Posts Tagged ‘toy’

Bird toys are damned expensive. Totally cool, but made to be destroyed, and so there’s this sort of double edged sword to putting a new toy in their cages. Like, “Ooh, great! They love that one, they…oh, geez. Dead already.”

vs. “Ooh, dammit. Did I just spend that money for nothing? Totally not interested in it…but at least it’ll last awhile, I suppose…”

Except for one thing – the bamboo!

It was one of the first things to go in when we first started the garden, not realizing that the stuff is indestructible and will do its best to overrun everything it can. I don’t have a picture from when it was planted, but at only about 3 feet tall and in a 1 gallon container it looked innocent enough.

It’s now almost as tall as the house and has to constantly be whacked back, because it’s impervious- bugs don’t eat it, the cold doesn’t touch it, and after it rains you can practically sit back and watch it grow with the naked eye:

I don’t know if you can get an idea of the depth here, but there’s a ton of the stuff.

Luckily the parrots have decided they love it- I’ll cut a couple of canes and criss-cross them through the bars. The boys’ll go to their work, stripping and breaking them down, covering their cages in shredded little leaves.

It’s kind of hard to get pictures of the action, but here’s Pratch hanging down from his swing to get at it:

Honestly, he usually stands right on the canes to strip them, but he had a little a little Wile E. Coyote-style accident the day before. Taking a tumble after snapping the branch he’d so recently been standing on made him a little more wary the following day.

Jack loves it too, but of course had to get nosy when the camera came out:

He actually has it somewhat easier, being smaller, lighter and (sorry, Pratch!) more agile, he climbs and hangs all over the stuff- it’s a completely free jungle gym.

Proving that I am totally insane, I briefly considered buying another of those tiny, innocuous containers of the stuff at the nursery, thinking I could leave it in its pot between the parrot cages. They could strip stuff at their leisure, Pratchett could have a screen between himself and the hated Jack, and the bamboo would be contained and unable to spread.

Luckily I came to my senses, which, contrary to popular belief actually does happen once in awhile. But if you’re looking for a low cost, high yield parrot toy, this one fits the bill! Or beak. Or talon…

I was poking around and came across a new concept in bird toys and gave it a whirl. You go to Birdy Booty to check out their samples, decide they’ve got a whole lot more time and creativity than you, and fill out the form.

You don’t choose a specific toy; you determine how much you want to spend, and tell them about your bird(s), their likes and dislikes, color preferences, the whole shebang, and wait for your box to arrive. (Pratchett’s instructions were that he’s easily annoyed- he wants to be able to break his toys up immediately, all the better to make me have to buy new toys ASAP.)

There was much rejoicing at the opening of the box:

I suspect more boxes will follow.

Oh, and they accept donations for the amazing Project Perry- if you donate a toy to them, BirdyBooty’ll match it. Click the link to see phenomenal photos of the aviary they created for rescued greys.

Zulu has all kinds of foraging toys to keep him occupied, and usually they take him a day or two to figure out, but then there’s this treasure chest.

Damn that treasure chest. Two ‘keys’ have to be turned and then pulled out keep it ‘locked.’ It’s a clear yellow lucite, so he can see the nuts and things in there, taunting him. Once the bird’s pulled the keys the bottom drops down, allowing access to the goodies locked up inside.

Well, sorta. As it turns out, it’s made for a bird with a smaller head than Zulu…he can’t fit his beak in there to get at the treat. He tried valiantly for quite some time, stubbornly not allowing me to get my hands in the cage to try and help. HE was going to do it.

But if the beak don’t fit, you must submit. With a mighty PEEP! He came barreling out of the cage, and over to the outer door of his food (making sure I was watching, of course):

Ripped open the door, and flung the entire dish out, onto poor Kassie, asleep by the cage. Not that she cared much, she started eating it up straightaway.

Mission accomplished, he swung the door shut again as if it’d never happened and feeling much better about the whole episode.