It’s easy to pick up bad budgie care habits. But these bad habits that are easy for us to live with are hard for your parakeet to live with. Your bad habits can hurt, or even kill, your parakeet.
Let’s take a look at some of these common mistakes:
1. A big mistake is feeding your parakeet a seed diet.
Budgies need more than just a seed mix to stay healthy. Giving your parakeet only seeds is like eating only turkey. Turkey may be a good food, but you wouldn’t stay healthy if that was all you ate, would you?
Now, when you bring a parakeet home, it has probably only been seed fed until now. So when you give your parakeet another food, he rejects it. That is a natural reaction. If she had never seen a potato before, she would be a little suspicious when one appeared on his plate.
It is this natural reaction of your budgie that leaves budgie owners to say things like ‘my budgie only likes seeds’ or ‘I just fed my budgie seeds and it looks fine’.
The truth is that no animal that has a poor diet will be very healthy, or live as long as it can.
2. Exposing your parakeet to extreme temperatures
A mistake that is not so obvious, but just as deadly for your parakeet, is exposing it to sudden changes in temperature and drafts.
Sitting your parakeet’s cage next to the window, so you can have a beautiful view and watch the birds fly by, is really dangerous. You see, the constant drafts will probably make your parakeet sick. And a parakeet that gets a chest infection can go downhill very quickly.
Plus, the heat can blow your budget. If your budgie’s cage is getting all the heat from the midday sun, it’s easy for your budgie to get dehydrated. If there is no shade in the cage, your parakeet has no choice but to sit there while the heat makes it uncomfortable.
Budgies can be hardy animals, but there are some conditions they are simply not fit to live in.
3. Windows without mesh
You may not have even considered this one. Your windows are dangerous to your parakeet, as is any glass door. When you let your parakeet out of his cage and fly away, the parakeet often doesn’t realize the glass is there and tries to fly through it.
This is not only dangerous, but can be deadly. I’m sorry if that sounded a bit melodramatic, but I’m serious. Lots of parakeets break their necks crashing into windows. Not to mention the shattered beaks and other injuries.
Sadly, more parakeets die this way each year. Hopefully, your parakeet won’t be one of them.
