Taking Your Lovebird Out of the Cage

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. When you are trying to tame your bird you should generally work with it 1-2 times a day. Generally, for very short sessions. You don’t want to stress the bird out too much and you don’t want to stress too hard. If your bird is hesitant to come out the cage and tries to bite or scratch, or anything like that, you can get a small towel and very gently and carefully pick your bird up the towel so that it can’t bite you very hard, and take him out of the cage. If they try to get away, you can simply just hold them in the towel, and you never ever want to squeeze hard with a bird. It’s very important for bird’s respiration that they be allowed to fully expand their chest cavity. Therefore, when you’re holding a bird, you want to make sure that you’re never squeezing on a chest cavity as this can end up killing the bird. Generally, when you’re trying to get your bird used to being held, if it’s nervous and tried to fly away, you can gently hold in a towel for a few minutes and then put it back in it’s cage. Gradually, you can work up to simply holding the bird on your hand for a few minutes then putting it back in it’s cage. Then eventually you can work to petting the bird, playing with it, rolling it over, and it just depends on how quickly your bird wants to trust you. Once again, it’s very important to just work slowly with your bird and just be patient. Remember these guys are very intelligent and once they bond with you and they trust you, it’s going to be a really great relationship. "