Amazon Parrot
Green, stocky and loud: an Amazon at full volume carries through a house and out of it. Strong talkers, and they live for decades.
Photo by prague.czech.photo, CC BY 2.0
Overview
Amazon parrots are stocky, green, mostly Central and South American parrots that run from around 250 to 700 g depending on the species, and they are the extroverts of the parrot world. Where an African grey watches, an Amazon performs.
They are among the best talkers kept, with strong clear voices, and they sing. They are also loud in a way that carries through walls, and that is not a training problem to be solved so much as the species being itself at dawn and dusk.
Temperament
Bold, confident and theatrical. An Amazon that is happy is obvious about it, and one that is not is equally obvious.
Mature males of several species become seasonally hormonal and can be genuinely aggressive during that period, pinning their eyes, fanning their tails and biting hard. It passes, and it comes back annually. Reading the body language is most of what living with one well consists of, and it is learnable rather than mysterious.
Care and grooming
A formulated pellet base with vegetables and limited fruit. Amazons put on weight easily, more so than most parrots, and an obese Amazon on a sunflower seed diet is one of the commonest presentations in avian practice.
Seed only diets are deficient in vitamin A, protein and calcium regardless of what is sprinkled on them, and vitamin A deficiency has historically been noted specifically in parrots fed that way. Pelleted diets are formulated to carry 5,000 to 8,000 IU of vitamin A per kilogram of feed.
Living and exercise
36 by 24 by 48 inches as a minimum cage, with a play stand outside it and several hours a day out. Amazons are strong chewers and destroy soft wood quickly, which is the point of giving it to them.
They are long lived, 40 to 70 years, so an Amazon bought by someone in their forties is a bird that needs naming in a will. That is not a dramatic statement about parrots, it is arithmetic, and it is the single most useful thing to think about before buying one.
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