Written by James Dawson, all rights reserved.
I just picked up this thread and cannot echo strongly enough Chris's
descriptions of benefits of flight. We can allow our birds the miracle of
flight. Indoors is a first step and is where the miracle happens first.
Outdoors is a second step of even greater magnitude. A new world opens up
for freeflighted bird.
It takes a new mind-set in the owner, one which requires throwing off old
published dogma about parrot-keeping and the necessity of clipping. The
benefit of clipping goes to the human and not the bird. Clipping makes the
bird much easier to manage. That's it. The proponents of clipping push the
false sense that the owner is being responsible by cutting feathers and
restricting the birds ability to move. You can see the fallacy of this idea if
you apply same to other loved ones -- dogs, cats, and even children (should we
attach a ball and chain, or perhaps sever the large muscles that allow legs to
function?). Dogs or kids can't run into the street and be killed by a car
if they can't run at all. We wouldn't have to keep an eye on them out the
kitchen window so much if they couldn't move. Those statements seem absurd
and more than a little horrible yet they perfectly parallel what we do to birds
by clipping them. Freeflight requires a greater commitment by the owner --
the flight space has to be free of dangers and the owner has to be much more
vigilant with the bird.
Freeflight is the ultimate enrichment. You can take any of the advantages
described for traditional enrichment (which is essentially creating a complex
and rich environment for the bird) and magnify them perhaps 100 times for indoor
flight and 1000 times for outdoor flight. Is it more risky? Yes.
But even hanging a toy in the cage also brings a certain amount of risk into a
caged birds world (albeit small if it's a good toy). The safest
environment would probably be a padded cell. One has to temper the urge to keep
the animal physically safe with the equally important need to provide mental and
physical exercise.
Chris is right that FF birds are healthy and happy. The exercise alone is enough
to raise health above clipped birds. The other aspect of FF is the
benefits to owners. It's not widely understood among parrot keepers that
most parrots are tremendous and spectacular fliers. We're not taking about
ground birds here, the vast majority of parrots make their living flying.
A bird in a cage is mildly interesting to me. I never tire of watching my
birds fly.
JD
<< Parrots are defenseless against the mirad of outdoor predators, there
original protection was there large groups and huge awareness systems of alert
to dangers around them. In human bonding they lose that natural protection. They
will inevitably become victim to the predator of some kind. >>
I disagree that predation is inevitable. Most parrots can out fly most
raptor species, provided the parrot is a good flier and recognizes a raptor as a
threat. Even a single bird has a good chance of seeing an incoming raptor.
One would hope that they would see dogs, coyotes, and cats as threats too.
I flew four amazons together for 7 months daily and did not lose any. They
reacted to raptors twenty-seven times and survived to talk about it. The worst
was a Cooper's Hawk who made a run at the little flock and separated one out.
But the hawk lost it's nerve and broke off, I think, when she wasn't able to
catch it easily and she saw how big the parrot really was. The evaded
Red-tails a number of times by out flying them and really didn't get too excited
by RT's after awhile (but they always took to the air when one was around). In
the last few encounters, the parrots flew above the RT (an RT has no hope of
catching a bird that's above it).
The discipline of outdoor freeflight is new and instilling awareness of
predators is an area that needs development. Our birds haven't lost their abilities
to avoid predation, they just were never taught to do it. We have to
figure out how to do that. Predation is a risk but doesn't not constitute
an inevitability for an individual. Throw in the human factor (there are
steps we can take to reduce the threat) and the chances for a freeflight bird
have to be much greater than for a wild one. A bird that is flown while the
human partner is there runs relatively low risk in my opinion.
JD
James Dawson is a wildlife biologist specializing in avian social behavior and raptor
biology. He works for Sonora Environmental Consultants, Inc., a company based in
Tucson, Arizona that among other things conducts environmental ed programs that utilize
free flying pscittacines.