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Alfie still loves his granny. He will waddle over to her and sit and preen himself for ages (hence all the fluff and dander!) then will gently grab my mum's fingers and ask for scritches. If mum gets distracted by the TV and stops scratching his head he'll remind her that he's still there and that she has a job to do! 😂

I'm sure I have a defective grey, because he is not interested in almonds at all 😂 Most grey owners tell me that almonds are their grey's favourite treat but Alfie just flings them! He does seem to be enjoying it- especially the flinging toys at my head part- that's always his favourite game! Good idea though- I'll chuck some walnuts in there to encourage him to rummage around a bit more.

I did something a little different for Alfie's Christmas present this year. I normally get him a couple of new toys to hang in his cage. This year I decided to add a new toy to his shelves that he likes to play on in the living room... mainly to try and stop him chewing on the wall! I found an untreated wooden box and stuffed it full of crinkly paper, wood chips and foot toys. It's been a big hit and after a bit of side-eye Alfie hopped up and started exploring. He has great fun rustling through the box and finding toys to fling out of it... most of them usually land on the sofa below... or on my head if I'm sitting there. 😂

I'm late to the party but I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. I know plans might have been changed last minute (mine certainly were!) but I hope you still got to celebrate and enjoy Christmas as best as possible. Hope all your birds were all spoiled rotten, as they should be! 😄 I got an untreated wooden box for Alfie and filled it with crinkly paper, wood chips and lots and lots of foot toys. I gave it to Alfie before Christmas to give him chance to get used to it. He seems to like it and will hop in and start digging around. He'll then start launching toys out of the box with gusto!

Here it is... photographic proof of Alfie willingly eating a piece of carrot. It might have been the smallest beak sized piece in the world... but he actually willingly bit into a piece of carrot that I offered him and ate it, instead of immediately flinging it back at me. He then went on to eat a few more teeny tiny pieces. AND he was willing to try and pea and a couple of pieces of broccoli too... although he wasn't so keen on either of those. It is a constant battle to try and get this guy to eat healthier foods. I'll hold my hands up and admit that I wasn't very good at trying him with different foods when he was young so that's probably why he's so picky. There was a lot less information around on keeping parrots back then and not as much information available online as there is now, so he is a bit of a seed junkie. I make sure he doesn't get sunflower seeds or peanuts and I mix dried fruit and veggies and occasionally some nuts into his main food mix. Then I offer up fresh veggies cooked or prepared in various ways. He liked mashed potato and I managed to get him on mashed sweet potato with some veggies finely chopped and mixed in for a while but then he started rejecting that too. I've tried every pellet available over the years too... although he has just started to try his tops and roudy bush pellets recently... after having them served up for months on end. 😂 One thing that's helped is that he's recently become interested in what I do in the kitchen when I'm preparing dinner. So I set a chair nearby so he can perch on the back of it and see what I'm up to. Then I offer him what I'm preparing- anything that's safe for him to have I'll offer to him. He mostly ignored me for the longest time but I noticed he's getting more and more curious. Sometimes he would poke what was offered and sometimes he'd pick it up and immediately drop it. More recently he has taken a couple of bites... he ate a bit of chilli pepper the other month and seemed to like it. Most veggies were pretty much immediately rejected though- especially things like carrot and broccoli. Yesterday though he was in his cage and so I offered him some carrot, a pea and some broccoli and to my surprise he took all three, gave them a good poking with his tongue and then actually ate some. He seemed to like the carrot and although the pieces he bit off were very small, he did eat them and come back for more. He did chew up some broccoli but I'm not convinced he ate any and he dropped the next piece I offered. And he ate a bit of the pea but rejected the next one offered. I praised him loads for just trying the foods though, as this is a big step forward. So... for anyone with a picky eater... keep trying! I'm fairly certain that if I offer him carrot again today it'll probably get flung straight back at me again... but I shall persevere as always!

Aw that's great news! Thanks for the update.

Alfie has a second cage in my office so he can come and hang out with me whilst I work from home. He also has a java tree on my desk and a shelf he likes to play on so I sometimes let him out if I don't have too many calls. He's not normally that noisy. Sometimes he'll beat the snot out of his toys which clang against the side of the cage but that's probably as bad as it gets. I might get the odd whistle or noise from him but he's mostly quiet. He's noisier if he's downstairs and I'm upstairs in the office. I have noise cancelling headphones and they are wonderful. I used them a lot at my previous job to help block out the sound of a colleague who was very noisy!

Happy hatch day, Corky!

Happy hatch day!

Alfie rarely steps up to come out of his main/big cage. I open the door and let him come out on his own. Some days he immediately climbs out, other times he'll eye me up suspiciously before climbing out. I think he probably tries to work out whether it's play time or whether I'm going to take him upstairs because I'm either working from home or want to put him in his travel cage. (If his travel cage is in the same room he definitely won't come out!) He has a second cage upstairs so he can come and join me when I work from home, just so we can keep each other company. He will always step up to come out of that cage. He's still a little wary of the play top so on the odd occasion that I do let him climb out he'll generally try and get to me anyway as he doesn't want to climb to the top of his cage. If I do ask him to step up from his main cage then he'll either do the same thing as Vim where he asks for head scratches, he'll gently push my hand or the wooden dowel I'm using away or he'll lean back on his perch to indicate there's no way he's stepping up for anything. It's really rare for him to step up to come out of that cage- but it does happy once in a blue moon!

