What comes first, the chicken, the egg, or you? - Thoughts on problematic approaches in bird keeping.

 

In the grand scheme of modern internet culture and wider life, things can get er... complicated.

I haven't really sat down to write over the summer, I've been busy working on myself with the sudden realisation that in a few more years I'll be ancient (in keeper/dog years!) and I don't want to be any more of a worn out old Birdman than I have to be. A lot has been on my mind both personally and professionally and I've had plenty of time to think about a whole load of things.

One thing that has been on my mind more than anything has been "why do we do this?" and more so all the unusual types of keeper I have encountered through the years that have confounded and baffled me.

In the past I have had so many conversations with all sorts of fellow bird keepers, both private and professional and so many seem to have encountered similar, yet it's rarely addressed anywhere in any meaningful way.

It occurred to me that maybe there's a whole load of keepers out there that could do with the comfort that they are not alone and there are (in my opinion of course) right ways and wrong ways to look at keeping.

Palm Cockatoos mating at Leeds Castle in England, UK - This will add up later, but who doesn't like the idea of more Palms in the world?

 

This post will be less of a husbandry critique and more of an analysis of the internal qualities and maybe a few of the "deadly sins" of caring for birds in general.

To be clear, this is aimed at nobody in particular, but a coagulation of decades of casual observation and moments that gave me, to use the modern parlance "The ick".

To start out, for those who have maybe been taught by or worked with me in the past, one of my often used mantras is relevant here - "Some people like being keepers more than they like keeping". 

What this means boiled down, is that some are motivated more by the idea of being a keeper rather than what it means to keep birds. In that sense I've been able to see the transition since the 90s from self focussed keepers attending authentic social meets to network with others to a more modern social media led culture where keepers are not only spending a huge amount of time on social media, but having to actively promote themselves like their own demented PR agent within their industry or circle, either for professional advancement or more nefariously just social clout. It's an unusual trend which is not going to go away, but it has led to a hundredfold increase in the sorts of "being a keeper" behaviours rather than "keeping" behaviours, if that makes any sort of sense at all.

Now being honest, this is fairly harmless in the main and seldom do any animals suffer from this sort of behaviour except in extreme circumstances (and I trust you will know those instances when you see them right?), but it does propagate a culture that leads the person on the street and young potential keepers with very skewed ideas of what it is to be a good bird keeper.

Anyway, that baseline set, let us crack on with a list of little red flags that always concern me when I see them, because you didn't ask for them, but you're here, so let's go.

1. Anthropomorphic projection

Oh boy, the cardinal sin, the Elephant bird in the room.

 

Anthropomorphism

/ˌanθrəpəˈmɔːfɪz(ə)m/

noun

noun: anthropomorphism

the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal, or object.

 

Any sensible keeper knows that their birds are birds and not people, but you would be amazed how often I see people wildly attributing human characteristics onto their birds, both at home or at work.

Sure, we spend a lot of time around our birds, but the focus of all of our interactions HAS to be based around their natural behaviour and not ours. As humans I find in absence of knowledge we tend to transpose what we do know onto a situation, which I suppose, often leads to this crime of ignorance and sometimes just indulgence.

One of the most offensive spectacles I witness regularly is keepers engaging in physical behaviour that is socially inappropriate for the species they keep on the basis that the bird enjoys it. A common example of this is when individuals have raised a bird for whatever reason and then insist on continuing to be its "parent" for the rest of its life - Yuck. If an individual was raised the natural way it's real parents would quickly push it to independence for it's own good so that it can socially function amongst it's fellow birds, and if it were to encounter it's parents again in later years, it would likely not behave like a perpetual chick, yet these sad dysfunctional animals continue to appear on social media and real life, being endlessly coddled by a human for the keeper's own one sided benefit - this doesn't help the bird at all.

 The second common issue I often see here is situations where people engage in courtship behaviours with birds, again often hand reared ones, which for similar reasons to "parenting" are misleading for the bird and will likely lead to more and more problematic behaviours. Once more this is a sin of ignorance, indulgence or both, and is a bloody horrid thing to do to your birds (which I know of course you don't do right?). Classic example here is parrots, the amount of times I see keepers touching birds in areas of the body that are considered socially as "mate areas", for context here there are a similar set of areas in humans, consider a stranger approaches you and puts their hand on your shoulder, that would instantly be recognised as a neutral, friendly interaction, but if for instance, they placed their hand on the lower part of your back, that is of course an instant sign of something else entirely. The same is true for birds, and by touching them in certain ways, we are sending certain messages and writing social cheques we have no ability or intention to cash. Generally speaking, in parrot culture, heads and feet are "friend zones", this is where flock mates would physically interact with the bird via preening, but under wings, under the tummy and vent, and in females in particular touching the back are all very much "time to get fruity" zones, and engaging any parrot in this way makes a suggestion that the bird will take literally, which if you consider the long term and constant physical and behavioural nature of parrot pair bonding, you are in absolutely no position to fulfil, nor should you. Kissing your bird anywhere, particularly on the beak, emulates pair co feeding or parental regurgitation feeding and is also wildly confusing and in many cases pretty stupid.

