Budgies (Parrakeets) as Pets - A Guide to the Selection Care and Breeding of Parrakeets

By Anon Anon

This vintage book contains a complete handbook on keeping parakeets, being a practical guide to the selection, care, and breeding of these wonderful birds. Including a wealth of invaluable information and useful tips, this volume would be of considerable utility to both existing and prospective parakeet keepers. The chapters of this book include: “How the Parakeet Came to the United States”, “How to Choose your Bird”, “How to Select a Cage”, “How to Feed you Bird and Care for the Cage”, “Training Your Bird”, “Entertaining our Pet Parakeet”, “How the Parakeet Keeps Itself Clean”, etcetera. Many antiquarian books such as this are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on aviculture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781447482512

Book preview

HOW the Parrakeet Came to the United States

The Budgeriger, hereafter called the Parrakeet, is not a bird which is native to the United States. As a matter of fact, it is not even found, in Nature, on the North or South American continent. How then did it work its way into being the most popular of domesticated birds? Here’s the story—

About 110 years ago an English couple named Gould, visited Australia to study the fauna of that land. The purpose of the visit was to observe and collect specimens of animal life on the Australian continent. Since birds are animals, and since Mr. Gould was an ornithologist (one who studies birds), it was natural that the little Parrakeet would catch his eye, and when the couple returned to England they went right to work writing their reports in a beautifully illustrated volume. Featured as one of the highlights of the report was information and pictures of this new bird, the Parrakeet. Sailors, learning of the birds soon preferred them to the standard of the seas, the full grown Parrots, and started to carry them aboard as pets. Once the families and friends of the seamen saw the beautiful Parrakeets the rage was on, and the sailors were compelled to bring back specimens for their friends. It wasn’t too long before a full scale traffic started and Parrakeets were brought into the continent in large numbers.

As soon as the bird became firmly established in the homes of thousands of English, French, Dutch and German Parrakeet-lovers, the aviculturists (people who breed birds) began to experiment with raising their own birds rather than importing them. Not only was breeding the Parrakeet easy, but the birds multiplied very rapidly, and it wasn’t too long before it was discovered that a single pair of birds could easily produce as many as 40 eggs a year! It was a good thing too! For about 40 years after the Goulds left Australia, that government was forced (in 1884) to control the export of the birds, and they only allowed birds to be exported for scientific purposes. All of the original stock of Parrakeets came from Australia between the years of 1840 and 1884, and all the domestic strains are the offspring of those birds.