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Keeping a fully flighted parrot off the ceiling lights and other things
Use a drill on your fruit and veges!
Birds and pictures on the wall
Preventing your Parrot from chewing electric cords
Environmental Enrichment - Leaving the TV or Radio on

Keeping a fully flighted parrot off the ceiling lights and other things

Sometimes “No” and “Get Off” just isn’t seem enough. We have an old house with 14 foot ceilings and lights hanging down several feet with big heavy glass shades. Within a couple of weeks of her arrival Keiko had learned the joys of landing on them. They would swing and creak and my heart would be in my mouth as I thought about the dodgey 80-year-old electrics and the potential danger to Keiko, not to mention the expense we would face if the shade fell. The fact that I needed a ladder to get Keiko down certainly didn’t help for a smooth step up training session either!

So I went and bought about $12 worth of large light-cardboard sheets, and with sticky tape and a ladder I placed big cardboard cylinders around all the hanging lights, basically making it impossible for Keiko to land on them. They were probably there for about 2 months before I got the ladder out and took them down. It may not have been necessary for that long, but it worked. Even though it is now possible for her to land on them again, she never tries. I think it simply doesn’t occur to her after such a long time of habitually ignoring them as a possibility.

I expect this technique can be modified for a multitude of other things.

Drill your fruit and vegetables!

If you find it difficult to get a hole through that corn on the cob or pumpkin so you can put it on a kabob or a length of string for your parrot, I recommend using an electric hand drill. It might sound a little crazy to grab a power tool out of the cupboard in the morning for the sole purpose of drilling a hole through fruit and veg but I haven’t looked back.

You can pick up a cheap drill for around $30 at a hardware store, sometimes even cheaper.

I have a drill solely for this purpose with a ¼” drill bit in it. The drill bit won’t come out of the drill anymore as the fruit juice kind of clogged it up a bit which is actually the reason I have an electric drill for fruit and one for everything else, but I don’t care as it’s saved a lot of time and effort and its fun! I just drill the holes, giving the drill bit a quick spin under running water to rinse it off (yup, I leave it in the drill when doing this) and return the whole thing to the cupboard for the next day. If you prefer I expect with a bit more effort in your cleaning routine you can prevent the drill bit from getting stuck.

Birds and Pictures on the wall

I haven’t used the technique I described in keeping a parrot off the ceiling lights, but I expect it would work just as well on picture frames (wish I’d actually thought of it at the time), Keiko just stopped landing on them when I started presenting better perching spots for her. Anyway to curtail the damage if she does land on them (Keiko is a heavy enough to tip pictures off the wall). I’ve now made it a habit to hang a picture on two hooks slightly apart so the tipping won’t happen.

Preventing your Parrot from chewing electric cords

Buy some stop-pick or some other feather picking preventative stuff (or make your own bitter concoction) and with a cloth wipe it on to the cords your parrot most often goes for. I used this with a timneh grey I had in England, reapplying it every day to a particular cord he would just not stop going for. After about a couple of weeks he stopped trying because he didn’t like the taste, and he didn’t go for any others after that either (not to say I didn’t keep an eye on him just in case), and I stopped bothering to apply it when that happened.

However it may not always work. I tried the same trick on Keiko (she likes the hair dryer cord), and found that she obviously didn’t mind the taste, so I’ve just had to persist with the “No” and “Get Off” for her.

I’m pretty sure there are also fancy tubes you can buy to put around your cords (they’re designed for tidiness, but they could be put to other uses). Just make sure that whatever they’re made of is not toxic to your bird. You’ll still need to persist with the “No” and “Get Off”s but at least it might help prevent something horrible happening in those first moments.

Environmental Enrichment - Leave the TV or radio on

Whether your bird watches or just listens, the TV can be a great way to add a bit of excitement to a day in the cage. I’ve heard that many parrots respond to television programs like game shows where the hosts speak in excited voices, and I imagine, if you can bear it, infomercials would be fantastic. I personally recorded a documentary program called The Real Macaw, and I play it for Keiko several times a week. She will screech and yell during the footage of macaws in the wild feeding, and she always starts saying hello about a minute before the pet parrot in the video says it. I’m pretty sure she’s starting to pick up the “Bye bye” phrase in it too.

Keiko also likes space action movies. I think it might be the high pitched battle sounds. She doesn’t really sit there and watch as far as I can tell, but she definitely joins in vocally. Anyway, it’s a great diversion and I’ve begun collecting stuff for Keiko’s very own TV entertainment collection to help while away those times I can’t interact with her directly.