- Blue! In your own words, what
are humans messing up? Blue, excuse me. He's like, "I got things to do, human." Okay, maybe later. Good interview. Hey guys, Jamieleigh
here from "Bird Tricks," and I'm here with my
little budgie, Blueberry, to talk to you about the top two mistakes that people make with budgies! So before we get started in this video, I want you to comment down below and tell me what you think
are the top two mistakes that people make with these
tiny, but mighty little birds. (bright music) (splashing)
(distant talking) - [Child] Blue. Little blue, little blue, little blue. (singing) Look at him. Is he done?
- Think so? - [Child] You wanna come up? I'm gonna stop, stop the water. Offer him to come up, but
he doesn't want to, so. (splashing) He's in the water. And now it looks like he wants up. Grab him, all right. Boop!
(Jamieleigh chuckles) Blueberry!
(flutters) (giggling) He's like, ready to. - [Jamieleigh] (chuckles)
You can move around. You don't have to stay in that one spot. - Blueberry, Blue! - [Jamieleigh] Wait 'til
he's paying attention. - Blueberry! (flutters) Blueberry! (flutters) (flutters)
Blueberry! (giggling) - Well, you gave him the hand signal. - Yeah, yeah. Blueberry! (flutters) I'm gonna go-- - [Jamieleigh] Make sure he's facing you and looking at you before you call, okay. - Blueberry!
(flutters) - [Jamieleigh] Good, that was perfect. (chirps) - Over here. (Jamieleigh chuckles) Blueberry! (flutters) (giggling) I kissed him on the forehead. - [Jamieleigh] I saw. - Blue!
(flutters) - All right, so the top two mistakes that I see most commonly made with budgies is number one, not interacting right away. And number two, believing that they need to live their entire lives
out on an all seed diet and that they can never convert to pellets or never convert to fresh food. So, the first one I'm going to tackle is the not interacting right away. A lot of the times, when you
take fear out of the question or out of the picture for birds, so say they are fearful of you when they first get brought home. When you first bring a bird
home, everything's new, everything can be very overwhelming. And especially from a pet shop bird, when you first bring it home, it usually wants nothing to do with you. (chirping) (laughs) So the moment
that you try to interact, the bird of course is very
fearful and pulls away or flies away, or just
tries to get away from you, letting you know that it
doesn't want to interact. A lot of people choose to respect that, put the bird in its new cage and let it settle for about a week. And what happens in that
week, is that bird learns to see its cage as a very comforting place where nothing bad happens to it. And any time the humans try
to interact with the bird, the bird's very resistant, very fearful, and so the people just constantly back off and say, "I don't wanna
stress the bird out. I don't wanna upset the bird." And eventually it turns into, "The bird doesn't wanna interact with me," and so they just leave it alone. Eventually, enough time
passes where this bird is completely not tame
and doesn't wanna interact with people, that the
people feel really guilty that it has to stay in
the cage all the time. And the reason it has to stay
in the cage all the time, in that scenario, is
because if they let it out, they could never get it back in, or it'd be so traumatizing
to get it back in that it wouldn't be worth it. So a lot of the time, birds end
up being caged all the time. People feel guilty about this,
and so they get it a buddy. And now, this can go one of two ways. The buddy can actually be a true buddy, or it can be a little enemy,
where they don't get along and they're actually hurting each other, in which case they have to be separated. It's kind of a roll of the dice when you get your bird a pal,
because you're picking it out, the bird's not picking it out, so. Although I have heard of some people doing some birdie dating services and letting their birds pick the bird. So, I think that goes on in some places. If you've ever heard of
that, leave a comment so people don't think I'm totally wacky for even saying that. I have heard of it, I promise. So then what happens, is if
the birds take to each other and they're pals, then they
both decide to be fearful of humans and the humans
just kind of think, "Well, at least I got my bird a buddy and I don't feel so guilty for leaving it in the cage all the time." So now it's two caged birds, all the time, and they never interact with people, except to get food and water. And usually, that food is the seed diet that they come on from the pet shop. So, the reason this scenario
plays out the way that it does is because the bird was never
taught to overcome fear. So for example, when the bird
showed that it didn't want to interact with a person,
the person backed off and said "Okay, I won't
introduce the fear, which is myself," for
example, or the person. So then I'll back off and I'll leave you to do your own thing
and as the time goes by, the fear gets worse and
worse and more ingrained in the bird of yeah, that is a valid fear, you should be fearful of that. And the more that the person backs off and doesn't interact, the
worse the fear will get. So, if you look at it from
trying to overcome the fear on day one, versus day
30, it's gonna be easier to overcome that fear
because it didn't have time to fester and grow on day
one, as it did on day 30. That's why I'm so pro interact right away. And interact right away
doesn't mean force yourself on the animal, it just means
give the animal the opportunity to show you that it wants to interact. And maybe that's through
feeding the bird in your lap, or even next to you, and just
doing some fun little things with your bird.
