My life has been spent doing what many people don’t do – observing birds in the wild. And, after seven decades of doing so, I have seen that wild birds live incredibly complex, varied, and yet regimented lives.
Yes. Regimented. They are not as free as song and poem and romantic imagining may indicate; their survival invariably depends upon necessary adjustments to changing seasons, food availability, need to establish and protect breeding territories, avoidance of predators, and much else.
These are the circumstances that derive from literally millions of years of an evolutionary trajectory whereby each species adapted in all ways to the conditions of a specific, often incredibly varying, environment. Those environments, emphatically, are not and never were, imprisonment. The regimentation accommodated, not restricted, natural behavior and instincts. Consider the budgerigar (also called a budgie), a small parrot that lives in the arid vastness of a great desert, thousands of square miles in extant. There, he swarms in great flocks, often moving into more humid, greener habitat, or grasslands where the seeds of mulga, mallee, and spinifex provide sustenance. A social creature, the budgie may join a flock of more than ten thousand to visit waterholes, being most active in the morning. His body is fine-tuned to release hormones that prompt breeding condition when food is most abundant. There is some seasonal migratory movements that may cover hundreds of miles.
None of this can be replicated in a bird cage, and yet that is how so many budgies are forced to live. One of the most common pet birds, millions of budgies are held as pets in captivity, and we should realize that the behaviors we think of, in anthropomorphic terms, as “cute,” such as the bird “talking” to his image in a mirror, derive from frustrated social instincts.
Larger parrots also suffer in captivity. Their frustrations at the abnormalities of life in a cage too often lead to a form of nearly incurable self-mutilation called feather-plucking, an obsessive indicator of serious stress. And, once the novelty of having a parrot wears thin, these larger parrots’ tendency to chew everything, make loud noises, and their ability to create mess leads “owners” to abandon them, too often to even worse conditions.
Captive birds are too often treated as toys, as trophies, or as surrogate children, all to human benefit, not the birds’. And, these poor creatures can be bought and sold by anyone – no knowledge of a species’ natural behaviors or ecology required! When illness or injury occurs, vet bills are often far greater than the cost of the bird, even if a veterinarian with the required skills can be found, and the birds are left to suffer illness.
No matter how much it is rationalized, and no matter how common pet birds are, birds are wild animals and they do not belong in cages – not now, not ever.
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.William Blake (English poet, artist, and mystic. 1757-1827.)
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