To add onto this, another non physical consideration is that birds communicate much of their intention vocally or via display, which means at times, you can be unintentionally sending mixed or erroneous signals to birds by participating or mimicking those behaviours. One fairly famous example that is often seen is a Shoebill stork "bowing" and that human visitors need to bow back. This is courtship behaviour, not the kind of human respect gesture we might expect. To that end, every visitor is not participating in some cute social custom, but merely entering a bird's territory, proposing pair courtship, and then leaving... endlessly. The same is often seen in birds like cockatoos where their flamboyant "dancing" is seen as an expression of musical joy, but again, this is often part of wider social displays that MEAN things to the bird that you can't necessarily detect. It is no coincidence that these flamboyant displays in so many species can often end in confusing and hormonal aggression towards the keeper or a bystander, because what is being sown here is just that, confusion.

 

A Summer Tanager interacts with it's reflections to no productive end. In a way we can think of misleading interactions with our own birds to be just as confusing and frustrating as this mirror.

 

Just to touch on the keeper aspect here (and this may trigger some folks so hold tight) there are two kinds of people when it comes to this, those who just don't know any better and are doing their best with what they know, and to them my suggestion would be to study up on the natural behaviours of your species so you can really learn how to understand your birds and their needs; this is truly the closest you can get to actually “speaking” to your charges, so much of their communication is non vocal, so its worth doing for you and your birds.

The second type do it because it they know better but it makes them feel good either to have another organism socially crippled and dependent on them OR because of the extra social attention it gleans for them to have a “relationship” with such a wonderful animal.

My brutal advice to them would be to get a grip, you are a grown ass human and know better than to cause unneeded confusion and social stress to your birds, they deserve as well adjusted a natural life as you can offer them no matter their background. Ask yourself honestly, is this for them? both of you? or just you?

And no matter what someone told you, or who else does it, you are responsible for your birds, the buck stops with you. You are the only one who can steer positive changes in their lives.

Don't get me wrong, I know that there are so many hand raised (intentionally or not) birds out there that have unique living situations and may be unable to live a life that we would consider normal for their species, but the keeper should never be adding to the already complex social burden these birds carry, we are there to help, not hinder and frustrate.

Outside of behavioural situations, anthropomorphism can creep into our husbandry routines, applying human preference and logic to an animal that may need or prefer something else entirely, or to counter may need you to be the tough guy and not allow them to live certain ways. I won't dwell here because in honesty it's a massive sub topic and if you'd like to read more along these lines I wrote a post earlier in the year on “dropping the chop” and how we can erroneously enforce our own preferences onto bird nutrition, so go check that out later if you like.

So all that said, lets close off on anthropomorphic projection, I think that the gist is there and you can see why understanding species behaviour is so important to know how to act right around birds, and indeed what a good keeper's place is in their bird's life. You're essentially a mix of bird butler, maid, nurse and agony aunt, and that's it. Oh the glamour.

2 – Social media

This one is simple – keepers often get really into generating virality to the point that they will obtain birds they cannot adequately care for, or manufacture fake situations to get attention from strangers online and or make extra cash. I have a few friends who keep birds and also have popular social media channels, but what they all have in common is that they are simply sharing things that their birds do, work they have done with their birds or helpful advice for other keepers. They keep birds first and broadcast socially second, not the other way around.

Some folks, in particular, more professional zoo circles tend to fall in love with the idea of being a bird keeper to the point that it almost becomes a cliché, with the image of the modern bird keeper being a khaki clad, key jangling, hosepipe coiling bag of joy, but miss all the underlaying qualities that define a truly great bird keeper, most of which require none of the above (although if you like khaki that much, you do you). 

 

Here's a Dollarbird, it has nothing to do with anything, I have just been thinking about them a lot lately, and now so can you, you're welcome.

In my experience a good fellow bird keeper cannot be easily defined by their appearance or even their initial conversations, to get a good feel for a keeper you need to see them amongst birds in a natural context. A real bird keeper can be easily judged by the fruits their birds bear rather than what they say, show or do on social media or in a conference hall.

Social media has it's place in life, but the answers to bird keeping are not there, they are out in the aviaries and the wild world.

