my smart little chewy

[Keinanna]

so i have had my conure chewy for 4 days now and while he is still adjusting i am finding out that he is a pretty smart little guy. We have alittle mp3 player filled with bird sounds hooked up to portable speakers for our budgie and thought chewy might like to listen to it too so we brought the mp3 player in the bedroom for chewy yesterday and one of the tracks is a bunch of ducks quacking well now my little conure quacks like a duck its pretty funny to see him making perfect duck sounds. I wonder what he will pick up next. The people who had him before me said he could say about 15 words i have only heard him say "no" so far it will be interesting once he is a bit more comfortable to see all the things he can do and say.

 

[roxynoodle]

It is kind of fun to discover what they can say or imitate. The new Grey had me running around like a nut case the first night when she imitated the fire alarm and I thought it really was the fire alarm!

 

[Keinanna]

that would be scary hearing that and not knowing it was the bird

 

[roxynoodle]

It was! I checked every room, the basement and went outside to look in the crawl spaces!

 

[Keinanna]

having two greys growing up was much the same they imitated everything. They never heard the fire alarm so thankfully we never had that one but we did have them imitate the low battery beep on the smoke detector and they also imitated the cat meowing but made the cat sound hurt or in distress when they did it so we would frantically search for the poor cat but it was the birds and then they would laugh at us when we found out it was the bird.

someone told me a story about their african grey that was kind of funny the people had a dog who hated cats so the bird would call the dog over meow at it and then say whatcha gonna do huh huh whatcha gonna do then laugh at the dog. i dont know how true that is but it sounds like it would have been funny to see

 

[roxynoodle]

I believe it. I've heard of cockatoos calling the cat over, unscrewing their toys and then bombing the cat with the toys.

Not quite as good, but Rowdy covered the cat in pellets the first day she was here. The cat was sleeping on the end of the couch, near her cage. I took a nap myself at the other end. When I woke up, the cat was laying there sleeping but covered in pellets.

 

[Keinanna]

thats awesome i hope chewy figures out some clever way of making himself less interesting to the cats in my house we have one who could care less one who is kind of interested and then our youngest kitty who is not quite a year old who torments our poor birds. the budgie we moved up really high so the cat cant get to him. He only got one quick peak at chewy before we shooed her out and have kept the bedroom door closed ever since

 

[roxynoodle]

My cat is not only very predatory, but she wants so bad to play with these birds! She and Rowdy used to play "terrorize" for fun, but that doesn't happen so much anymore. Now a lot of the time, the cat will sleep right in front of her cage. They are buds, but they can't be trusted out together.

Kitty wants to play with Pete, too, but one or both would be seriously injured. Pete isn't exactly thrilled with her either.

Merlin is being too sweet to the cat! The cat can stand up and look at her in the bottom of the cage, and she will come over and they sort of kiss each other. I am discouraging this as I've heard cat saliva is dangerous to birds. And kitty could possibly get a claw into her. I am using smaller bar spacing for a reason!

When the birds are out, kitty just has to go into my bedroom for a few hours. Maybe as she gets older, they will all be able to coexist outside the cages.