Exercise Your Bird — Why & How — Videos
We focus on bird and parrot nutrition a lot here because of the complexity of a bird’s anatomy. Birds require far more energy than their ground-based counterparts. Migratory birds fly at high altitudes where the air is thin. You and I would require supplemental oxygen at those altitudes.
Birds have two matching lungs just like mammals but they’re totally different organs. Our lungs contain tubes that flow into little sacs. Cul-de-sacs actually because air can only go in and out of them, never flow through them, to the outside. They take up a good portion of our chest. Air comes in from the mouth down to our trachea and then through a complex series of tubes — bronchi, actually — eventually into tiny air capillaries which then exchange gas between the ventilation system in the blood where it moves the oxygen to the bodies cells.
When you think of birds lungs think how water moves in and out of a sponge. Air comes directly into the birds lungs and then into adjacent air sacs. The sacs are believed to function kind of like bellows and push the air through the birds lungs. Human lungs exchange air with every breath, birds lungs hold a constant volume of air. They inflate but they don’t deflate — they hold air. Think about submarines — they rise and fall by pumping air into cavities when they want to go up, the air is replaced with water when they go down. If birds lungs filled and emptied with every breath their altitude would constantly change.
The advantages of this “constantly inflated” design are clear. Birds are able to stay on course easily and it allows them to have a much higher energy level than mammals. Mammals lose energy just by breathing because of the actions of their lungs
How rapidly birds breathe is inversely proportionate to how much they weigh. Parrots will take approximately 14 breaths per minute when at rest. Bird breasts are different than ours. When a parrot takes a breath, it’s chest muscles forces it’s breastbone out then air is sucked in through it’s nostrils. A safety note here: holding birds too tightly around their chest could suffocate them
The smaller the bird the larger it’s heart relative to its size. The human heart is typically about one half of 1% of body weight and the average heart rate at rest is 72 bpm. Your bird or parrot’s heart can be anywhere from 1–1/2 to 2% of its body weight and have a standing heart rate of anywhere from 140–400 bpm.
When we work out we’re happy to have a 120 bpm heart rate during a brisk walk maybe 140 to 160 beats per minute while putting our our body under stress. A bird in flight can have a heart rate exceeding 1000 bpm. (Hummingbirds heartbeats have been measured as high as 1260 bpm. Because hummingbirds are literally always on the verge of starving to death they’re able to to store enough food to survive overnight and slow down their own metabolisms to conserve energy).
So we have these well engineered flying machines that we insist on keeping in enclosed structures. To complicate matters it’s almost impossible to tell if they’re healthy or not. Birds generally don’t get fat. Try taking a birds blood pressure — that’s a bit of a challenge. The two easiest and most accurate ways to keep track of your birds health are to watch its poop and weigh it regularly.
A great deal of emphasis is placed on bird behavior and bird nutrition but time and effort also must be placed on exercising a bird in order to keep them healthy. We provided some videos to help you get started on an exercise program for your bird if you haven’t already.
It’s no secret we are proponents of keeping birds flighted. But as advocates for the birds who want to make sure that if you notice clipped you have the tools needed to exercise said bird.
“If a picture is worth 1000 words, how much is the video worth? We hope these videos will help keep your bird in superb health and keep you, the caged Bird keeper on the right side of sanity.
Yes we know birds are nuts and it’s not uncommon for them to make us crazy. Yet can’t help but love them” — mitchr
Ladders can be an important part of your birds daily exercise routine as seen in this video “Get Your Bird To Exercise” — Parrot play stands and spiral bungees hung from the ceiling provide a wonderful opportunity for your bird to use its feet and legs. Floor walking and wing flapping are simple activities your bird can do daily too.
Sometimes you do not need an elaborate. parrot play stand. In this video a cockatiel does yoga like stretching out his wings and is able to work his way up and down a rope perch attached to another perch suction cupped to a window. Birds are happy to be out of their bird cage and in this case bask in the sunlight by the big glass door
In this video the person becomes the parrot play stand. We see a female (Red) Eclectus parrot being held by the feet while flapping her wings. Wing flapping is a great exercise because it helps push air through the lungs of your bird. This is the equivalent of you walking on a treadmill going nowhere but still getting exercise.
Someone must have gotten an A plus for this science project. It is a wonderfully simple illustration about the functionality of a birds lung and how the air passes through it. Inhalation and exhalation are explained in this remarkably simple animated diagram. It will help you understand the unidirectional flow of air through a birds lungs.
I don’t know if this is my favorite way to exercise a bird but there is clearly a special bond between this man and this blue and gold macaw. We don’t know who’s enjoying themselves more, the man or the bird. At the end of the day the bird got some exercise and the man, well he got to play with his bird.
We recently spoke about providing the best quality of life for handicap birds. In this video we watch as a bird who has an issue with its foot is taught to wave. While raising its foot to wave, its full weight is then exerted on the handicap foot giving it much needed exercise so the bird can live as normal a life as possible.
Sometimes simple stretching exercises will help your bird feel better about himself. The African gray in this video seems content on top of its birds cage and stretch its wings and feet. Call it birdie yoga. What’s important is the bird is out of its cage and able to fully extended its wings.
If you have any comments or questions about the information we’ve been discussing here — please post them below.
Until next time
Catherine Tobsing
President, Windy City Parrot, Inc
Originally published at .