Birds for Sale
Browse parrots, finches, cockatiels and other birds from breeders across the United States, with photos, prices and the seller's own details on every listing.
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Buying birds: what to look at
Birds give you a better set of signals than puppies or kittens and almost nobody uses them, because feathers record what a bird has been fed and how settled it has been for weeks. Once you can read them you can tell a great deal from across a room.
“Fully weaned” is the whole question
For a hand-raised bird, weaning is coming off formula, and unlike a puppy it does not happen on its own: it has to be allowed to happen, gradually, while somebody weighs the bird every day. “Nearly weaned” means not weaned, and it means you have just agreed to hand-feed this week. Formula at the wrong temperature causes crop burn, formula too cool sits and sours, and getting it into the airway instead of the crop kills the bird in seconds. Ask when it last had a hand feed, and treat a vague answer as the answer.
Read the feathers
Look across the tail and the long wing feathers in decent light, not at them. You are looking for stress bars: faint horizontal lines running the width of a feather. A feather grows over days, so a bar marks a stretch during that growth when the bird was short of food, too cold, or badly stressed. One faint bar on one feather is not much. Bars in the same place across several feathers say the whole clutch had a bad week.
A fluffed bird in a warm room is a sick bird
This is the earliest visible sign there is and most people read it as sleepiness. Fluffing is how a bird holds heat, so a chick doing it in a warm room, sitting low with its eyes half closed, is telling you it feels unwell. A well bird is slim, upright, alert and faintly irritated by being stared at.
Ask what it weighs, and what it weighed a week ago
For a bird this is the whole thing, and it is free. A breeder weighing daily gives you both numbers without looking them up. Stable or rising across a week while eating unaided is a weaned bird. Going down is not, whatever it is doing in front of you.
And ask how it was sexed
Not a health question, but the one that saves an argument later. Visual sexing of a young cockatiel is unreliable and DNA sexing is not. A seller who tells you which one they did is a seller telling you the truth about what they know.
More on choosing a seller and reading a listing on the PetListings blog.