tinysaurus-rex:

Yes, she does! She just gets really hyper in general and does everything in hasty fast motion, even her baths are super fast and she doesn’t take time to soak.

Rex hasn’t begun sitting yet but she’s really itchy from molting, so between trying to forage lentils from her toy ball which is stuffed from them she was itching her face. At one point she accidentally kicked the ball and paused to see it go flying and a TON of treats came out, and I could just see the “oh” on her face and she immediately starting hitting it with her foot to replicate what just happened 😂

I’m glad you’re acting as a mate for your tiel, that’s awesome! Many people try to discourage mating behaviors all together, but it’s a normal part of their life just like pigeons, and healthiest to just help them through it instead of punishing them for something they can’t control.

cmipalaeo:

orcinus-ocean:

paleofeathers:

falseredstart:

This is a tough question, and a very big question. Since it’s just about impossible to objectively explain why birds are amazing (they are, btw), maybe I can explain why birds amaze me and why they’re the focus of both my career and a significant portion of my recreational time.

1. Birds are dinosaurs that you can hold today.

Flashback to 2010, a time when little Redstart was thinking about applying to college. For a while I was convinced I would pursue animation and go be some awesome art director of nifty animated films starring animals. Then I realized that a) I wasn’t good enough or motivated enough to make it, and b) having art as a career would ruin creating art for me. So, then it was back to my other passion: paleontology.

I literally applied to college planning to be a geology/biology double major with a long-term career goal of being a professor of paleobiology. I doggedly pursued this game until my sophomore year of college, when I discovered birds.

Birds are dinosaurs. Just about everyone knows this now (thank goodness). The big, significant realization here is that you can study dinosaurs today. Think about the magnificent breadth and depth of scientific questions you can ask about an animal when it’s right in front of you, instead of turned into rock and shattered into a million fragments! Don’t get me wrong; paleontology is an awesome field. But instead of dedicating my life to recreating the world of millions of years ago, I decided to work on unraveling the mysteries of today’s dinosaurs.

2. Birds are Pokémon.

Stay with me, now! As a wee youth I was obsessed with Pokémon. Wait, I’m still obsessed with Pokémon. Well, it turns out that birding and bird banding are just about the closest thing you can get in real life to filling out the Pokédex.

Birds have the Goldilocks number of species, which makes them incredibly appealing to pursue, study, identify, and watch. Think about it! Mammals, while are certainly *~*~*charismatic*~*~*, are mostly nocturnal. There are also like 10 of them in the world (yes, that’s an undersell). Lame! Insects and other invertebrates are amazing, but there are too goddamn many for many laypeople to really get into (side note: my alternate field would probably be malacology because I love Mollusca). Fish have some good numbers and variety, but require getting into this whole aquatic sphere– a different world entirely and one that is not readily accessible to those of us who matured in NYC.

So there’s the numbers game and their incredible charisma at play here. Humans have trained their companion psittacids and cacatuids to speak, to understand; as intelligent social animals, we can feel a mysterious connection with birds in the same way that most humans feel an inherent connection with your typical charismatic megafauna, such as wolves and lions (*eyeroll*).

3. Birds are diverse.

Cassowaries are three-toed behemoths that can communicate in rumbling infrasound like elephants and kick a grown man to death. Woodcocks can see in 360 degrees without a single turn of the head. The booted racket-tail is a hummingbird about the size of a quarter with a tail three times its body length that goes torpid every night after its daily frenzy of foraging for nectar. The Chiroxiphia manakins coordinate sexual display in an incredible show of teamwork, after which only one male gets to mate. The bowerbirds build ornate structures that rival some human creations, and then dance and sing in front of them for a mate.

Albatross can maintain a pair bond for decades, and once their chicks fledge they may not touch solid ground for three years. Steller’s eiders from both North America and Russia winter together on the sea ice of the Bering Strait, where they fish for molluscs in the cold. Bar-headed geese fly over the Himalayas. Arctic terns breed as far north as the Arctic circle and winter all the way south in Antarctica, in the longest migration known to the animal kingdom. Martial eagles kill and eat small antelope by flying them up high and dropping them to the ground. Starlings and mimids can imitate hundreds of sounds. Numerous seabirds can go their entire life without a single drink of freshwater due to their advanced salt glands. 

…And so on. The breadth of the bird world is absolutely incredible. With roughly 10,000 species worldwide existing on every continent (something that cannot be boasted by many other taxonomic classes), birds have evolved to occupy so many amazing niches.

4. Birds matter.

Now, this isn’t to imply that other animals don’t matter! It is incredibly vital that we keep a steady stream of funding to all biological sciences,  but I must say that in my work with birds I have always felt that the research I’ve been doing plays its part in the greater scheme of things.

Birds are an easily seen indicator species; their high sensitivity can be informative about how the world at large is doing. As climate changes and anthropogenic disturbance increases, we can see bird populations shifting their range and phenology from year to year.

Since they are so prominent, birds have also been among the numerous species to face untimely extinction; take the story of the magnificent great auk, for example, which was rapidly hunted into oblivion due to its flightlessness and colonial breeding strategy. Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, Bachman’s warbler, ivory-billed woodpecker, Labrador duck: these are all species that used to be seen in North America that are nowhere to be found today. 

And it’s through some well-timed intervention spear-headed by biologists and conservationists that we have avoided the loss of other amazing bird species. The National Audubon Society keeps an egret in their logo, a nod to the birds that were almost destroyed in the hat trade. The Atlantic Puffin was completely extirpated from the Gulf of Maine until it was successfully reintroduced on Eastern Egg Rock. And remember the shitshow that was DDT? It was birds that let us know how much of a threat that pesticide was; brown pelicans, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, osprey, and more faced steep declines thanks to the substance.

