>His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours.
Are you worried if you give him excessive screen time he won't be able to focus on his studies or something? ;-)
(Cute story, thanks for sharing.)
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I think my bird already has a difficult time focussing, he acts like he has ADHD. He'll happily sit their doom scrolling watching birds.
The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
> starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
Its even psychologically addicting for birds.
Or alternative interpretation: Parrots are highly social creatures who love hanging out and socialising with other birds. Even a relatively happy parrot who is kept with a few other birds to keep them company, and has access to rooms to fly can feel under-socialised and under-stimulated. (This is not a dig to the commenter in particular. Even if you are richer than a king, and have an aviary zoos would be jealous of probably your parrots are not getting as much stimulation as they would be getting in the wild.) As a substitute to the real socialisation it is craving it finds watching bird videos agreeable.
Basically i wouldn’t call a starving man begging for scraps “addicted”. They just have an unfulfilled need. They found a way to fulfill that need (more or less) and they are pursuing what they found to work for them. This might be bothersome for the keepers of course, but it is not the bird who choose to become their captive pet.
(I want to emphasise here that I assume that the commenter is a lovely, dedicated, bird-loving person who provides a large flock of friends to their parrots and all the enrichement they can think of and money can buy. This is not a comment on them doing anything wrong. Simply an observation that there are some parrots whose needs are neight impossible to fully meet in captivity.)
If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
Unfortunately he is isolated from his species (they are quite rare and endangered - we look out all the time for a female for him), but he flies a lot and socialises with other hook beak birds.
> If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
He eats well (and varied), sleeps well, socialises with other birds and he plays games with us too. He hasn't got feather loss and he's not getting into weird psychotic behaviours. He has certain routines in his day where he waits for example to be let out in the morning and he puts himself back into his cage.
I will say that when you eat near him, he gets excited and seems to be begging (or demanding) food. And when I say "aggressive" with mobile phones, I mean that he lands on you and pecks you (not nearly at full force) until you put on something he wants to watch. It's still not clear to me if it's addiction or just basic need.
The bird is captive and isolated from its fellow birds so of course it craves socialization.
>The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
Do you lock him up when this happens? I care for a bird, if it acts out when we let it roam, we lock it up the next day and it has quickly learned to enjoy it's limited freedom.
If he starts behaving like this we push him off and he flies away. He communicates his boundaries quite clearly by opening his beak (a warning before a peck), and we communicate ours by pushing him away.
I should say that he generally behaves himself, but a little like a child, sometimes he is in "that mood" and is almost looks for trouble.
A friend of mine has a parrot and I asked what having one is like and he just sent me this video [0] and the comment "Either peaceful and quiet or like this, wall to wall, no in between."
Yeah pretty much, they are either just doing their own thing or they are fully engaged with destruction and chaos. You can kind of tell what mood they are in if you spend the time to read them.
Could his new variety of vocalizations be imitating what he sees on his tablet?
Not sure, but it is difficult to imagine where these new sounds are coming from. I have never heard another bird quite like some of the sounds, one particularly clear one sounds like "eel" but it's as clear as a human would pronounce it.
He also cycles through a pattern (probably for attracting a mate) and it gets more and more complex as time goes on. He keeps adding to the noises and pattern, but it's very predictable.
Every generation of parrots just parrots what the last generation of parrots said about them.
Parrot parents parrot their parents