 3 – Prioritising the wrong things

As a third and final bugbear, rubbish time management and blinkered process.

This applies to all keepers, probably more so to keepers who are working, but let's be honest, we all want to make the best of the time we have so that we can use it wisely and actually do the things we and our birds enjoy. Having good levels of discipline are critical to being a good keeper of any species and sometimes this can go so far that routines become so ingrained in our minds that we just continue them as we always have or cross transfer husbandry and practice to other species which may not require the same level of attention, or need different care.

One trait which seems common in all types of bird keeper is tidiness, sometimes to an alarming and almost pathological level, and being pragmatic, what is important to birds is good hygiene and avoidance of excessive pathogen pooling; not the shape of some topiary or the alignment of boxes in a hallway. Now of course when you have time for both, you can do both well, but I have known keepers who if given only 10 minutes to do one task of their choice would rather sweep the hallway or coil a hose perfectly than maintain some internal aspect that has a direct impact on their birds. Birds needs always have to come first, and performative human concepts like boxes being lined up have to come second. This root thought process is the issue, here not really the tasks themselves, but you get the idea.

 

Possibly the only documented time a bird has concerned itself personally with coiled hosepipes.

 

Once again we are often working with what we know and subconsciously lean away from the unknown and into the familiar, but that dovetails ultimately into the conclusion of this well intended brain dump.

WHY?

Why am I continuing these routines this way?

Why am I doing this specific task?

Why am I encouraging this behaviour?

Who is it benefiting?

Is it benefiting anyone?

What could I be doing that would work better?

If this process is actually unneeded, how could I spend this time enriching my birds life more?

Have I drank enough water today?

Jokes aside, in my experience the keys to moving forward are almost always being honest with yourself, being focussed on your birds, stepping to one side, remaining humble... and asking... WHY?

Stay Birdy.

C.

If you enjoyed this, I can write more along these lines, it seems like there are a lot of lost bird keepers out there looking for some guidance and a like minded voice but there seem to be very few outlets for this around that are direct and open about what good bird keeping entails for both birds and keeper. Let me know if this was useful to you.

We don't talk about flamingos: why do flamingos in human care remain such a challenge?

Amongst the most widely adored, popular and (curse me) marketable bird species on earth: Flamingos.

Looking at zoo collections alone, amongst the 6 species in this family they are likely one of the most widely kept and displayed birds across the globe, standing strong, representing the class Aves alongside other charismatic avifauna like penguins, ostrich and pelicans.

As we celebrate another International Flamingo Day, I'd like to share my thoughts on the world's favourite pink bird and explore some challenges of flamingo husbandry both academically and through my own experience.

 

This will make sense later, trust me.

For me, of all the birds managed in collections, it seems fascinating that flamingos find themselves in the conundrum they do. Looking at them from a zoo perspective, thinking more on the finance side of things, flamingos rank up as one of the most popular zoo animals and as such, you would expect them to draw the same levels of motivation and investment as any other species in this setting. There have always been challenges securing large amounts of investment for the "little brown jobs" as Gerry might say. You have to consider the obvious here: zoos are charities in the main, with limited income. This income is based on zoo attendance. Zoo attendance is based on what people want to see. What people want to see is what they see as charismatic, the typical zoo animals, you can probably name them. Now I'm not going to wade into the ethical swamp of doom that is the charismatic zoo species debate, but this has some relevance here.

What I can never grasp about flamingos is how they have all the right criteria to fare very well in a zoo setting. They are not small, they are not quiet, they are one of the brightest and most recognisable birds, they are great, they really are. Any other species, say tiger, giraffe or rhino, would have long been relieved of the simple day to day chronic health problems that we see in flamingos still. Somehow flamingos still struggle with age old issues that seem surrounded with a mix of hyper specific academia and at the other end, wild folklore husbandry bordering on witchcraft. What is it that creates this almost unique situation?

So first we must delve into the elephant in the room: pododermatitis or bumble foot.

This problem has been studied, talked about, ogled at more than any other topic in flamingo care, to the point that I have even heard it be asked in the past that delegates at a conference avoid the topic because it is so prevalent that it can become a distraction from almost all other aspects of flamingo care. It does still seem that this issue lays at the core of flamingos troubles in human care, and there is a wider web of limitations that connect to this that many may have not considered.

