Dear Parrots magazine,
All Pals Now
I have read many articles about adding a second or third bird and how they would get on with the original ones that we already have. Well, I have two African Greys and a large flight in a utility room, and they have lots of freedom and light, and a good environment.
The query came when a friend of one of my neighbours had a Timneh Grey she had to re-home because of her failing health, so I thought what do I do?
First of all I put the Timneh Grey into a cage and positioned it close to the flight where my two other Greys were, but they just didn’t seem to like each other and we often had three fluffed up parrots. So this gave me a problem. Reading what I have about neutral rooms, I decided to take the two Greys and put them in a cage (I have quite a number of various sized cages) and I put the Timneh in another cage. I took them into my conservatory, which is on the other side of the house. Neither of these birds had been in the conservatory before, so I thought this might be a solution.
Well, the aggression never materialised and the two Greys and the Timneh constantly looked at each other and appeared to want to make friends. I kept them like this for a couple of days, by which time I decided to take the plunge and let them out all together in the conservatory, which was secure. All the time through this process, my husband, myself and one of my daughters were watching the birds, but as it happened there was no problem. To our astonishment, they all got on really well.
So the final stage was to try the three of them back in the big flight, which had been disinfected, cleaned and hopefully removed all trace of their familiar smells. Bob’s your uncle, all turned out well and they have enjoyed their lives together for the last seven months.
Melanie Forester, by email