Quiet scritches with this little girl.

Playing fetch with one ball is a Schiele dominated sport 😅

Schiele angrilly storming off with the ball at the end 😂

Have you noticed an increase in your bird’s mischievous activity in summer & Autumn? Schiele’s been extra screechy and both her and Vonnegut have been chewing through their balsa and sola wood like crazy, whereas a few months ago in molting season they weren’t that interested. Even the wild cockatoos outside are raucous this time of year. They’re screeching, flying like crazy and ripping into trees. Why? Of course it could be a few factors but one may be that food is plentiful and thus they’ve got energy to burn! I’ve found the same can be true for pet birds. In molting season, nesting season and breeding season that energy goes into growing new feathers, finding a mate, building a nest, raising young. But in the in between season that energy seems to go into having fun! Which isn’t a bad thing! As long as that energy goes into fun destroying toys rather than fun destroying furniture (or ears…thanks Schiele 🙄). It’s a great time for training birds and using foraging feeders, not just for treats but for their main meals (well let’s face is all times of the year are great for this). That mental and physical energy can go into working for their food, just like they would in the wild.

I finally caught Vonnegut on film saying “what are you doing?” in his little speech impediment voice 😂 Why do I say speech impediment voice? Well….Birds learn their song or vocal range in those first few weeks while they’re in the nest around their parents and flock. William Thorpe pioneered scientific research on song learning in the late 1950s. He showed that chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs), raised in a laboratory as nestlings without adult males around, developed abnormal songs (Thorpe 1958). However, when young were exposed to taped recordings of a wild chaffinch song (tutor songs), they sang species-specific songs as adults. Later, Peter Marler and colleagues further showed that song dialect is learned during a sensitive period. And in recent times, the Australian National University found that regent honeyeaters have been losing their song due to adult population numbers. The Taronga zoo have been playing adult song recordings to regent honeyeaters in their captive breeding program to help combat this. But how does this relate to Vonnegut? Well he was raised in an incubator, with no adult birds around. And that’s why we think he’s never learnt the standard ringneck call or perhaps why he isn’t very good at talking. We can’t say for sure, it could be many other factors. Perhaps I talk too fast or I’m not very clear in my pronunciation myself. Either way, we love his little sounds regardless of whether they’re normal. They’re perfect to him and that’s all that matters 🥰