I'll rush you through what pododermatitis means for a flamingo, but we won't dwell too long, it's not pretty. pododermatitis is at it's most basic level a bucket of similar issues that crop up in the feet of an animal, but few animals are plagued quite as frequently as flamingos. In flamingos (and many other birds) it manifests initially as hyperkeratosis, usually on the soles of the feet, in particular the soft skin around the foot joints. Sometimes it will be only a thickening of the skin, much like human skin thickens when you walk around barefoot on rough ground. over time this can develop into quite obscene deeper tissue injuries as the hyperkeratosis impacts the use of the foot. There are a few categorical deviations used to describe the types of growths that occur, although the interactions and causes of these are still not clearly understood. luckily for the keeper, they can all be treated largely the same way based more on the severity of the issue rather than the type.

 

Example of fissures, presenting deep inflamed splits between the joints.

 

The categories roll roughly as follows, 

1. Hyperkeratosis - generalised thickening of the skin - very common.

2. Fissures - deep cracks occurring between the joints, usually resulting as an advanced form of the first hyperkeratosis state. 

3.Nodular - these occur almost as tumour like growths on one particular joint (below the foot). 

4. Papilliotomous growths - these are strange outward growing growths that form almost brush like hard skin tissue and are most often seen in advanced cases.

As I said before, in terms of management the severity is the dimension of concern, and this can escalate in a couple of ways.

1. Tissue infection - split inflamed tissue becomes infected, forming abscesses within the foot. this occurs most often in advanced stages or situations where hygiene is very poor.

2. Skeletal contact - some splits can become so severe that they can reach bone and cartilage within the foot, which has very serious implications for both welfare and recovery.

As you can see, this issue is quite broad in its occurrence and in my experience is best addressed from a husbandry direction as a SYMPTOM rather than a stand alone disease.

In almost every instance of pododermatitis I have encountered in both flamingos and other birds, the problem has, when viewed in an honest, wider scale, been a by product of an environmental or physical issue, or lack of a provision that bird needs. That said, it's now more clear what needs to be talked about way more when it comes to managing these birds - environment.

 

Lesser flamingos in Tanzania.

First before we delve into environmental factors, there is another topic we must touch on: pinioning and clipping. When we talk about this as keepers we have to be mature about it and avoid falling into the hysterical pitfalls that society may throw before us, but we must also resist the urge to ignore the by-products of this process as if it did not exist.

Again I'm not going to run foolishly into the ethical debate about flight restriction in human care, but I can assure you that I do think about it a lot.

My current view is this: Some collections have a no pinioning policy, some collections clip, some collections have a mix of pinioned and clipped, some have fully flighted under mesh. Whilst there are some major welfare benefits in terms of behaviour to not pinioning and clipping, including display, mating and mental well-being, three things come to mind when I think about this in relation to flamingos and their feet.

1.Flamingos are very long lived birds and collections with mixed flocks of both pinioned and clipped birds are going to house pinioned birds for decades to come. Even policy cannot remedy this immediately.

2. Flamingos are so popular that the chances of them never occurring in human care anywhere in the world are 0. This is not a species that is likely to be phased out on welfare grounds (nor should it with the right care).

3. The realistic idea that any aviary anywhere can offer a flighted flamingo the type of meaningful flight space to perform any level of athletic performance is naive.

So considering these factors we can reasonably assume (ethics aside) that very few, if any zoo housed flamingos will ever achieve the level of flight activity that they might in the wild, so you can pinion, clip, not clip and the physical result is largely similar. The reason this is significant is that in removing the option of flight, you are also removing a certain percentage of time that a flamingo can spend not putting weight on it's feet. Of course this can't be easily quantified because a baseline does not exist for a zoo animal like this. We could make use of wild data but it still would prove largely unhelpful because these flamingos are not wild, and are not in the wild, so what seems most sensible is focussing on what the tolerances are in collections, rather than trying to jump for a bar that is largely unreachable within the limitations of human care (at this point).

That considered we can reasonably infer that our flamingos are spending more time on their feet than they were designed for, lack of flight being the first offender.

 

Interestingly, young flamingos do not develop issues until they are several months old at least.

 

Secondly let us consider that flamingos are primarily a water bird. Their entire lives evolve around it and I personally believe that it is considerably more important to zoo based flamingos than many realise.

Wild Flamingos live quite a different life to those in the zoo, not only can they fly freely as discussed, but they also love to swim, and I'm talking properly swim, like a duck might. Their living relatives the Grebes are highly aquatic and in some cases almost exclusively bound to water. Why then do we not see flamingos in human care swimming like this? this would surely offer more much needed relief to our flamingos overburdened feet?... Correct padawan, you have it.

For some reason, probably historical, whenever anyone has built a flamingo pool they have in most cases insisted of creating something like a large circular children's paddling pool (more on historical cultural husbandry crimes later) and these types of pools are problematic for 2 reasons:

1. They are often too shallow for a flamingo to fully submerge and raise it's legs into a swimming position in the first place.