Greys can be pretty change adverse, so the fact Vim has just been lifted from an environment she knows, put in a new strange house with new people- it's a LOT to take in for a grey. She needs to get used to her new surroundings, her new home, her new flock, her new routine etc etc. So she might be a little wary and frightened to begin with. But once she settles and gets used to everything she'll come round. The most important thing you can do is respect her space and her feelings. Take things at her pace and if she seems uncomfortable or scared, just take a step back, tell her it's ok and let her calm down and adjust. If you try and force a grey to do something they're not comfortable with then they'll either try and move away or if they feel they don't have a choice they'll bite to try and make you go away. It sounds like you're doing all the right things so far. It may take a little while to win her round but it'll be so worth it when you do. 🙂

I wouldn't recommend the fluffy huts- too many stories of birds picking at the hems/fabric and ingesting it. I wouldn't want to risk it personally.

I can't give much advice about potty training as I've never tried it. I have read that some people have had difficulties where their bird will try and hold it in until given the command to go though, which can be bad for them. However it's easy enough to clean up. You can put paper under playstands etc to catch most of it. They do tend to have their favourites and will interact with people in different ways. If she is biting your daughter then I would get her to take a step back for a while. Get her to read stories to him and interact from a distance for a short while. You could also try introducing some training and get your daughter to provide the best/favourite rewards. Target training is probably the easiest one to start with- where the bird touches the end of a stick on command and gets a reward for it. (It has to be a gentle touch, not a bite).

Hello Muńeca! She's a pretty little thing! I barely know anything at all about her species. Hopefully she comes round soon and settles in nicely with the rest of your flock! Good to hear about Murfchk as well!

Hopefully it's a phase and will pass. Alfie goes through stages of regurgitating for me and sometimes he'll start as soon as I walk in and say good morning. I usually tend to tell him he's being silly and that I'll leave him to cool off for a few minutes and leave the room. I'm glad it's never got to the stage that Dorian has. I have noticed that Alfie is now chewing a box then going inside it, which is new. Usually he just destroys the box and turns it into confetti from the outside. But the last few boxes he's been chewing holes then standing inside them. He doesn't seem to do anything inside, other than maybe chew them a bit more. And as soon as he catches me looking at him he runs back out.

Welcome to the forums! Like Greytness said, if you have the space to have the two cages side by side, that might help. If you've figured out what Boomer's favourite treats are then you could possibly use that to reward her whenever she shows interest or climbs on the new cage so she associates it with a positive reward. If she's already curious and has played on the top of it then that's a really good start. If you're worried about her falling then I'd definitely start with some lower perches and maybe pad the bottom of the cage with some old towels so if she does happen to fall then it'll be a soft landing. In regards to the inflammation on her foot, I've heard of something called bumble foot, which can occur when a bird has inappropriate perches. Their feet can get sores and inflammation from it. Hopefully the fact she's now able to move around more freely and has different sized perches with different materials will help ease any inflammation. It sounds like she's already been working those legs and feet anyway! Sounds like she really hit the jackpot when she found you! 🙂

Haha yes I'm familiar with that little grabby foot move. Alfie has managed to get himself in a few similar pickles over the years!

She's made a rod for her own back- he would happily sit there forever I think! Whereas when I go to scritch his head he turns his head and looks at my hand like "what do you think you're doing?" 😂

Welcome back! Really glad to see you here again.

When I go and visit my parents I regularly take Alfie with me in his travel cage. My dad is largely indifferent about Alfie (he hasn't forgiven Alfie for biting him on the finger once when he was a baby bird). My mum has been trying really hard for months and months to get on Alfie's good side... and it's been working. Whenever she visits me Alfie gets all excited to see her and will whistle and make lots of noise until she comes over and says hello. When I visit them Alfie normally stays in his travel cage but my mum has been quite brave recently and has said he can come out. She sits on the other end of the sofa from me (and dad stays on the other sofa out of the way) and Alfie typically wanders around the sofa and goes to see her. Recently they have both been super brave and Alfie has allowed my mum to give him head scritches... and mum has been brave enough to do it. Alfie has been enjoying it so much that he makes a beeline straight for my mum and will sit there for the rest of the evening enjoying his head scritches. He even started closing his eyes last time! I'm super happy that they've managed to build on their relationship. Mum was always interested in Alfie and helped me wean him when I first got him. Unfortunately he did bite her a few times so she backed off a bit and got scared (fair enough) and then me and Alfie moved out. She's still wary of being bitten but Alfie has been really good. He will very gently grab her hand/fingers if she dares to stop scratching his head. 😂 I'm still not on this level of head scritches with Alfie. I can give a quick scritch but then he tends to wander off or move his head. He tolerates me, at best! Slight jealousy aside, I'm super happy that him and mum have gotten this far. 😄

I've never seen a hummingbird except in videos etc because we don't have them over here- but they're usually zipping about so quickly you don't get a good look at them. They are beautiful birds!

Ok thanks, I'll have a look. Haven't found much on the bird sites I usually use. I might have to see if I can get some shipped over the pond maybe. Thank you, he's doing just fine. His face is healing up nicely and doesn't seem to have bothered him. The two ladies who came out to do his beak last time have been in touch and are going to come back maybe this week to have another session. I think I'm going to put Alfie in his travel cage before they get there so I can bundle him up in a towel without him flying around the place and getting so worked up before hand this time. I have no doubt that he'll still wriggle and put up a fight but I think I'll hold him this time to try and make sure he can't move his head about quite as much. Hopefully he'll end up looking less battered and bruised this time round if I can help keep his head still. 😔

Yes I think so- although he never seems to have a 'big' moult- it seems to just be a continuous process where he loses a feather here and there throughout the year. Either way- he's fine and I think I was just super stressed after the beak issues so worried over nothing. 😂

I had Alfie's leg band removed some years back as it was starting to rub on his leg and make it sore and he kept playing with it (probably because it was irritating him). I had him microchipped at the same time.

OK thanks- I'll have a look and see if I can find some. I had a quick search but it's coming up in tablet or liquid form. Do you use it? What form does it come in?