OK, so the last time I talked about food, it was about how my conure Ollie eats his pellets only if I offer them to him one by one by hand. As you can imagine, this gets quite tiresome quite fast! Some days, I feel like a servant feeding grapes to the emperor.
Associate editor Jessica Pineda half joked that I should just bolt a fake hand in Ollie’s cage and put pellets in it. Once I recovered from laughing hysterically at the notion, I thought, hey that would be pretty cool! And for all those finger/hand phobic birds out there, what if the fingers were also posable and you could extend the index finger, like you would do when requesting your bird to Step up? Wouldn’t that be an easy way to condition the bird to accept stepping onto your hand/finger? Now I just need to find a realistic but bird-safe hand ...
Speaking of whacky ideas, what “bird invention” would you like to see? I’d love to hear them! Send them to us here.