What do you need to make your own bird toys?

Making a bird toy is mostly a question of what you are allowed to use. The assembly is simple. The materials are where it goes right or wrong.

Here is what actually goes into one.

Something to destroy

The point of a toy is that it comes apart. A bird that cannot damage something loses interest in it, so the bulk of any toy should be material you expect to be reduced to litter.

Softest first, hardest last, that means roughly: sola, palm leaf, balsa, willow, then beech. A small or nervous bird wants the soft end, because the first bite has to work. A macaw will ignore anything that gives way too easily.

Most homemade toys fail by being too hard. If your bird has not touched it in a week, the answer is usually softer, not more interesting.

Something to hold it together

Whatever threads through the middle has to be strong, chewable without falling apart, and safe when it inevitably is chewed. Vegetable tanned leather and natural untreated sisal are the usual answers.

This is also where a common mistake happens. Cotton rope frays into long soft strands that wrap around toes, and birds pull threads loose and swallow them. Sisal is coarser and resists fraying, which makes it the better choice, but no cordage is exempt. Check it, and retire it when strands get long.

Something to work for

A toy that only gets chewed is half a toy. Anything with a cavity, a weave or a gap becomes a foraging puzzle the moment you push a treat into it, and foraging is the behaviour a cage takes away most completely.

Woven shapes, beads with a hollow centre and split blocks all do this without any extra work from you.

Texture, and more than one of them

Birds are particular. A toy made of one material gets tried once. A toy with something soft, something firm and something woven gives a bird three different things to fail at, and the one they like is rarely the one you expected.

This is the single easiest improvement to a homemade toy: stop making it out of one thing.

The part that causes most of the trouble

Hardware. The wood, fibre and weave are the easy part, and the metal is where homemade toys go wrong.

Whatever you hang a toy from is in the cage permanently, gets chewed, and is made of a material you probably cannot identify by looking. Plating, alloys and the way a clasp closes all matter, and a link that a beak can open is a link a foot can get caught in.

We are not going to tell you which hardware to buy, because that is a safety claim and we would want to be certain before making it. It is worth researching properly rather than taking the cheapest option in a craft shop. We answer why we don't provide these hardware in our FAQ.

What to leave out

• Anything dyed or varnished unless you know what with. Craft-grade materials are routinely coloured, and that is the risk rather than the material itself.
• Chrome tanned leather, which is most leather. Only vegetable tanned belongs in a cage, and old belts and bags are almost certainly the wrong kind.
• Pressure-treated timber. Skirting offcuts and old shelving are not bird toys.
• Garden bamboo canes, which are commonly treated against mould with no way to tell by looking.

Where to start

If you are building your first one, take a length of vegetable tanned leather, thread three or four things of different hardness onto it, and hang it low enough that your bird can reach it from a perch. That is a toy.

Our toy parts are the components we use in our own toys, sold singly so you can try a material before committing to it. If you want to know how a particular one behaves first, the materials library covers each in turn.