2. There is seldom any motivation for the birds to make use of their swimming behaviours. They will like most birds only do things for a reason, and even if they have that depth, they often need a reason to swim which seldom occurs in a zoo setting.

So to gently conclude that portion, we can I hope, without being able to crunch any juicy numbers, agree that the removal of meaningful flight and real physical swimming behaviour will significantly impact the percentage of time a flamingo spends on it's feet. We cannot resolve the pododermatitis issue entirely, but more conscientious management could provide a percentile of relief to our birds and make an intolerable situation more tolerable for them, but it does require this kind of proactive husbandry that can predict problems before they arise; an approach I have always been an advocate for - there is often method in my madness! 

Moving on to the second and by far more immediately addressable portion of this dive, I present to you the historical crimes and folklore that have cursed (almost) every flamingo enclosure I have ever encountered.

First in the dock - Concrete.

Concrete is by far one of the most convenient but simultaneously inappropriate materials to find in a zoo. Ignoring it's awful environmental profile, it is hard, thermally very unhelpful and in this case, very abrasive on soft flamingo feet.

The two main reasons bare concrete is problematic are firstly it's thermal properties - on a basic level it draws heat from the surfaces that touch it, that is why when you put your hand on it you will feel coldness, it is literally wicking heat away from your tissues. In a natural sense it behaves thermally more like rock, likewise heating up in excessive sun. Granted flamingos do have systems in place to deal with cold, they are able to regulate blood flow to maintain heat within their body, but just because they can do this doesn't mean we must expose them to it. These abilities are largely evolved to offer protection to the birds in cooler water, not cold surfaces and cold air.

The second and more direct problem unprotected concrete presents is it's roughness and the way in which a flamingos weight is distributed through the foot. Imagine if you will for a minute, spending a day in a swimming pool made of rough concrete, you would I'm sure by the end of the day have some soreness, particularly around the joints and tips of your toes. The same is true for flamingos, who's soft feet were evolved specifically for use mainly on flat, soft mud. It may at first seem a trifle anthropomorphic to make this jump, but if you accept that physics apply equally to all things and that the exact pressure points which often present with hyperkeratosis in flamingos are the leading walking points of the foot.

 

Pleasant eh?

 

How does concrete get even worse? Slopes.

One way to really accelerate the deterioration of your birds feet is to increase the angle of the concrete, which creates even more pressure on specific points. Again, Flamingos are designed in the main for flat habitats, an those big ol' floppy feet were not made for rough slopes. You would be amazed how often I still see bare concrete slopes in flamingo enclosures.

Second in the dock - Folklore and legacy enclosures

We need to be real, Flamingos are a highly specific and evolutionarily unique family, yet like so many birds they often do not receive the level of attention to husbandry that they deserve. This is, I believe, down to their incredible resilience. In spite of having their selective issues they are very sturdy birds in general, they live a long time, they don't tend to suffer huge amounts of pathogenic disease and are able to hide their discomfort for a long time. There is also a strange phenomenon I have noticed with flamingos in particular that I have never noticed in other species.

"The Elysian Flamingo Lawn"

If you think about the times you have seen or worked with flamingos in a zoo, there are likely a few instances where you have seen them pottering over a bright green lawn in an almost disneyesque fashion, something like Alice in wonderland. Seems harmless enough, but where did this come from and why does it exist?

Andean flamingos enjoying that sweet soft mud.

For every other animal in human care we consider deeply what type of habitat the species comes from and do our best to replicate that as much as reasonably possible. Aviculture has a particularly rich history here, creating densely planted aviaries for small passerines, open grass plains for ratites, more sparsely perched, high aviaries for our vultures, who require a more open plan. So HOW did our poor flamingos get lumped with paddling pools and verdant lawns?

The direct answer to this question is probably completely by accident, and that old villain of progress in aviculture, folklore husbandry. For some reason keepers seldom thought deeply about the real habitats of these birds and just copied what they had seen elsewhere, or made adjustments to a hand me down enclosure. There are also some subconscious cultural connections between flamingos and lawns, flamingos and beaches, flamingos and cocktail bars... you get the idea, all have little connection to living wild flamingos.

The reality for flamingos is MUD. Soft, preferably inert mud. If you seriously look at wild flamingos all across the world there are three things flamingos look for in their habitat; flatness, mud, water and combinations of both. In some cases these birds are living in very extreme habitats that are inhospitable to almost everything (again thanks to their resilience) but those three requirements stay largely the same.

Walking on mud both on the land and even more so in the water is very gentle on feet. It moves and yields to the pressure of those joints, it does not resist them like hard ground, concrete or rock.

