CAGE SYNDROME

[imgreytoo]

I wish I would have found this <http://www.bottlebrushstuff.com/you_need_a_bottlebrush_play_gym.htm> before my cage purchase. Read starting with paragraph 8, it starts with "Today, right now, what kind of life does your bird have.", and read through paragraph 16, ends with "Most birds, over time, suffer from CAGE SYNDROME in some manner."

 

With an open mind consider the idea of a night roost/nest cage and a day cage or area. Using the same cage for day housing and night roosting seems very counterintuitive. How big does a day cage need to be if you have a night roost cage? I don't have the answer, but would like to know what all of you think.

david h <><

http://AGreyRunsThroughIt.blogspot.com/

[TheGreyMiester]

I read some of his stuff but I'm not sure I buy in to everything. I respect his opinion but the writer is trying to get inside the mind of the bird, putting himself in their shoes, but there is really no way to know exactly how a bird truly feels. I remember seeing one case where a baby seal was rescued, raised in captivity to be released later in the wild. They discovered the seal was not doing as well as they expected. The seal seemed to be trying to cope with the stress of finding food on its own where it had never had to worry about food from its care takers. So it really is hard to know with any kind of certainty the true experience of the bird in my opinion.

[imgreytoo]

TheGreyMiester wrote:

. . . . the writer is trying to get inside the mind of the bird, putting himself in their shoes, but there is really no way to know exactly how a bird truly feels. . . .

GreyMiester,

I was looking at it from the behavioral stand point. There was a "night" flock of large escaped pet parrots by the "river" in Santa Ana, CA. We used to watch them as they gathered.

 

They would start to assemble at about 4:30 - 5:00 PM squawking to beat the band. You could see them in the lower branches of the 60 foot eucalyptus trees. Around deep dusk they would disappear into the trees, if you looked carefully you could see one or two about 8 - 20 feet down from the top of the tree. Most were well hidden.

 

But they were nowhere to be found during the day. So Wayne's comments make a lot of sense to me, but not from how the birds feel.

david h <><

AGreyRunsThroughIt.blogspot.com<br><br>Post edited by: imgreytoo, at: 2007/04/14 09:09

[Guest Monique]

I didn't read the article but I like the idea of a sleeping cage. If you have a night cage it does not change the size of your day cage at all. Your night cage can be really small, though. Even a small dog kennel with a perch screwed into the side. Because that cage is supposed to be only for sleeping.

 

We generally have our parrots in their cage during the day while we're at work, then on a play stand or with us out and about, and then to sleep in a sleeping cage.

 

Having this is very helpful, also, if you get a bird that becomes territorial about its cage. I do not like the play stands on top of cages at all and do not use them because I believe they promote territorialness when that is the only place the bird usually is (not saying it will happen, just saying it is more likely).

 

I live in the country and can't get home from work for lunch. But if I lived in town I would even have another cage and switch them at Noon time on my lunch break. :lol: