their capture.
This shift toward captive breeding of pet birds has provided an unintended benefit: improved availability of better pet birds, from both a health and a temperament perspective. Caring, informed aviculturists (people who raise and care for birds) stepped up to the challenge to produce companion birds who are well raised, see humans as friends, and aren’t damaged by the stresses of being captured and removed from their natural environments.
The reduction in the demand for wild-caught birds for the pet bird trade hasn’t ended threats to the survival of parrot species in the wild. Habitat destruction is proving to be just as damaging, if not more so, to many bird species. Organizations such as the World Parrot Trust (www.parrots.org) are fighting to preserve birds in the wild. We encourage you to support them.
Telling the Girls from the Guys
Which do you prefer — a male bird or a female? Does gender really matter? How can you tell the males from the females, anyway?
Selection of one sex or the other depends on the qualities you’re seeking in your new family member. If you’re buying a canary and you want a singer, a male is your choice. (And still, you should hear the bird sing before you buy him.) Male cockatiels are usually better whistlers than females, and the red and blue female Eclectus parrot is considered the real looker of her kind — much flashier than her green and red mate, although he’s not bad looking, either. In terms of health, females sometimes have obstetric problems, such as egg binding, where eggs get trapped inside, especially in smaller parrot species such as budgies, cockatiels, or lovebirds. And of course, the folks who breed birds have preferences: They don’t want to end up with all males or all females!
In many cases, though, gender makes no difference in terms of pet potential. The basics of caring for, training, and feeding a bird, as well as the bird’s intelligence, will be the same, male or female.
Some species have gender identities that are obvious to human eyes. The Eclectus is certainly one of the more extreme examples — the male and female are so different that folks once believed the two genders were separate species — but other, more subtle differences exist in many species. An experienced seller can usually tell the girls from the boys in adult budgies, cockatiels, and some of the other parrot species where the colors are the same but the marking pattern is just a wee bit different, such as in the Senegal parrot.
In their quest for birds with that something special, some aviculturists have created a number of color varieties, in the process adding another level of confusion to the identification of some species. The classic example is the cockatiel. The common normal gray cockatiel is easy to sex: Males are gray, with bright orange cheeks and no white on the underside of their wing feathers. Females have gray heads with duller-colored orange cheeks and cross bars underneath their outer tail feathers and wing feathers.
DNA TESTING: WHEN YOU JUST HAVE TO KNOW
Do you really need to know whether any bird is a boy or a girl? In general, both males and females make equally fine pets, so determining gender is not a necessity — unless, of course, you plan to breed your bird. Give your pet a nice non-gender-specific name, like Avery or Flynn, and go on with your life. Some folks, though, can’t leave it at that. They have to know.
Enter DNA testing, where a blood sample is sent off to a special lab for gender determination. The cost: Depending on the number of birds you’re testing and whether you’re sending in blood or feather samples, prices start at $17 and go up from there. Most services offer discounts for multiple birds. DNA testing may be a pricey investment for a $60 cockatiel, or a relative drop in the bucket when the bird is a $10,000 hyacinth macaw.
Simple? Sure, but thanks to new color mutations among cockatiels, it can be much more difficult to differentiate the sexes. In varieties such as the cinnamon, the white-faced, and the albino, telling male from female can be difficult, if not impossible.
Again, buyer beware: If there’s no ID to match with the sexing result, you can’t be sure you have the same bird, can you?
Checking Up on a Bird’s Good Health
In the wild, a big part of a bird’s survival depends on not presenting a tempting target to predators, who actively seek out the sick, old, and weak. Even in birds who are in little danger from predators — generally safe souls such as our own pet birds — the genetic imperative to hide illness still holds. Some signs of sickness often are visible, however, and you need to look for these tip-offs as you form an overall impression of good health.