 

Greater flamingo in Southern France.

 

I find a strange satisfaction in seeing muddy wet zoo flamingo habitats with large deep pools that are made up largely of these soft types of substrate. Sand also is great for relieving pressure, small particulate sand has been shown to be particularly helpful in this respect.

It should be mentioned that several collections have made considerable efforts to improve indoor housing for flamingos, making use of softer rubber liners to cover concrete, adding indoor pools and internal substrates, but these have by and large been in reactive response to the increased pressures added by shutting birds into the houses, rather than a routine effort to create overall more helpful spaces for the birds year round, which long term we need to design from the ground up.

To try and conclude on what is a very deep and entrenched topic, I'd like us to consider the network of challenges that human care has thrown at flamingos and see that many are avoidable. Consider our tough pink birds, missing in many cases their options to fly and properly swim, compound that with the Alice in wonderland worlds they sometimes have to inhabit that are doing nothing at all for the health of their already overused feet and you can maybe see on wide scale how this very common issue is a manifestation, a symptom of a wider issue that flamingo custodians could do better to remedy.

I'd like to give you with a few info bites that highlight how we often fall into accepting the state of husbandry as acceptable because it seems difficult to change.

- Flamingos are probably one of the most well studied birds living in zoos, pododermatitis in particular having been extensively documented, so the academic literature to tackle this is available and has been for some time.

- Studies of wild flamingos show an almost 0% incidence of pododermatitis - the wild is offering something we are currently not. On average around 90% of flamingos in human care suffer with some level of pododermatitis by comparison.

- The most Northerly population of flamingos exist in a feral state in Germany and fly out to the coast in winter once the chances of ice set in - Generally speaking flamingos avoid cold and ice when they can, and this can be seen in their natural distributions and migration patterns. I don't think cold is a sole cause, but have a hunch that it presents a significantly bigger issue than we currently think.

 

Are you sensing a theme here?

Takeaways from today -

- We need to recognise the attention these birds deserve and think harder about how flamingos live in the wild and try to mimic that.

- We need to have a high attention to detail when it comes to management, a small issue for us could be big for the birds and they can't easily tell us.

- Flamingos do not live on lawns outside of children's books.

- Pododermatits is a largely a symptom of environment and not a stand alone disease

- Question the science behind received husbandry - is this based in science and observation or is it just something someone else has done that has been neither net positive nor negative?

- Stepping away from these species and abandoning ship is not the answer: there can be a much better future for these birds across the board with effort.

I hope this has been helpful, insightful and has turned you all into flamingo husbandry detectives hell bent on improving the lot of these fantastic, lanky, pink wonders.

Till next time,

C.

 

P.S - for a bit of fun, have a look at this -  https://www.audubon.org/news/uh-what-flamingo-doing

And this  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQAMiqyZDnw

NEWS: If you've made it this far and are still excited to learn more, you might be interested to know that we have recently set up a facebook group to help push forward thinking bird
keeping and discuss challenges and ideas. You can find it by searching Aviology: aviculture 2.0 on facebook, or using this link

I may see you there!

It's time to drop the "Chop" - Whole food is better for our birds.

So here it is, a promised rewrite of an article I wrote last year (but lost a day before publishing) which I am going to do my best to recall for you.

-------------------------------------------------------

If there's one thing that seems to thrill most bird keepers, and maybe animal keepers of every sort, it is preparing food for our beloved charges. we have since the dawn of aviculture more or less prepared this with a chef like level of precision. It has been ingrained in generations of bird keepers as a skill and a source of personal pride. On social media you can often see photos of the "meals" prepared lovingly for our birds.

But what if I told you this is not only unnecessary, but actually counter productive in most cases and probably does more to please us than it does for the birds in our care?

Before some readers consider grabbing a pitchfork and a torch, I too spent a couple of decades mindlessly chopping food up, just... because. Granted, it feels satisfying to do for sure, but there are so many things you could be spending time on that would improve your birds life even more. I'd add also that at various points in my bird keeper journey I've been an all fresh feeder, an all pellet feeder and several stances in between, all had their pros and cons. These day's I'm looking for a mix somewhere between good nutriton and good mental health for my birds.

 

That got your attention didn't it?

 

Firstly we have to accept that our birds in the huge majority of cases do not need a happy mix of foods and indeed in the wild, this would never occur, in fact the idea of a bowl is a completely alien one and comes from our anthropocentric tendency to apply human lifestyles onto animals even if it is not necessarily best for them. If we can start looking at how wild birds feed we can start feeding our birds in far more interesting ways both for us and for them.

So I hear you ask, if we do not chop, how do we present foods to our birds, and how do we get them to enjoy a healthy diet?

