I bought 5 pieces of XL sized cork pieces for my birds to destroy. All of them except Mommam the blue spangled budgie literally go nuts at the sight of it. Mali can possibly spent ten minutes getting occupied from this thing. And finally, Mali has a better target to chew on that is not human skin. When he gets nippy I can just summon this sacred cork and he’ll immediately let go of the human finger/skin fixation and go after the cork instead.
In fact, Mali loves the cork so much he sometimes will drive any bird (including Joseph) away so that he gets to chew it all by himself. If I try to bring out the second cork so that the other birds will just chew on this one and leave Mali alone....he will try to get that second cork too. Grass is always greener on the other side, eh?
This is how big the corks are.
Because Mali is unpredictable when he’s in the vicinity of the cork, Joseph and I opt for a recall practice instead. The budgies are kept in the background because they now have to come out on a different time because they keep bullying Joseph by ramming their heads against the poor p’let.