Exercise and Mental Stimulation for Birds 101

The importance of exercise

Exercise is vitally important for the health of your bird. Not only does exercise lead to a stronger body, stronger muscles, and beak but it also creates a happier bird with purpose and a higher level of life enjoyment.

Exercise prevents:

Obesity

Obesity is common in pet birds due to lack of exercise and improper nutrition (usually related to a diet too high in seeded components). Obesity can lead to injuries and fractures due to the inability to safely navigate their environment inside or outside of the cage. It limits the ability to fly and so limits the scope of the environment available for the bird to engage with, reducing the opportunity for enrichment. Obesity can also cause serious health problems, leading to fatty liver, organ failure, and even death.

Boredom

Boredom alone can lead to behaviourally associated health concerns such as feather plucking. This is a condition in which birds pull out their feathers leading to pain, potentially causing infection, and also resulting in an aesthetically displeasing bald bird. 

This also has associated issues if housed with other birds as it prevents mutual preening (a natural behaviour of grooming themselves and their bonded companions) and can lead to cannibalism. A lone bird being unable to preen due to feather loss as a result of feather plucking will develop other severe mental health and behavioural disorders due to being unable to perform natural behaviours.
 

Exercise is a great way to relieve boredom and promote positive behaviours in your pet bird. At least 1 hour a day of exercise is recommended.

Exercise can include supervised playtime outside of the cage or enrichment involving playing with toys inside the cage.

Encouraging exercise

Encouraging exercise doesn’t have to be difficult. Allocating at least 1 hour a day to exercise and interact with your bird is a great way to build the companion animal bond and keep your pet happy.

Time outside of the cage gives a better opportunity for flight and strengthens muscles as they move around the home environment. Providing safe toys, climbing elements and perches around the room with treats encourages your bird to interact with the environment and greatly enhances their enrichment whilst getting exercise.

Games and interactive toys are also useful for mental and emotional stimulation and encouraging “accidental” exercise. Some species of birds are particularly intelligent, opening up lots of possibilities to be inventive with exercise and enrichment. Raising the flag, opening locks, or sorting shapes are all fun games to engage your bird in exercise in a fun way.

Importance of mental stimulation

Mental stimulation, otherwise termed “enrichment,” is a key part of ensuring your bird’s optimum health and welfare. Enrichment promotes positive behaviours by providing the opportunity to express natural behaviours and promote overall well-being, keeping them mentally, physically, and emotionally enriched. In the wild, birds would spend a lot of their time foraging, travelling distances to find food, avoiding predators, and engaging in natural behaviours with companions/ flock mates. Captive birds need added input to ensure they don’t get bored or suffer the consequences of being cooped up.

Consequences of a lack of enrichment include the development of stereotypical behaviours like

• Feather plucking
• Cage biting
• Repetitive swaying
• Repetitive bouncing
• Route pacing in cages

Providing mental stimulation

Some of the larger-brained birds, like parakeets and parrots, have greater requirements for mental stimulation than others. Parrots have been described as having the mental capacity of a 3-5-year-old child. With this in mind, mental stimulation should be provided in a variety of ways to ensure a well-rounded happy bird.

Social enrichment

• Play interactively with your bird
• Provide opportunities for your bird to interact with birds, people, and other species safely. This could include flying with other birds in an aviary, pairing with another bird, or interacting in playtime with humans.

Cognitive enrichment

• Training birds to learn words, phrases, and songs.
• Talk to your bird in everyday life. They enjoy the interaction and may pick up a few words, enjoying mimicking them back to you, especially if it results in a desired behaviour from their person, such as receiving a treat.
• Puzzle/Interactive toys
• Teach and learn toys.
• Use music as a tool. Birds appear to enjoy and engage with music (perhaps due to their own relationship with song, varying pitch, rhythms, and patterns). Music has been seen to relieve stress and anxiety in animals including birds. Birds can be seen to bob along, dance and vocalise to music, clearly enjoying the stimulation.

Physical environmental enrichment

• Rotating and changing toys weekly to keep engagement.
• Altering their cage environment, swapping out toys, changing the position of furniture, making life interesting, and encouraging them to explore and interact with their environment.

Sensory enrichment

• Destructible toys
• Providing a range of toys with different textures, sights, sounds, and smells to interact with.

Dietary enrichment

• Foraging toys
• Introduce new food items in new ways
• Hiding treats

Encouraging exercise and providing mental stimulation in the form of enrichment tools is vital to the health and happiness of your pet bird. If you have any concerns about implementing exercise or enrichment in your bird, speak to your vet.