We think about the species and how it feeds in the wild, what challenges it would face in that environment and how we can replicate this in human care. A great and age old example is what some keepers call "spiking" and involved taking larger food items like whole fruits and vegetables and skewering them on metal kebabs or branches. Historically this has been done since aviculture began, but has often been treated as an enrichment method rather than a complete presentation. If you can present whole food every day in a natural position, hanging, skewered or otherwise, why wouldn't you? Knowing that sitting stationary at a bowl like a bored McDonald's customer is the most unnatural and mind numbing way to feed any bird is key to motivation yourself to... BIN THE BOWL!(C)

OK, so of course there are some cases where bowls are needed, presenting water in a limited environment for example, or presenting a mainstay food like a pellet that works as a "buffer" food but is not highly motivating in most cases, but in general any fresh foods are rewarding enough to justify the effort for a bird and we should resist the urge to chop and feed out in a bowl.

These Purple crowned lorikeets are enjoying the challenge presented by removing thier own bites from this apple whilst balancing on the branch. There are probably even more challenging ways you can think of to feed this item too.

The main visual benefit of feeding in a natural way is the increase in your bird's productive behaviour. What might have taken a few seconds at the bowl to wolf down could take several minutes or more and require a far more advanced set of behaviours to obtain. Remember, every second your birds spend not being idle is adding up to a better life. Being realistic, wild birds spend many hours per day moving around and foraging, so we need to do our best to recreate this for them, resisting the urge to make it easy for them - for the record you need to monitor feeding closely at first to know if the individual can actually access the food, start out with something high reward that they do not strictly need and work through the diet from there until only the unavoidable bowl items remain fed in bowls.

Some examples I have used or seen include:

Large frugivores - offering large chunks or whole fruit on branches as high as possible, often in locations that require effort to access

Insectivores - scatter feeding insects in random locations throughout the day or setting up timed feeders at random intervals, creating situations that require natural behaviours to be expressed, like foraging, digging or hawking,

Carnivores - offer whole large carcasses that require effort to break into or whole smaller carcasses that can be presented in natural ways, hidden, hung up, hidden in trees etc... Whole eggs or chicks for example can be given in artificial "nests" to provide a challenge to the bird. 

Nectivores - Present nectar diets in ways they may be found in the wild, feed fresh non toxic flowers and blossoms alongside to provide variation and stimulation.

Seedeaters - Whole seed heads can be offered in ways similar to how they might be found in nature, on walls, upside down, all sorts. You will be surprised how agile your birds are once they get used to feeding in more athletic ways.

These are just a few of the more obvious examples of how you can immediately improve your bird's nutritional welfare and save yourself time doing unneeded preparation, giving you time to concentrate on coming up with more and more creative challenges to provide your birds with.

For these systems to work, you will require some adjustment to your feeding plans and each situation will be different, but as an example I'll show a simple plan for a commonly kept type of bird, a turaco.

Disclaimer: this is not an accurate diet, it is just to show the theory and does not represent a guide to feeding these species.

Let's say your turacos receive the following each day every day, chopped in a bowl.

 

50g papaya 

50g mango 

50g steamed carrot

50g steamed sweet potato

50g apple/pear

50g steamed green beans

50g steamed beetroot 

Ad lib access to turaco pellet

Ad lib access to water

 

OK, so a fairly standard portion if you're feeding out your veggies (which you are right?).

But we can also feed the same volume of food like this: 

 

Monday - 350g papaya

Tuesday - 350g steamed carrot

Wednesday - 350g apple/pear

Thursday - 350g steamed beetroot

Friday - 350g mango

Saturday - 350g steamed green beans

Sunday - 350g steamed sweet potato

Ad lib items offered as usual (unless you have an even better idea forming?)

 

As you can see, this fairly simple change offers several benefits, as discussed it only requires you to cut a rough chunk of the food item to the weight required and present it in a challenging way, the other benefit is that once your bird gets used to this diet routine, they will start eating their "veggies" which here means the less rewarding food types for any type of bird. Birds in human care often use the quickest possible means to acquire the highest number of calories. As a result when offered a daily mix up, they tend to pick the most calorific foods first, couple this with a general trend of overfeeding in aviaries, birds are able to hit their daily calorie needs quickly and not touch the dreaded "veggies" in whatever form they take. It's the same reason humans crave sugar and doughnuts = easy, quick calories; our ancient primate brain from 10,000BC still loves that gunk! - these instincts are hard wired in our birds too and a few centuries in aviaries can't undo hundreds of thousands of years of evolved survival behaviours.

