budgies! budgies are awesome!

Budgies just don't get enough appreciation, so I thought I'd start a thread to share some things about my budgies!

Tomorrow is the day we chose for my lutino hen's birthday; we always took the approximate age of the bird in weeks from date of purchase, counted back, and fixed a day to spoil them.

Yellow will be six years old tomorrow. I'm broke so can't afford to buy her anything, but promised them both a revamp of the cage and new toys in October, because Marky's birthday is in November. He will be ELEVEN years old. For an old bird he is looking ok, when he moults his feathers don't grow back so quickly and he's a bit mottled and has a few bald patches. But other than that looks and acts the same as he did when six weeks old in 2001.

I found out tonight that the oldest budgie on record was 29 years old! So, will Marky still be here when I'm 50?!!!

DBB

I think, in all fairness, the least you could do is post some photos, would love to see the gang

Silverfish

I would love to see some pics of your budgies!

Well ok!!

Here is the birthday girl herself: Miss Yellow. Yeah we named her Yellow.


Here's my little ones playing in their cage.


And here's the man himself, the badass Marky!


And just for fun, a picture of my old flock before the two blues died.... JJ died at 7 from age, there was something just not right about him and his breeding, Sebastian die at 2 and a half from a tumour, I miss that bird every day!

Sigma Force

Agree, budgies are so under valued in this country, and so many are kept alone and lonley or in tiny little cages with nothing to do all day. Nice to see someone who appreciated all their nuttyness.

RossPaws

Beautiful birds! I had two budgies when I was a kid, but we got them from a scraggy old pet shop and they were never healthy or tame. It kind of put me off birds, so now I keep rodents! If you think your birds don't get enough appreciation, wait till you see people's reactions to rats...

pawrick

Budgie belonging to my uncle in Athlone escaped once, he was found safe and sound on the sligo train. Student who found him on the train was attending AIT and spotted the missing posters near the college the next week. All ended well, but very lucky bird to have been found.

I have a parrotlet myself - bit smaller then a budgie, he's just turned one year old and hopefully I will get another as soon as i can find one.

Demonique

Our budgies must have been easily amused, how else would they find the wall interesting? They'd sit on the pictures and face the wall for hours

Probably don't have room for budgies now, they were out in the study before and when we had them there was only an iguana tank and my royal python was my largest snake.

We also had a tiel. The budgies used to follow her around on the floor.

They died within two weeks of each other, we had the tiel until we moved her out of the study because we discovered the reason the cornsnakes were cold was because their heat mat had been pecked through. Of course, I came home one evening to find out that one of my parents had left the back door open whilst Thistle was out of her cage and she flew the coop.

There's too many cables in the study ATM due to me having 14 adult snakes and 20 baby boas. Too risky to have birds in the room as they might electrocute themselves and also the adult boas have escaped in the past so a budgie could make a nice snack for them.

My Mark will talk to anything that stays still long enough, which includes perches, the bars of the cage, the wall, curtains, imaginary things... Yellow prefers her plastic toy budgie, who she forces to sit upsides down on the perch while she sits above it and chats to it. I guess I prefer it's the plastic bird and not Marky!

These two little ones aren't tame, I got Marky at 6 weeks, straight out of the nest, and handled him exactly the same as I did all my young birds, but it was obvious from the very beginning he just didn't like being touched! They're all so individual, is one of the lovely things about them. Yellow I never tried to tame because she takes no prisoners, she'll just sink the beak in the second you get close enough. I miss my two blue birds! I have lately been reading old Livejournal entries and the things my Sebastian used to get up to make me laugh so hard, things I'd forgotten. Like how I was lying on the bed reading a book when he suddenly, for no reason, sprinted up my leg, across my belly and was heading straight for my face when I whacked him with the book and he flew off. And how he would sometimes fly down and land on the open pages of the book and look dead proud of himself. He just loved being naughty. My mother was taking care of them and noticed that Bastian had climbed into my bookcase and was eating my books. She decided to hang a towel over the front of the bookcase to keep him out, but Sebastian sat beside her watching her do this, waited a second, looked up like "You done?" and went in behind the towel to eat the books.

They come in all personalities and with their own quirks, makes me sad too to see a lone bird decorating a lonely corner of a room. That's not the kind of pets they are meant to be!

Intensive Care Bear

I couldn't even guess at how many i owned over the years, when i was about 12 i got one, then we got her a friend and next thing you know there was 6 eggs in the bottom of the cage. We got a larger cage with a nesting box and transferred the family.

In the following months my dad built me an avery and i moved them all outside, got a few more for breeding and before i knew it i had a flock of budgies:) a few zebra finches, a family of cockatiels and cock pheasant which i got when it was a chick off the gun club. The pheasant spent its entire life thinking it was a budgie which was funny.

Anyway i'm rambling, budgies they're great:)