Environmental Of Birds Life

Building or buying an aviary for your birds can be one of the best things you can do; not just for your bird, but for yourself, too. When your bird has more room and a more natural environment, his physical and emotional health will improve, which can decrease any behavioral problems he may have been having before.

An aviary is a large enclosure that has enough room for the bird to fly. While a flight cage also allows flight, an aviary is large enough to actually allow a person to walk around in it. There are both indoor and outdoor aviaries.

Benefits of Aviaries

There are so many benefits to using aviaries with birds. By creating a more natural environment, we increase the quality of life that we provide to our birds.

Flight

The biggest advantage to using an aviary is that it allows your bird safe space to fly. Birds’ bodies are designed for flight, and their physical and emotional health depends upon that ability. When birds are allowed to fly, their respiratory systems work properly. When birds know they can fly, they feel more confident that they can get where they need to go and avoid predators.

Social Interaction

When birds are allowed to live together in an aviary, they get the benefit of interacting with other birds on their own terms. Your Cockatiel may greatly enjoy the company of your Budgie, but really want to avoid the other Cockatiel who bugs her so much. You might not have enough room to house your Amazon and Conure (who are very bonded) together in a cage, but you can with an aviary. If they get tired of each other, there is plenty of room to have quiet time.

Intellectual Stimulation

In an aviary, you can use a variety of safe, non-toxic branches as perches, as well as many different kinds of toys, branches, and food sources. In the wild, parrots work for their food, and it’s so easy to create foraging situations for birds in an aviary by hiding food at different stations. Offering many different kinds of toys and woods to chew provides your bird with hours of stimulation.

If you expect to have birds for a long time (and if you have even a small parrot like a Cockatiel we could be talking about 20 years!), look into using an aviary. Your bird will benefit greatly from this kind of living environment.

Birds have adapted so well to the demands of and trials set by our planet that Sir David Attenborough believes they may be the most successful creatures on earth, more successful even than insects.


At the southern extremity of the world lives the Emperor Penguin, better adapted to the cold than any other animal on earth. Short feathers made up of tiny filaments that trap the air in a continuous layer all around the body enable the adults and chicks to survive some of the coldest conditions on Earth, the Antarctic ice-cap in winter.

The champion of the Arctic, in the cold north, is the ivory gull. This beautiful snow-white gull breeds further north than any other bird, and it perfectly adapted to the conditions which defeat most other life forms. It lives here all year-round, even in the dreary winter dark.

The bar-headed goose breeds in one of the most desolate places on earth - high up on the Tibetan plateau, deep within the heart of the vast Asian continent.

Equally desolate, but much hotter is the vast barren landscape of the Atacama Desert in South America, with not a green leaf in sight. The savage, searing sun heats the grey sand up to temperatures as high as 50C. In this dreadful desert grey gulls live untroubled by predators. But they have to fly hundreds of miles to find food.

There are many other examples of birds living on the edge. The oilbird lives in the total blackness of Venezuelan caves. The rufous hummingbird survives and breed at altitudes of 9000ft and at temperatures well below freezing by making a nest of the highest insulate qualities, a network of lichen and spiders web, as good as the finest down.

Sometimes birds destroy their own habitat. La Perouse Bay on the Hudson Bay in the Canadian Arctic is a traditional breeding ground for the lesser snow goose.

After reserves were created to protect the birds, the population grew to such an extent that the birds actually ate themselves out of their own food. La Perouse Bay today is a saline desert - the geese have eaten and destroyed all the natural grasses that used to grow here. But such self destruction is the exception.

The birds that survive best tend be those most tolerant of man, or most able to take advantage of him. Birds like the waxwing, which have become a major problem for blueberry and strawberry growers in Florida and other states. Flocks of 500-1000 tiny birds can wipe out a whole blueberry crop within a few days.

Some birds, perversely, actually benefit from the pollution from intensive farming. The concentrated fertilisers farmers apply to fields may be good for the crops, but when they are washed out by the rain they contaminate streams and rivers. Rich nutrients cause some aquatic plants and invertebrates to flourish at the expense of the delicate balance of life in the waters.

This is bad for many birds, but not the ruddy duck, a small diving duck of North America. It feeds on the small aquatic Chironomid larvae in lake and river sediment. The larvae thrive in agricultural run-off. Ruddy duck feed on the burgeoning larvae and are also doing well.

The densely crowded and noisy cityscape would seem to be a highly inhospitable place for birds, unlike anything nature has produced. And yet there are birds which survive and prosper in the city. These are the generalists - able to eat anything and nest anywhere.

Black vultures in Sao Paulo city are never more than a flap and a glide from all the fetid rubbish they can eat. These urban scavengers nest on window ledges and roofs of tall skyscrapers. Some spend hours each day basking in front of warm exhausts from air-conditioner units.

In Kampala, Uganda, marabou storks are seen on the Sheraton Hotel. In parts of Africa the white stork now only nests on buildings.

In downtown Manhattan, peregrine falcons can be seen hawking down the "canyons" between buildings for small birds. In the black townships of South Africa, red-footed falcons roost in large numbers. They often select a large tree close to a source of light and pick off the many insects attracted to it.

In Trafalgar Square, London, in the middle of one of the world's largest cities, pigeons outnumber people. These unfussy feeders survive easily on the many scraps of food. The many city window ledges and concrete structures provide ample nesting sites, perfect substitutes for the cliff ledges that are their natural nesting places.

The programme to save the black robin on the Chatham Islands off the coast of New Zealand in 1976 is one of most famous conservation success stories of all.

There were just seven birds left on all the islands, and only one was a female. Scientists removed the female's eggs as soon as they were laid, so inducing her to lay more than one clutch per season.

The eggs were placed into the tiny nests of surrogate parents (warblers and tomtits). The robins were then raised as the tomtits' own chicks and fed up to, and past, fledging. Today there are more than 200 pairs of robins on the Chatham Islands. The idea of using surrogate parents to incubate eggs has been widely copied.