Training Your Parrot to Play With Cheap Toys

Isn't it always the case? You spend dollars and dollars on toys for your kids, and all they want to do is play with the box! With this new economy, we want to save money while keeping our kids entertained, so we're always looking for parrot safe, inexpensive and readily available toys. Our first Training Your Parrot to Play With Cheap Toys YouTube video, featuring our Timneh African Grey parrot Tillie, focused on an item we realized we shouldn't be throwing away: plastic bottle caps. This is far and away our most viewed YouTube video. So, to make this a series, we produced another YouTube video, Training Your Parrot to Play With Cheap Toys: Paper Bags. This makes the answer to the question: Paper or Plastic? simple. This new YouTube video features our Hyacinth Macaw parrot Princess Tara, and our Congo African Grey parrot, Arua:

To make it easy to view the original Training Your Parrot to Play With Cheap Toys YouTube video, we've added it here. Training Your Parrot to Play With Cheap Toys: Bottle Caps:

Since our parrots usually prefer to play with the containers rather than the contents, we produced yet another Training Your Parrot to Play With Cheap Toys YouTube video, featuring our Timneh African grey parrot Tillie: Training Your Parrot to Play With Cheap Toys: Cardboard Boxes. Our smaller parrots especially love chewing up cereal boxes and tissue boxes, although any cardboard container is popular with our flock, including toilet paper rolls. Just be sure they are not covered in glue. Inspect the material before giving it to your parrots, and if in doubt just toss it out! Something to watch out for, however, is nesting behavior. You want to be sure your parrots are playing with the boxes, and not trying to build a nest. For more about the topic of nest building, see our blog post about our female Blue and Gold macaw, Miss Bubba Boy: Our Flock: Bubba's Brood.

We're always anxious to hear about any other ideas for great, cheap, and readily available parrot toys. Got an idea? Please share it with us.