There is absolutely no doubt that birds make for splendid companions. If you care for them and raise them properly, they will offer you a loyal friendship that you will cherish forever. Some of the birds are easy to interact with, and you can start to bond with your pet right from the time when you bring it home. Other birds might take some time to break the proverbial ice and warm-up. If you have one of these birds, you may be wondering whether you are sufficiently interacting with your pet.

How Often and How to Interact with Your Bird?

You should make your bird an integral part of your family and spend some quality 1-1 time with it each day. However, that does not necessarily mean that you should hold and stroke the creature. Some of the birds simply are displeased when humans lay their hands on them. Although they enjoy interacting, hanging out, playing, and having fun with their people, but do not like to be touched physically. 

Other birds may tend to consider you as a possible mate, so it is best if you limit your physical interaction with them, particularly during hormonal season. Furthermore, there also happen to be birds who like nothing more than sitting and having you scratch their pretty little heads for several hours! You should try to become acquainted enough with your pet bird to offer the amount of touching that the creature is fine with.

A common mistake that most bird owners tend to make when they bring their new bird to their house for the first time is to handle and interact with it constantly. This does set impractical expectations in the creature, which may lead to behavior issues at some point. 

Try to interact with your new bird and handle it only as much as you are planning to 4 months from this point onwards. For instance, if you feel that you will have half an hour every day to interact with your bird personally, then that is how much time you ought to spend together right from the start.

Petting Your Bird: How to do it Correctly

To help your bird build a healthy bond with yourself and other members in your house, make sure that you keep petting and caresses limited to the feet or head only and request other people to do the same. You may be wondering why we do this. It is because the sexual organs of birds are directly under its wings on its back.

If you give full body strokes to your pet bird, what you manage to do is stimulate sexual hormone production. Petting your bird under the wings or down its back may result in a sexually irritated bird. The bird might see you as their mate instead of a companion. A bonded mated bird can be aggressive to other people in your house, as it becomes possessive or jealous of you.

It is also all right to handle the feet of your bird. This is a splendid idea since if your pet is acclimatized to you handling its tiny toes, you can clip its nails easily and without any bother.

Should you have Your Bird Perch on Your Shoulder?

Some people have their pet bird perch on their shoulders to interact with it more. However, it would help if you refrained from doing this. When your pet sits on your shoulder, you cannot see it or observe its body language. You can’t tell whether something is scaring or bothering it.

Kids and Bird Interaction

You might already be privy to the fact that you can injure birds easily if you handle or squeeze them in a very rough manner. However, it is quite unfortunate that kids often fail to understand how delicate birds are. Therefore, if you have kids in your house, it is very important to teach them how to handle, pet, and interact properly with your bird. 

Bear in mind that doing this is for the safety of your bird and the safety of the kids. As a case to point, if you have a parrot, you would know that these creatures have very strong beaks that can cause sore bites. That is why you should encourage kids to interact with your bird respectfully and also be sure to supervise any interaction between the bird and kids at all times.