Different strokes...

I picked up a book on Cockatiels that turns out to be about 10 years out of date and originally written in German. I found it quite interesting.

For one thing, the author does not even touch upon grooming of any sort, let alone discuss wing trims at all in either a positive or negative light. She does state that it is imperative that the bird be allowed to fly freely every day. Later in the book she devotes some significant space to discussion how, on several occasions, she has watched a beloved bird fly away "with a mixed emotion of sadness and admiration" to almost certain death. I have to say it is refreshing in some ways to have a person embrace the inherent risk in flight, but I don't understand how one can reconcile feeling admiration when a bird flies away with keeping it in the first place.

Then the section on molting reads a lot like what the little "A doctor talks to 8-12 year olds" had to say about taking gym class while menstruating. Keep them quiet and warm, in the cage, not too much activity, etc. As if molting was a disease.

The section on feeding refers to seed exclusively, and sprouts, but disdains pellets. It recommends using corn cob litter as the cage substrate.

The book does have some good bits on natural behavior which are sorely lacking in most books on pet birds, but I thought it was interesting that some of the things taken for granted by most of us are extolled by experts elsewhere and elsewhen. Just musing!

Old information books are such fun to read. Have you ever read a really old human health book? It is amazing really to see how far we have come in a short time.

Oh wow...kind of like reading an old encyclopedia from the library nowadays

Yeah, but this book is only 10 years old! I have horse care books from the 60s and earlier that are more aligned with modern thought. I wonder what a parrot book from the 60s is like?

I do think there is a cultural difference involved. Apparently wing-clipping is widely considered to be cruel in Germany and fly-aways are considered a normal risk. I have a German friend who is normally quite pragmatic about animal care, who gets very wierd about wing clipping, so I think there may be a difference in standards.

I bought my eclectus pair from a guy who's originally from So. Africa. He was keeping the male at semi-liberty to fly around the property because the male came back predictably. The female he didn't fly because she wasn't bonded to him, the male or the property and he didn't trust her to fly around. We chatted for a while and he'd been keeping assorted parrots about 20 years with all of them kept at liberty. Over that 20 years they'd all perished to predation and/or other environmental hazards - macaws eaten by coyotes, amazons and amazon sized birds taken by hawks, etc. He said the CAGs were the smarted and evaded predators the longest (several years) before being eaten.

Despite all his birds ended up dead, he would never clip. It's just not something that was done when he was growing up.

I'm on the fence on the view point. On the one hand I think it's ok as it's perfectly natural to let them fly and die, if that's what ends up happening - it's the most natural way of keeping them. On the other hand I see it as we have brought this creature into our environment and we are responsible to keep them from harm.

This is getting off the topic, but I have a lot of opportunity to observe a lot of different types of birds in my backyard these days, and I can see that some types of bird I would never clip because all they do is fly (hummingbirds). On the other hand, the quail NEVER fly, only for a few feet if startled, and I doubt they'd even notice.