How to Clip a Bird's Wing

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Madeline Franco and we are here to talk about birds, specifically wings and more specifically to clip or not to clip that is the question. Clipping a bird's wing feathers and we do only clip the bird's wing feathers, we do not actually clip the anatomy of the bird. We remove a number of feathers and that would be primarily let me see, let me show you with Jas, that would be the outer feathers, the four or five at the very tip there that you see, those would slow the bird down enough but allow it to break a fall, just prevent it from gaining altitude. My birds are unclipped because I prefer them that way however, I have a bird room and it is not as much trouble for me to remember not to open the door with the birds out. If you have a family situation with a lot of young children, with people coming in and out particularly in the summer time you want to be aware of this and very conscious that if your bird is not clipped you can lose a bird in fairly short order if he runs for daylight and birds very often will. My own philosophy is I used to be a clipper of wings big time, wing feathers, however, I decided to try it one day and allow my birds to become fully flighted. I prefer it. The reason is that flying is a big part of their lives in the situation that they are in and if they want to be with me they can very easily just fly to me. I prefer that to their begging for my attention by shaking their wings up and down sort of like this and I get very upset when they do that because it just reminds me that I have taken flight from them."