Parrots
Two toes forward and two back, which is what lets a parrot hold food in one foot. Long lived as a family, and among the few birds that use tools.
Overview
Parrot covers around 400 species, from a 25 g parrotlet to a 1.8 kg macaw, and what they share matters more than what separates them: high intelligence, long lives, strong pair and flock bonds, and a beak built to destroy things.
Those four traits are also the whole difficulty. An intelligent, long lived, social animal that needs to chew is not a low maintenance pet, and the mismatch between that and what people expect is why parrot rescues exist.
Temperament
Social to the core. Almost every parrot kept as a pet is a flock animal, and the behaviours people find hardest, screaming, biting and feather destruction, are usually a social or occupational need that is not being met rather than a temperament problem.
They are not domesticated. A hand raised parrot is a tame wild animal, one or two generations from the forest, and it retains the full behavioural repertoire including seasonal hormonal aggression. That is not a reason to avoid them. It is the correct expectation to hold.
Care and grooming
A formulated pellet base with vegetables and some fruit. Seeds are deficient in vitamin A, in the amino acids lysine and methionine, and in calcium, and a seed only diet is suboptimal regardless of what is sprinkled over it. Pelleted diets carry vitamin A at 5,000 to 8,000 IU per kilogram, and indiscriminate extra supplementation causes its own toxicity.
No parrot is hypoallergenic. The feather dust, heaviest in cockatoos and greys, is what allergic people react to.
Living and exercise
By species, always wider rather than taller, and the cage is the base rather than the day. Out of cage time, foraging that takes work, and destructible wood are the three things that separate a parrot that is occupied from one that is not.
One household hazard is worth naming for every parrot owner. Nonstick cookware overheated past 280 C, which is 536 F, releases fumes that are rapidly lethal to birds. In a controlled study, nine minutes of exposure killed 97 percent of the budgerigars in it, and birds are usually found dead rather than seen becoming ill.
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