When to Buy a Parakeet

Video Transcript

"Hi today we are going to talk about what age in which to consider adopting a parakeet. In particular with budgies you want a bird that's going to end up very friendly. You want to start out with a very young bird. This bird right here is about five weeks old and it's not weaned yet so this is too young to get a bird if you're not experienced in hand feeding or not willing to hand feed. So about two weeks after this bird would be weaned which means it would just be free from his parents and eating food on it's own. But it will still have these stripes on his head, you see on this young bird's head. So as long as he's got a lot of that barring right there above his nose, you know that the bird is under four months old. And at that age it's still very easy to tame them down. And if you just get one bird, that bird will generally bond very closely with you and so you can carry it around with you and it wants to interact, you know it will sit on your desk with you and muddle through your papers. If you are not interested in necessarily having a one on one bird, you can get these and adopt them as adults. There's plenty of people who decided that they don't have enough time for their birds or already have very tame parakeets and so you can adopt one as an adult. And if they are already hand tamed, generally adopting and adult bird there's not any problems. You are not going to have, it's not going to have a whole lot of trouble switching over from one person to a new person and then getting used to a new human being and you know, interacting with you. If you are interested in hand feeding you can try at this age, but this age wants to have their eyes opened and if they haven't been hand fed and you just pull them from the nest at this age and they're too afraid of people to eat from you, but you can if you are interested in getting one really, really small and I'll talk about hand feeding later, again this is something that you want to be fairly experienced at doing because you can kill them very easily. You can start getting them close to this age. This is a little tiny one. This one is about two and a half, three weeks old. It's had his eyes opened for about a week and a half and starting to get some feathers. At this age it can maintain it's body temperature a little bit better if you get them much younger than this they will lose body heat too quickly and you need an incubator. At that very young age up to two and a half weeks you have to some where warm, but generally for most people get them when they are just weaned, lively, have all their feathers is the most appropriate age to get them. Again, you can get a hand tamed adult or you can get just an adult pair if you just want some interactive lively birds to have in your house. You want a little bit of chirping noise, you know they are very colorful just to have them entertain you, without necessarily being able to pick up the bird and take them out of the cage. You know, and adult bird is fine. These birds live anywhere from six to twelve years at least the budgies do. Other parakeets the larger parakeets will live even longer. So if you get a one, two, three, four year old bird it will still have a long life span to spend it with you so an adult also is a very good choice."