Sometimes, when we introduce a toy to our birdie friend, they might not be interested in it immediately. You might find that you are struggling to get your birds to play with toys and yet they are chewing on our notebooks and destroying our wooden furnitures. It may be for fun, it may be because they have a lot of energy or they are trying to send you a message. Which one it might be, you would know your birdies better.
But if you are struggling to get your birds to play with toys you might want to explore these two questions:
- Are they spending their energy else where?
- Are the toys right for them?
Are they spending they energy else where?
If you observe your birdies on a usual day, what do you see them spending most of their time on? You might find they are doing everything else except play with their toys that you bought for them. They may be screaming or just resting all the time which may be an indication that they might be bored. But why are they bored? They have been given a lot of toys. Sounds familiar? This leads to the next question, are the toys right for them?
Are the toys right for them?
This is rather subjective and may differ from bird to bird. Like us, we all have our own preferences, our birds have preferences too. It's up to us to figure out what their preferences are. For example, some birds like to chew on really hard wood while others like softer wood. Some likes to chew on cards or paper where its thin and easy on their beaks while some may like the challenge of thicker materials.
Now lets explore this further. Most of the major store bought toys are made primarily from Pine wood which is generally a harder type of wood. This is probably due to Pine wood being easily accessible. Usually this means there is a lot of it and most of the time, cheaper. If your birds like these type of toy, great! You've found the perfect solution. However, for a lot of us, this may not be our situration. We've looked endlessly trying to find the toy that is right for our birds and what we found is no matter how cheap and accessible a certain type of toy is, it has no value if our birdies don't want to play with it.
Our Toys
We were in a similar situation where our birdies show little interest in most toys that we buy from the store. So we started looking for alternatives and started designing toys that our birdies prefer. Our toys are naturally softer which makes it a bit more versatile.
We say versatile because we have a few some tips on how to encourage play that we can apply on our toys to make it more interesting and fun for our feathered friends.