Can Parrots & Parakeets Live Together?

Series Summary

Having a pet bird is a big responsibility for any animal lover. While on the surface, owning a bird may seem as easy as owning any other pet, birds require stringent, specific care to stay healthy. Also, each species has different needs; some birds are domesticated and adapt well to life in a small cage, while some are large, untamed and unruly, and are not appropriate for most people to keep as pets. In this free video series on pet care, find out how to keep birds as pets. Learn to pick out a healthy parakeet, care for it and identify signs of sickness. Discover the art of training cockatiels, which can be trained to step up on a finger, to not bite and to even speak in some cases. Get information on picking out the right bird cage and bird food. For an attractive and vocal pet, consider caring for a bird.

Video Transcript

"I would never recommend mixing a parrot and a parakeet together in the same cage. It's dangerous for both the animals. Simple fact of the matter is birds can do serious, serious damage to each other and unless you're talking about keeping breeding pairs together or possibly love birds, I don't usually recommend keeping birds together. They can chew each other's feet off, they can feather pick each other, they can cause some severe damage. I've seem quite a lot of large parrots and small parrots and parakeets with missing feet and toes and messed up beaks and stuff from fighting and problems. So the short answer is no, I would never recommend that. Don't ever mix species of bird in a cage, don't ever mix varying sizes of bird in a cage. Now if you really, really want to keep more than one bird, you want to keep them together, you need to stick with something like you could stick with only parakeets, you could put two parakeets or so into a cage together probably. And you need to, or stick with something like say a love bird, love birds are generally pretty communal, you can keep those together. Be aware that if you keep more than one bird together in the same cage, you're going to end up with birds that don't like people but like birds a lot."