I swear, when I let them all out of their cages, the budgies spend half of their time going straight into Coyote's cage to mess with his stuff and eat his food and vice versa. Like, HEY GUYS, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE OUT OF YOUR CAGES and they're all like, WE JUST LIKE TO VISIT. They have toys on top of Coyote's cage, food in a bowl outside of the cage, the playgym and the house to fly around and what do they do? Sit on Coyote's favorite perch. Coyote goes to the mineral block/cuttle bone thingy in the budgies' cage and acts like he's never had anything so wonderful in his life even though he has the EXACT SAME ONE in his own cage. In the same type of holder and everything. And the water dishes! They get very excited about drinking out of each other's dishes, like the water is somehow different. It can't be out of novelty because it's the same thing every day. My hypothesis is that it's due to the fact that they are weird. I am sure that one day science will back me up on this.

That's why when I get my tiny house, I'm attaching my aviary right to the side door.

No cages for me!! For some reason, that drives me absolutely up the wall insane. Birds! You have wings! Fly. Land on my face. Do something. Get out of your prison! The tiels always want out and hate their cage. I'm so moving up to bigger birds though, tiels and up. The little ones get too attached to their cage and it drives me crazy.

But these weirdos do leave their cages... to go hang out in another cage! It's just silly.

aren't you lucky that they are so easy to occupy? You don't even need to try hard to please them. I would call it jealous and curious.

The first rule of the bird kingdom seems to be: everything is better when you steal it from someone else. They're saying to themselves "ha ha! I'm sitting on HIS perch. I'm eating HER food! It's WAY better than doing the exact same thing with my own stuff".

It can be very difficult to get a bird to try a new food, unless it's something on your own plate that you're trying to eat. It becomes even more desirable if you don't want the birds to eat it and are trying to keep them away. It has to be sincere though. If it's actually a food that you want them to eat and you're just trying to pretend that it's your food and you don't want to share it, they will know and will avoid it like the plague.

OMG, it's so true. I learn something new every day with these weirdos. They can totally tell when I'm trying to trick them into eating something vs when they're really not supposed to eat something! Stinkers! For example, my cheerios this morning. Coyote was obsessed. So I was feeling a little motivated and made a wonderful treat with the Cheerios. I threaded a bunch on a wooden bbq skewer, gave it a light coat of peanut butter and honey and then rolled it in that egg food stuff (everyone's still molting, mainly the budgies but Coyote's growing feathers too). I was all proud of my treat, made of the very food he was so desperate for just minutes earlier and while he did actually touch it, that's as far as it went. The budgies acted like it was a predator.

Weirdos!

Actual true fact: In Australia, one of the native words for cockatiel is weiro (the alternate spelling is weero). They must have figured out a long time ago what kind of bird they were dealing with.

at first, when the babies were growing, I thought that they would CUDDLE together on the long perch at night. I didn't know they would fight to have a whole perch to themselves.

Weirdo's.... LOL....tiels...
I recon' Budgies are worse than tiels for there strange behaviour, I'm having trouble working these two, I have out.. especially Bryni!
Tiels Id have any day as my favourite bird....
for these post they made me smile...

Here's another thing to add to "birds are weird" theme. Last evening, Coyote was on my chest and I was giving him scritches and his feathers just started falling out like it was a bad Rogaine commercial or something. First a yellow face feather. Then a grey neck (?) feather. Then a small white feather. Then an orange feather. Then a crest feather.

Ok, so yeah, he's clearly back into full on molt mode but man, all of these feathers in literally about a 2 minute span! And now his crest is all weird looking... he's having a bad hair, er, crest day.

I swear, I scritch him every day! I wish he'd let the budgies be better friends with him so they could preen him, he'd probably enjoy that about now.

I had to modify his clip by one more feather per wing too because I thought he was "fixed" but he wasn't. I also fear that I'm going to have to do some weird home-made something to keep him from getting at the wires and whatever else is up there in the ceiling fan. I really, really don't want him on the ceiling fan at all but I don't think I can avoid it. A clip won't help either, because he figured out the perfect launch spot for it, a floor lamp that can be used to get himself up there, no matter where I put it in the room. Ugh, my husband is not going to be amused.