View attachment 306010
View attachment 306011
Late last fall, our housecleaner asked if we would like one of her parakeets. She has a dozen or so, who are self-replicating
, and had a young fellow somewhat recently hatched whom she thought we'd enjoy. She asked us to come up with a name so she could get him used to it and for whatever reason "Morty" came to mind. She said he was a male and I figured even if "he" was a "she" it could be short for Morticia.
Morty is a lutino, I think - pale yellow all over, slightly darker yellow at the top, and his eyes look red (though you can't see it that well in the photo).
Dropbox - morty - Simplify your life He's a bit on the small side, as I understand it, though I haven't seen enough other budgies close up to know for sure.
Anyway - she brought him over in early January. She's a big proponent of wing clipping, she says they are more tractable / easier to tame. Her birds get all over her house - I gather they can fly to some extent. Morty really can't - he plummets to the ground when we open his cage door; he can occasionally get a couple inches off the ground.
He's an Only Bird right now. At some point I might get a second one, but I've heard so much about how 2+ birds pay attention to each other and ignore their humans, so I've been wanting to hold off to try to get him tamed and maybe learn a phrase or two. He's not too lonely (I think); I work from home, so most work days and a good chunk of the weekend, I'm 10 feet away from him and talk to him regularly.
He does NOT approach us or let us approach him. If we need to handle him, it's a matter of chasing him around the cage with our hands, which is terrifying for the poor guy and stressful on us; half the time he manages to get past our hands and winds up on the floor. Holding millet ("birdie crack", we call it) has never motivated him to tolerate closeness; he also does not go near any fresh foods we try offering him - fruit, veg, occasionally a small bit of popcorn.
Birdie crack DOES serve as an inducement to get him to exit his cage; before I built the play structure, we would put a spray on a cafeteria tray on the floor just in front of his door. I hung a ladder from the cage so he could get himself back into the cage at will, which also helped.
He's so far only made it to the first raised level of his play tree - millet helped with that. I've since hung some on the next level up, so hopefully he'll take advantage. Having a rope-perch bridge from his cage to the tree made it more accessible also. I've set it up so that he can get to every level without flying - some horizontal platforms on each level will reduce the risk of him falling the whole way down if he gets to the top.
I had the idea that we should wait to let his feathers grow back (the cleaner has re-clipped him twice) until such time as he was more approachable, but after 5 months he still does NOT want to be approached. Other articles I've read say they will remain utterly skittish until he can fly away and then we might have better luck. He clearly WANTS to fly - he'll stand there and flap his wings frantically, with little effect. Occasionally he's gotten a few inches off the floor but nothing more than that; he can't even glide downward gracefully though that's improved some since his last clipping was a month or so ago. So I really want to let his feathers grow back. I do worry that since he's been clipped since such a young age, he might not ever learn to fly well.
Our housemate is worried about letting him fly when he's still so unapproachable; she makes the reasonable-sounding point that what if he gets up somewhere and we need to catch him to get him back in his cage for some reason.
Thoughts? I'm honestly against wing-clipping as a routine thing, but on the other hand if he's to have out-of-cage time, it might be safest if we can't get him to approach us.