These reasons just brush the surface of why birds are amazing– and yes, why I am constantly amazed by birds even though I look at them every day in my backyard or as part of my work. We haven’t even mentioned feathers, or vocalization, their incredible physiology, or the way they have inspired artists for centuries.

Getting into birds literally changed my life; it was a turning point for my career, for my mental health, and for my outlook on this incredible world that we live in. I want others to have similar realizations about the natural world! That’s why I run this blog, and that’s why I’ll never stop birding.

ᵈᶦᵗᵗᵒ

There are twice as many bird species alive today as mammal species. And the vast majority of those 5000 mammals are either rodents (tiny things hiding in the dark, you know, like throughout the entire Mesozoic era), or bats (you know – bird wannabes).

Now who rules the planet?

Friendly reminder that dinosaurs still outnumber mammals

lookatthisbabybird:

protect-lgbtqia-kids:

lookatthisbabybird:

lookatthisbabybird:

Pigeons, doves, finches, canaries, chickens, turkeys, pheasants, ducks, geese, any other fowl I’m forgetting. Pretty much anything domesticated. I don’t believe finches and canaries are domesticated, but they make good pets if you’re willing to work with them to get them used to you, or if you’re okay with an animal that doesn’t want interaction.

Budgies are on their way to being domesticated, yes, but they still aren’t great pets as pet stores advertise them. They should not be sold in pet stores to begin with, since they’re parrots,. They’re small, but they’re still as complicated as a large parrot. To answer your question: you are correct, budgies shouldn’t be pets also unless from a rescue or rehab, or something similar. Sadly, I don’t see this ever happening.

Some quality blogs about or who own the aforementioned birds:

@turings @quaility-quails @chickenhugs @chickenkeeping @chicken-times @oregonseramas @my-life-with-ducks @1337banna @duel-styx @tinysaurus-rex @ramseyringnecks

Canaries are domesticated, they have
been breed since the 17^th century and differ much from
their wild ancestor. Not just in colour but also with their size and
body in general.

Just like domestic chicken have become
bigger, heavier and ‘rounder’ depending on the breed, the same has
happened to the canary. Both also have become more tame.

And while with most domestic animals
there is still behaviour found that their ancestors also have(dogs
and wolves), domestic animals differ in important areas, especially
fertility.

Wild animals breed only when enough food is there in season. Domestic pets breed even when starving(street pigeons, feral cats and dogs) and  much more often and plenty.
Wild chicken lay 15-20 eggs per season. Domestic ones lay up to 300 a year.

About the ‘they make good pets if you know how to
work with them’ that goes for all domestic pets.
Cats, dogs,
hamsters, chicken, mice..if you don’t know how to fullfill their needs, even
the most domestic dog will suffer and be a nightmare to have as a
pet.

Canaries and finches will be very affectionate and cuddly
when you interact properly with them.
Same as cats that depends on
the individual.

And while not all finches are
domesticated yet, one is 100% a domestic pet that has changed so much
that  experts are not really sure what wild ancestors they came from.

The society finch (North
America) or Bengalese finch (elsewhere), Lonchura striata
domestica or L. domestica, is a popular cage bird not
found in the wild.
They have been breed since the 15^th
century in captivity.

While even wild, handraised birds will
often be  tame and  affectionate, the difference to domestic
animals is that wild animals can hardly be tamed in adulthood and are
much more shy and/or agressive.
And that hand raised, wild species have much more of a flight reflex and panic much more easily even when hand reared.

Budgies are already
domesticated because their size, body composition, fertility and
behaviour has changed significant from their wild ancestors.
Just
because they have needs that are less easy to meet, does not mean
they are not domesticated.

And their needs won’t change through any breeding as they are now.
No matter how domesticated, a horse will need pasture and a budgie will need room to fly and a proper diet.

Or we could say, because a pig is
much harder to keep in a flat than a dog of the same size, the pig is
less domesticated.
No, their needs are just not as easily
meet under our modern circumstances.

And just like with dogs, there are canary(and budgie) breeds
that have changed so much through human interference, that they can’t
survive without human help.

Also, some dove species kept as pets are not 100% domesticated.
Similiar to some fowl.

Thank you very much for the correction about canaries, I only have had done limited reading on them and had read they aren’t domesticated and are still afraid of people; however, in regards to budgies, no, they are not domesticated.

Domestication means we have bred out fear of humans, changed their biology significantly, and usually bred in a reliance on humans, neither of which budgies have. If a species has an inherent fear of humans (from birth/hatching), it is not domesticated. Budgies, as do all parrots species almost always need to be taught not to fear humans. This is a telltale sign that they are not domesticated. They are still wild parrots, whether they have been bred longer than other parrots in captivity or not.

I have done some searching for this post to see if I could find any genetic differences between wild type budgies and American/English budgies (which I just learnt are the same species, Melopsittacus undulatus), and the only thing I could find are color morphs, and size in the case of English budgies. One could also argue life span, but that’s just a side effect from captivity and not living in the wild with predators, not us breeding it into them. Color morphs are not a sign of domestication, as we do this with many other animals, especially reptiles and amphibians.

Also, of course my statement of “they make good pets if you’re willing to work with them” applies to all animals, but it goes many times over for non-domesticated animals, as they generally have more complex needs. A cockatiel is going to be a more difficult animal to take care of than a pigeon, since we have bred and adapted pigeons to be used to us over millennia.