Long story short, when these high calorie options are not available on tap each day, the birds need to feed on other food types to hit this magic number, in turn improving the variety of foods they consume, rather than reducing it. If we start thinking about food seasonally over weeks and months rather than days we can see the long term benefits too. They also have the added benefit of reducing possessive behaviour and squabling between individuals in mixed spaces - everyone has the same!

A handful of good scientific studies now demonstrate that birds activity budgets are considerably changed for the better by feeding this way, if indeed this was not anecdotally obvious to the thinking bird keeper.

Over the long term, if conditions are suitable, you can take the next step for herbivorous species by planting their spaces with the types of plants (or workable analogues) that they would make use of, think fruiting species for frugivores, heavy flowering species for nectivores and in some cases these plants may even draw in wild insects for your insectivores. In this sense the offerings are truly random and can really pack out their day feeding or even just checking for ripeness or suitability – these are all still valid behaviours and keep their brains ticking over.

The welfare benefits of feeding like this could form their own topic across the taxa which we don't have the scope for in this post, maybe we will dive deeper in future, but I'll leave that part there for now. Feed your bird's mind, not just their tummy.

 

Nectivorous birds really enjoy the real thing and the stimulation it offers, even if it must be just a part of their wider diet.

It's worth also touching on the potential risks of feeding out chopped food.

In some situations bird feed is prepared the day before and stored overnight or longer, pre chopped in a state of nutritional decline. This is a problem for two reasons, the first being nutrient loss. Several key vitamins are damaged by oxidation, with the content starting to drop immediately from the moment the mass of the food item is exposed to oxygen, think about an apple or banana chopped, they start to brown very fast, this is due to nutrient oxidation in the tissues. Vitamin C jumps to mind as a vitamin that oxidises really quickly in open air.

The second issue is that disease pathogens settle quickly in the environment and prefer damp, calorie rich environments. Whilst many birds naturally carry a diverse flora of very alarming pathogens, it is not beneficial to create situations where large monocultures of a certain species can develop unchallenged.

So these two issues can occur anywhere, even on whole food items, but the risk these present is one you may already know but not have connected to feeding birds - surface area:volume (here we will say Sa:V)

When we chop our foods we instantaneously increase the ratio of available surface area to tissue volume. The smaller we chop, the more skewed this ratio becomes. This provides not only a much faster rate of oxidation as oxygen now has very easy access to almost all of the internal volume of the food, but also a massively increased surface area for nasties to settle. Compound this with time in storage and exposure to the environment, you are creating risks for no real benefits.

Feeding larger items maintains a decent Sa:V and makes it much harder for oxygen to diffuse into the food and damage nutrients. As a bird feeds on parts of the food, chewing or tearing off chunks themselves, they are only ever exposing new surface areas as they feed, up until the next time they eat, rather than those fresh areas having already been oxidised and exposed many hours before at time of chopping.

 

This Black vulture is presented with a full buffet of challenges in the form of this carcass. Feeding this way massively improves the quality of the time spent feeding versus idle behaviours in predatory and scavenging carnivore birds.

These methods are of course going to be unique for each bird species based on it's ecology and natural behaviour, but nutrition and physics are the same for all species, they are all subject to the same rules. So far I think the only type of bird where feeding like this can be a challenge is natural berry feeders. Often the fruits available for them are domestic fruits that are way too high in sugar compared with the types of berry found in nature. In these cases it can be a challenge for small birds to tear off pieces of food from large items. In this case a three fold approach can be taken, feeding out large items they can handle, also offering "wild" berries when available and sourcing a good pellet that can replicate the typical item size they would biologically find in nature, some birds are not made for large foods all the time. That said, interestingly most berries have naturally higher amounts of oxidising nutrients like vitamin C.

If I've convinced you to apply this to your birds, whatever species they are and however they live, it can be far more exciting for them (and you). You may initially miss the Pierre White culinary satisfaction of chopping a mountain of flawless apple, or removing the organs from a carcass, but that will soon be replaced with the satisfaction of watching your birds behaving in exciting new ways and generally keeping much busier than before.

The takeaways are:

- DROP THE CHOP!

- BIN THE BOWL!

- FEED YOUR BIRD'S MIND!

And as ever, all with a good dose of PFR - Performance, Feedback & Revision.

 

And if you still feel an uncontrollable compulsion to chop, take up cookery and channel it into yourself!

I hope that has been helpful and insightful, until next time...

 

Stay birdy,

C.

 

NEWS: If you've made it this far and are still excited to learn more, you might be interested to know that we have recently set up a facebook group to help push forward thinking bird
keeping and discuss challenges and ideas. You can find it by searching Aviology: aviculture 2.0 on facebook, or using this link

I may see you there!