Consider Your Lovebird's Gender, Lifespan & Weight

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Sarah and I’m here at Extra Care Animal Hospital today, and on behalf of expertvillage.com I’m going to tell you a little bit about owning a lovebird. Some of the questions when you purchase you’re bird that you may have about it will be how do you determine the sex. With lovebirds, the only way to positively determine the sex is by doing a blood test, which we can send to a lab. We get a drop of blood from your bird here at the veterinarian hospital, then send a blood sample out to the lab and they tell by DNA analysis what sex your bird is. The other option, which we very very very rarely is surgical sexing, where we go in with a endoscope and actually look to see if we testicals or ovaries in your bird. But like I said, very very rarely do we do that. Generally, we stick with the DNA sex thing. It’s much less invasive and much safer for the sake of your bird. Other things that you may wonder is how long do birds live, and generally, that is 6-12 years. Ones on a poor diet such as an all seed diet, we sometimes will only see them live for 4-5 years. A lovebird that is on a good healthy diet, which would be a pellet diet with fresh fruits and vegetables added in, we can see them live anywhere from 10-12 years. It’s very important, and I’ll talking about be talking about diet in just a moment, but it is very important for the health of your bird to get them on a good healthy diet. Other things would be how much does your average lovebird weigh. That is depending on the species, anywhere from 40-60 grams. When you take your bird in for it’s first exam, your veterinarian will take a look at your bird and tell you if your bird is at a healthy weight. It is possible to have overweight birds, so it’s very important once again to keep your bird on a healthy diet and make sure that he or she is not getting too chunky. Obesity can be a problem in birds and you want to make sure that you are keeping your bird at a healthy weight. If you have any other questions regarding your lovebird, you can always bring them up at your to your avian veterinarian when your bring your bird in for it’s first exam. "