How to Raise Lovebirds? A Detailed Guide to Care and Training
The lovebird, also called the qingliang parrot or love bird, is a particularly cute and intelligent parrot with a red beak and green feathers, making it especially beautiful to look at. Keeping pets at home has now become a trend, and quite a few people keep parrots, so do you know how to raise a lovebird? Let's find out together below!
How to Raise Lovebirds
1. Lovebirds mostly eat millet in the husk and like cereal grains in the husk, but feeding only millet will leave the parrot undernourished, so a mix of several grains must be fed, such as rice, hemp seeds, barnyard grass seeds, sunflower seeds, red millet, black millet, yellow millet, safflower seeds, sorghum, and so on. Note that sunflower seeds should not be fed too much; feeding 10 to 20 raw sunflower seeds per day is best.
2. Besides grains, lovebirds should also appropriately eat some clean fruits and vegetables; fruits should be cut into small pieces for feeding. Also pay attention to supplementing calcium for the parrot; you can buy some cuttlebone, or crush eggshells and mix them into the food, but be careful about the amount of food, and it is not advisable to raise the parrot too fat, otherwise it will be difficult to breed.
3. Pay attention to cage hygiene and clean the parrot's droppings on time; you can spread some wood shavings or fine sand at the bottom of the cage to prevent bacterial and viral infections and reduce parasites. At the same time, pay attention to the cage's location; choose a quiet place without disturbance, with no environmental pollution, and ensure air circulation and freshness. It is not suitable to keep parrots indoors. Because parrots like to bite the cage, you should also prepare a molar stick for the parrot, ordinary wood will do, to prevent the parrot's hooked beak from growing longer and longer and starting to fight.
4. When chicks are raised to about 6 months old they reach sexual maturity and can breed, so you should prepare a wooden box and a breeding box for the parrot. However, lovebirds will not breed in the hot summer; other seasons are all fine. Generally the female lays 6 to 8 eggs per clutch, with an incubation period of about 19 days.
5. Lovebirds also need drinking water, but note that the water must be changed every day. If conditions allow, you can feed some nutritional sand; nutritional sand contains calcium, iron and many trace elements and nutrients, and helps strengthen bone solidity, make the feather color bright, and supplement calcium.
How to Train Lovebirds
1. Practice climbing stairs
After it can stand steadily and fly to a person's hand by itself, you can begin this step. When the bird is on the finger of one hand, extend a finger of the other hand and slowly press it against the bird's lower abdomen to let it stand up again, and repeat this. At first you can take five times as one unit; after completing one unit, give a gentle stroke or a food reward. Both the units and the number of times can be increased according to the situation until the bird gets used to it. Doing this also makes them very used to jumping onto your finger later, somewhat similar to the second half of the previous training step one.
2. Practice standing on a person's shoulder
Once it has a certain grip, you can place the bird on your shoulder to accompany you while you use the computer, read, and go about your daily life at home. This lets it blend more into the human living environment instead of staying all the time in a box or cage, and over time it will become bold and crawl all over you.
What Food Do Lovebirds Eat
Wild lovebirds prefer eating plant seeds and fruits. They usually gather in large flocks in farming areas, mostly foraging on the ground, mainly feeding on grass seeds, berries, fruits, and tender plant sprouts on the ground; for example, rice in paddy fields and wild green vegetables in the fields are all their food. Of course, after coming home, they no longer need to worry about food, because keepers have prepared it all for them. Domestic pet parrots like to eat many foods, such as biscuits, bread, steamed buns, rice, green vegetables, Chinese cabbage outer leaves, carrot tops, cucumber, fruit, earthworms, rice, millet, and so on.
How to Choose a Good Lovebird
When buying a lovebird, you must note whether the one you buy is artificially bred rather than wild-caught. This is not only because of moral and conservation issues; wild-caught birds are usually prone to illness and death. Lovebirds are very good pets, especially lovebirds raised by hand-feeding from the chick stage; if they trust people, they can be very close to humans and can stand on a human's finger or shoulder. Very few lovebirds can talk, but if training starts from a young age, they may be able to imitate human speech.
As mentioned above, many people may think lovebirds can talk, but in fact lovebirds happen to be a parrot species that cannot talk, so if you like parrot species that can talk, you can keep species such as African grey parrots, macaws, and mynahs!