You will be wise to end the excitement while it is still of a happy nature. The event often ends with tears and tantrums. It is very much like the child whose birthday party has become overwhelming. There is a tipping point with a cockatoo where excitement becomes aggression. However, they aren’t just pretending to be excited. They are often “arguing” with their humans with very animated, human-like gestures and voice inflections that are an impeccable imitation of human excitement. The videos mentioned above often depict cockatoos in a very excited state. Don’t allow your cockatoo to become over-excited.I will put money on the fact that those videos depict the day’s best 3 minutes with that bird and that the endings of some of the videos were edited out.įor anyone considering a cockatoo, I want to offer three pieces of advice that might help you avoid ruining your life and the life of your new cockatoo. There is an abundance of very entertaining videos posted all over that make life with a cockatoo appear to be the most fun a human could ever hope for with a companion animal. As it turns out, the traits that make us fall in love with cockatoos are the same ones that cause their behavior problems and land them in rescues everywhere. There are specific traits that they have that make it nearly impossible to avoid anthropomorphizing their behavior. The cockatoo, specifically the white ones, are parrots that excel at pulling on our heartstrings. However, our humanness is also the very thing that makes us try so hard to get it right. One of the biggest struggles we have in doing things right for our parrots is with our humanness because it makes something that should be completely natural feel like work. It is even harder to WANT to see things from their perspective because sometimes it is a harsh look at the realities of nature.Īnthropomorphizing is a hole we don’t want to fall into. However, we are human, and it is hard to see things from a parrot’s perspective. The “fort” is a nest and the bird is definitely not playing. It has nothing to do with having found their other half. In reality parrots choose mates based on their ability to produce healthy chicks and defend their nest. However, when we allow ourselves that convenience it causes us to make mistakes in our care for our parrots, such as allowing them to “play” in a “fort” they are building inside a dark cabinet. An example of this would be the presumption that parrots fall in love like humans do based on the fact that they choose a mate for life.Īnthropomorphizing is a tool that many humans use to try to make sense of things that they don’t understand. It means to assign human traits to things that are not human, such as a parrot. If we have helped you better understand your pet, please share this guide to six cockatoo sounds and their meanings on Facebook and Twitter.If you are the kind of person who has scoured the internet to learn everything available about your parrot, you have no doubt come across this word “anthropomorphism”. We hope you have enjoyed our look into your bird’s behavior and have learned more about your bird’s behavior. Learning more about your bird will help you bond better and lets you provide a better life for your pet.

Keeping a journal will show you things about their behavior, you might not notice otherwise, and you’ll start to learn when they are hungry, tired, bored, and happy.

However, the vast majority will fall into the six categories we’ve listed above. Your cockatoo may make several noises, and its vocabulary will grow and change over time as your bird ages and gets used to its environment. You May Also Like: Citron-Crested Cockatoo Bird Species - Personality, Food & Care Guide.It will expect a response, and ignoring it can cause anxiety in your bird, leading to the squawking sound we mentioned earlier. Your bird may also start to call you if it’s feeling bored or lonely.

In the wild, you might hear a cockatoo make calling sounds to find its friends or to find a mate, but in the home, you might hear them if you leave the room and they are wondering where you went.

Umbrella cockatoo swearing