage. It is a pleasure to see them playing together and doing things together that we can't do for them.

Flutterby we used the techniques described by Barbara Heidenreich "good bird" is the book and there are DVD's. Her methods worked a treat for us. She uses positive reinforcement and once we started using that our little man became so much more happier and responded much better to us and we were able to build a bond with him.

I must admit I just leave them alone in a room when I go and do something in another room like the housework. I tell them where I am going and ask if they want to come, sometimes they step up and come along and other times they don't so I just leave them. They know what room I am in and can fly to me if they need something. I also know when they are up to something as they have tells. Our male goes really quiet or he starts to talk really loud and then I know he is up to no good. I check on them every so often and make sure they have lots to keep them occupied. I also call to them from whatever room I am in so they know I am still there. They seem quite content by themsleves either playing or talking. It is so cute to hear the flap of wings and then to see this little head peak over the top of the door to see what I am up to.

Worked for me as well. To think I will be 100 by the time our 2 greys reach their life span of 73. Is this the life span in the wild though, wouldn't it be a bit different in captivity? Maybe take off 10-20 years from that. Had to laugh at some of the animals they had there, snapping turtle, hellbender, cotton mouth mocassin, what sort of names are those,:laugh: . Some of the other animals on the list I have no idea what they are.

I would say female as well, she looks exactly like our female. Our male looks totally different.

We have the adventure pack which is a back pack cage. To be honest we haven't used it yet as the birds freaked when they saw the fact that it was covered. I also thought it was a bit small if you are having them out for a long time. I did leave it out and tried to entice them in but it didn't work. We now use a small dog cage that you can collapse down. The birds seem to love it becuase they have a clear view all around them, it is easy to clean and very light to carry.

Barbara's workshop will help you with this. We went on one with her and she helped heaps. Hope you are taking Ozzie with you to the workshop as it is great to do the hands on stuff while Barbara coaches you. We had the problem that our man wouldn't step up or go back in his cage. She showed us using treats how to train him to go in and it took a lot of practice but he finally got the message and is now an angel at stepping up (even when I place my hand in front of him he says "up" even before I say it to him and then he gets straight up). He also goes back in his cage no problem now.

We live in an apartment with 2 greys and yes they can be noisey. For us it is not true "If you have a loud lifestyle than they will be too". We have a very quiet lifestyle, but greys have their own times when they are loud especially in the mornings when they are calling the flock together. So they are quite loud in the mornings when we let them out and then in the evenings as well. It's not like it goes on for hours or anything, maybe 10-30min at a time and this is usually when they are playing so it's not like they sit on the perch for 30min and scream. It's more like loud playing noises. It has been a year now and the neighbours haven't complained yet (fingers crossed), but then again Swedes don't complain to your face they are more likely to leave you a post it note at your door.

We started to lock the bedrrom door at night, just in case she sneaks in and puts the fangs in. No seriously, we are trying to stop it at the moment, but she is a persistent little madam. She holds on so tight that he has trouble getting her off him. Every time she flies to him he tries to put his hand up for her to land and as soon as she looks like she is going to bite he puts her off onto her perch. Needless to say she is not happy with this and screams blue murder, but she will get used to it. Hopefully the vet can shed some light on it, I will let you know what she says about it.

Is this weird? Our female grey seems to like my boyfriends blood. She was on his chest and was gently preening him and when I looked aorund he had blood smeared all down one side of his face. She had bitten a small hole and smeared the blood. She now seems to have taken a liking to it as she always tries to get on him and bite a small hole to get the blood. We even found blood on his pillow last night as it seems she had bit a small hole in his neck. She constantly tries to do this to him, just flies to him to bite anywhere she can get. He tries to stop her, but sometimes it is impossible as she is so quick to land on him and then bite. She never does it to me just him and he is her favourite person. I wonder if she is lacking something? We have her yearly vet visit soon, so hopefully we will know if she has an deficiencies.