(chirping) Birdie, you're kind of
chopped off in this. I need to like, figure out my camera. Let me see, 'cause you're so
cute, I want people to see you. There, we'll just do a different angle so they can see your cute little self. (chirps)
So, the cool thing is, and I know I'm gonna get
a lot of people saying that maybe this is coming
off anti more than one bird, which I'm definitely not. The whole thing though,
is that I prefer somebody gets one bird, tames and trains and works with that bird, and
then gets a second bird, does the same thing, works,
tames and trains with that bird, and then socializes
those two birds together. So you have a very confident and comfortable relationship
with each bird on its own, versus trying to work with two birds. That usually works against you, 'cause one's more fearful than the other, one wants to interact while
the other one doesn't. And it can just get a little bit chaotic, trying to train more
than one bird at a time, and you moved out of the frame. (chuckles) Blue, Blueberry. They wanna see your cute little self. Oh, so I put him right
where you can't see him. He's there! Or she, we're still not
going by male or female, 'cause we don't know. Oh man, that toy is right in that spot. Blue, I should've set
the scene up for this. He's like, "What are you doing, human?" Okay, how 'bout we take that
toy off so they can see you? All right, so what does
interacting right away look like? A lot of the times, when
birds first come home from the store or the
breeder, they're pretty full, so food doesn't really go a long way. But letting them just
get used to what goes on in your home is really awesome, especially when they're out of the cage. So I like to do my first
day home out of the cage. Now, this is something you have to be super mindful of
if you have other pets. I do not, I only have birds. So it was really easy
for me to have Blueberry out of the cage all the
time on the first week, really, while we worked with her. And not worry about a dog, or a cat or anything getting to her. So, made it pretty awesome for us. That will be something that
you have to play by ear in the safety of your own home. But it was something that really worked for us and was a lot of fun. It also leans itself to
a lot of opportunities where you get to help your
bird in a positive way. So for example, Blueberry was
clipped when she came to us from the pet shop, and
she would end up at places that were nerveracking for her, she didn't wanna be there.
(chirps) And we could go over and offer our hands and scoop her up, and
then take her to the place that we knew she wanted to
be or was comfortable on, which was a lot of these stands. But the cool thing about these stands, is that they're out in the open and we have them all around our house, so we could change up
which one she was on. And just out of natural curiosity, the bird tends to go places and it just leaves you
opportunity to be able to physically interact,
as well as just go over and talk to the bird. And then also, what we did is we constantly offered food options. We would make food, we
would do a lot of things where she could get into things
that she wasn't supposed to. She actually was, (chuckles) but when birds don't
think they're supposed to do something, they're all about it. So we did a lot of that
and it just lent itself to a lot of interaction opportunities, where I don't feel like
letting a bird settle into a cage for seven days does that. It really just teaches the bird to believe its fear of people. So that's the number one thing I would say that people do wrong with budgies. The second thing is the
diet, as I mentioned before. A lot of people think that they go and they get from the pet
store a complete diet, and it's a seed diet. Now, these guys can suffer
greatly from all seed diets, and they live very short
lives because of it. So, I will say that with small birds, I found they prefer crunchy textures. And because they're tiny, you
don't have to make fresh food in huge batches like
you normally see me do for my medium and large birds. Holy molting, man. All these feathers just coming down. And so you can do it in smaller sizes and you can do it more often, so you can just make a little fresh batch on the go, every single morning and toss it into a little
food processor all at once and get it going for these guys. I notice that she definitely
loves the crunchy textures and she'll go to town on a full green bean or something like that, she
just loves playing with food. So give these guys opportunity
to play with their food. I know that a lot of you, I
hear and I see comments of, "My bird's just wasting the food. He's not actually eating it, he's just picking it
apart and destroying it." That's the first step to converting a bird to a good diet, is teaching
them to play with healthy foods. No matter how they're interacting
with their healthy food, as long as they're interacting, you're golden and you're on your way. Another tip for small birds
is giving them fresh greens. Now, I know Blueberry loves sprouts. That's something that you can offer that's really, really fun for them. And especially if they're
a little bit damp, they tend to like to roll on
it and rub themselves on it, so that they can kinda get
wet and take a bath that way, as they would in the wild, so. Little bit of wet grass
goes a long way. (laughs) So the other thing is pellet conversion. I know this can be a lot harder, but once you get a bird on fresh food and eating fresh food, you
can then implement pellets by just powdering them
(chirping) and sprinkling that powder
throughout different recipes that you try for your bird. For instance, Blueberry loves eggs. She loves when we cook eggs
and about every morning, my daughter and my husband have omelets. And they will make Blueberry
a little side omelet and they will sprinkle all
of her favorites on top, including pellets, and
that's one of the ways that we got her onto a healthier diet. Even if you guys have
to do this for a total of six to nine months,
it's completely worth it and it's totally normal. These guys can take a long, long time to convert solely over to healthy foods. Now, keep in mind, I do keep
seed as part of their diet but that part comes from
us, or it's used as a tool to get them to eat those other foods. So, (blows gently) that was
a feather, loose feather. (chuckles) So we try to use
the seed to our advantage, as tools to either get the
bird to eat healthier foods or to do some really fun bonding through training.
(chirps) Which is super fun, yeah. The other thing you can use
it for is other healthy things like teaching them to
forage, which Blueberry, whoa!
(flutters and chirps) Did you get scared? Blue, Blueberry! She's back on top, I
might have scared her. But Blueberry never showed
any problems understanding how to play with toys, so we didn't have to do too much of that. Although I did spend a little
bit of time training her to accept different textures of toys so that she wasn't picky about
which one she played with. Which as you can see, she's
pretty open to any type. And this one's really fun, it's
our Three Suns Exclusive Toy from parrotJOY that she made for us to represent our three sun conures. Which you're probably not understanding, 'cause you didn't see that
there's three. (laughs) Oh, and Blueberry is demoing. Eating good stuff, woo, wrong way. Eating good stuff, Blue? All right guys, if you
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