Budgies
The most kept parrot on earth, and a true parrot despite the size. The record for the largest vocabulary of any bird belongs to a budgie, not to a grey.
Overview
The budgerigar is the most widely kept pet bird in the world, roughly five million of them, and it comes from the semi arid interior of Australia where it lives in large nomadic flocks. It is 18 to 20 cm long and weighs about 30 g, and ADW records 21 years in captivity, which is far beyond what most people expect.
There are two types in the hobby and the difference is worth knowing before buying. The pet type is the wild bird's size and shape. The English or show budgie has been bred for exhibition and is noticeably larger and heavier, with more head feather, and it generally does not live as long.
Temperament
Social, chatty and constantly busy. Budgerigars flock in the wild, gathering at dawn and dusk and calling loudly, and a single bird in a quiet house is a bird missing the thing it is built around.
They talk, and they are underrated at it. The voice is fast, quiet and easy to miss, and males learn far more readily than females. A hand raised budgie that gets daily attention becomes genuinely tame, which is rarer in birds sold this cheaply than the price suggests.
Care and grooming
A formulated pellet as the base with vegetables and millet as a treat rather than a staple. In the wild they dehull grass and crop seeds and swallow them whole, and they drink about 5.5 percent of their body weight in water daily.
Seed only diets are the standard problem in this species: they are deficient in vitamin A, in lysine and methionine, and in calcium. Budgies fed nothing but seed develop fatty liver disease and tumours at rates that a change of diet largely removes.
Living and exercise
30 by 18 by 18 inches for a pair, wider rather than taller, with several perch diameters and daily time out.
One kitchen hazard deserves naming, because budgerigars are the species it was measured on. Nonstick cookware overheated past 280 C, which is 536 F, releases fumes that killed 97 percent of budgerigars exposed for nine minutes or more in a controlled study. Birds are usually found dead in the cage rather than seen becoming ill. A bird's cage does not belong in a kitchen.
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