How to Make Bird Toys

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Madeline Franco and we're here to talk about birds, specifically, in this segment we're going to talk about toys and how you might be able to make some simple toys yourself from everyday household items, generally speaking. When we think of parrots in the wild, we like to remember the sixty forty rule. Parrots in the wild spend about sixty percent of their time looking for food and forty percent of their time trying not to be food. Let's focus on the sixty percent. Because we have put them int he homes, our parrots don't get to look for their food as they would in the wild. So foraging toys really come in handy as a way to keep your bird busy, engaged, and interested. To many people, this hear looks like a spent water bottle. However, with a little attention, ingenuity, and a few moments of your time, and dropping a few peanuts and a couple of other things. I've got in here a little toy made out of straws, some clothespins which the birds like to chew on, and I'm going drop a few peanuts in there. And, you put that in your birds cage because he can see that there's something in there that looks interesting. Many of the larger birds, and believe it or not, even some of the smaller ones because this is fairly thin plastic, it's also food grade so it's nothing harmful. They will start to chip away at this and they will get to the toys and the peanuts inside. It's very inexpensive and it's an inexpensive toy that also helps you to reuse and recycle. Other simple toys consists of pine cones, which you can take off a favorite local pine tree, or you can them, and birds seem to like to play with those. They preen them and sculpt them. They're a lot of fun for them. And even just the caps of the bottle. These make great foot toys for some of your larger birds. They'll hold them and chip away at them, and pretty soon there'll be nothing left to them. These here are some jacks. Particularly small birds that are just learning to use their beaks, these are plastic jacks, they can use these. A bird using it's beak as a way to sense things and to discover it's world. So, even among baby birds, if you throw a few of these in the enclosure, they're going to start mouthing these. They're going to start working with them and it teaches them to teach their beak to grip. You may have seen these, these are decorative balls, I buy the natural ones, they're made out of reed. You can force a couple of peanuts into the center of them. Sometimes they're so small and the peanut is so big you can only get one into them. And this becomes a toy that your bird might like to play with. You can put a little peanut butter on the tip of the Popsicle stick and that becomes a treat and also a toy to shred after it's finished. You can take a simple, readily available paper bag, open it up, get some shredded paper, put some in there, make a toy out of these straws, you take about four or five straws, tie them together with another straw. You enjoying that? Make it nice and tight. It's just something, some sort of surprise for the bird to find in the bag. And, if I put anything foreign in my birds cages, they usually know there's a treat inside if I put a container in, anything like that. You can use various things to contain treats and surprises. You can even use small personal sized pizza boxes. You can make holes in them with a paper puncher, you can weave leather through the holes. And you just put that in there, put some sticks, put a few nuts, maybe a couple of these jacks, and some nuts, and you fasten that together. You can either tie the knot tight or not tight, and you just put that in your bird's cage and the bird will go and pick after it. A very simple toy can be made from wooden spoons. You can actually just give your bird a wooden spoon. For a Moluccan, this constitutes a toy. For other birds you can actually put an eye hook in the top and you can tie pieces of cloth, and string, and rope, and beads, and all sorts of things. So, the spoon just provides the infrastructure for whatever you want to attach to it. But, birds love wooden spoons. Particularly the large birds. They would, wooden spoons and paint stirrers."