Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Dr. Laurie Hess, Director of Pet Health and Nutrition at ZuPreem, and today, I want to tell you about one of my very favorite small birds, the budgerigar, also known as the parakeet or the budgie.

Budgies are perfect family pets as they’re small, very easily handleable. They’re easily trained as well to come onto your finger. They love to interact with their owners. They’re extremely social. In fact, in Australia, where they’re native, they live in flocks of thousands of birds and they really bond closely to their owners as pets.

They come in all different colors: green, yellow, white, blue and all kinds of variations in between. Often, when people have one, they want more than one.

They actually are terrific talkers. Believe it or not, you can teach even little budgies to learn different languages. I knew one that spoke Spanish, English and Hebrew, of all things. It was amazing to listen to this little bird talk.

And they are one of the very few species that are sexually dimorphic, which means we can tell males from females. Males and females have different colors right around their beak or on their nostrils. When they’re young, they all start as sort of a purple lavender color. Females tend to develop a pink or even a brown color around their nostrils as they age, while males tend to develop a bluish color there.

So they are perfect family pets and terrific little birds if you’re looking for a first time bird for your family and your children.