Birds Anyone?

[Emmsmom]

We have a male and female cockatiel. Elvis(the male) can get rather vocal at times but how annoying it can be depends on what you teach him to sing. LOL Last fall Elvis use to listen to a bird outside while we had the windows open. Well it took him all of 2 weeks to learn the song and now he won't stop. It is kinda of annoying at times because he sounds just like a siren. He will also make the "cat call" whistle too.

Memphis(the female) is very quiet. Females don't normally sing they just kinda chirp. Now when she hears my husband come home she will start screaming until he comes in and says hi. THen she will calm down.

The bad side to owning them is the mess they can make. They do produce a lot of dust from cleaning themselves so much. You also CAN NOT let them near ANYTHING shiny and delicate because they are very curious and they will pick at it. Their wings and toenails need to be clipped on regular basis. We use to have a male parakeet and we had to find him a new home. He was driving me crazy. He didn't sing he just screamed ALL the time. If you plan on getting 2 birds you need to try and get 2 siblings or a male and female that have already bonded. It is much easier that way. We didn't go this route and it took a while for Elvis and Memphis to get use to each other. We had to keep them seperated a lot. Now they clean each other but they still haven't bonded. So NO babies for us! A male a female will only mate if the bond so I am just fine with not having any babies. We just wanted a male that would sing. We are still trying to teach him other songs it just takes a while.