Center for Avian Rehabilitation & Education

FORAGING!

You may have heard of foraging, as it's been getting more and more attention in the bird world lately. Foraging occurs when your parrot must look/work for her food. In the wild, parrots spend many hours searching for food. In captivity, food is normally provided in a bowl -- no work required! Unfortunately, the hours that would have been spent looking for food are now available, which can lead to problems like screaming, feather destruction, obesity, etc.

It is very easy to begin foraging. If you always feed your bird in the same place, put a piece of paper over his food dish. Once that becomes too easy, tape the paper over the food dish. There are also many toys that you can purchase. We sell many of them at our facility, as do many other retailers. You can hide a treat in her favorite toy for her to find.

One of our volunteers recently switched her timneh african grey, Max, to 100% foraging for her pellets. Max receives 20 Harrison's pellets per day, which are wrapped in a small amount of paper and hidden about her cage. Before making the total switch, the volunteer would hide 15 pellets around Max's cage and place 5 pellets in her food dish. She noticed that Max would eat her hidden pellets first, sometimes leaving the pellets in her food dish uneaten, prompting the switch to all foraging, which has been successful.

The key is taking things slowly. The beginning forager does not understand the concept of looking for his food. With some of the specially-designed foraging toys, we often show our parrot the wonderful treat that we're putting inside. The only time Max gets her favorite treat -- yogurt-covered walnuts -- is when they're hidden in more complex foraging toys. Don't get frustrated if your parrot doesn't seem to get foraging right away -- it might still be too complex for her. Max's flock-mates are not as adept at foraging as she is, so they are provided with easier foraging opportunities, and as their skills improve, they are presented with more challenging ones.

Here is a video of Max opening up one of her new foraging toys. She has used at least 5 different methods to open this toy, and can now do it in under a minute -- time to up the complexity!