Birds For Dummies. Gina Spadafori

much. For disinfecting, use ½ cup of ordinary bleach to one gallon of water. Do your cleaning away from your bird, of course, and make sure to rinse and air-dry anything you clean before reintroducing items to her living space. Although scented cleaners may smell good to you, avoid strongly perfumed products such as those with pine oils. They can damage your bird’s delicate respiratory membranes.

       Dishwasher: If you don’t have one of these kitchen helpers, bringing a bird into your life and home is a great excuse to invest in a dishwasher. Sure, you can hand-wash in hot, soapy water, but running dishes, perches, toys, and cage grates and skirts through the hottest dishwasher cycle gets them cleaner more easily. For rope toys, your washing machine is a lifesaver, too.

       Handheld vacuum: Great for snarfing up pellets, dust, feathers, shells, seeds … and everything else. You gotta have one.

      Preventing messes in the first place

      Whatever lands on something you can throw away or wash out is one more battle with mess you can win easily. Newspapers and towels are your main weapons in this war.

      Newspaper can line the cage (see the nearby sidebar “All the news that fits the cage”) or cover the floor. You can also purchase rolls of butcher paper, packing paper, painter’s paper, or newsprint, all available from online or big-box retailers. Avoid anything coated or printed with colored ink. (Plastic mats and dog crate trays are good floor coverings beneath the cage, too.)

      Some people prefer to use small-animal bedding under the bottom cage grate, and that’s fine. Skip wood shavings and chips, though, and go for bedding made of shredded paper or cardboard. (Care Fresh is one brand we know and recommend.) Wood shavings and chips are dustier and can irritate your bird’s airways, especially in the case of aromatic woods such as pine and cedar. Also, remember that one advantage of having newspaper on the bottom of the cage is just that: You can see the mess, which can help you remember to clean it more frequently. Absorbent materials such as shredded paper, wood chips, or other things look less messy and may not prompt you to clean as often as you should.

      

Some bedding has fungal spores. Freshly ground materials, including eucalyptus branches and leaves, although they may smell nice, may be introducing things that you really don’t want in your bird’s living quarters. When dampened and maintained in a warm and humid environment — poof! — you’ve got fungus among us, which can be a risk to your bird’s health. Frequent changing and cleaning keeps the problem at bay.

      Towels provide good footing and mess prevention for any areas your bird may explore — and cleanup is as easy as throwing the towels in the wash. Watch for frayed or worn spots that can catch toes, feet, or heads. Towels are also great for covering your clothing when your bird is in a snuggly mood.

      

Save old towels for bird use, and ask friends and relatives to do the same. You can also look for inexpensive terry-cloth shop towels in the auto section of any discount store. These hold up well to messes and repeated washings.

      Towels are also an important tool to help you restrain your bird for grooming or when he’s sick. To learn how to “towel” your bird, see Chapter 7.

      ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS THE CAGE

      How common are newspapers as poop catchers? So common that many cages are designed to fit the standardized size of an American or Canadian newspaper. (The standardization came about because of advertisers, not bird lovers, of course!)

      Newspapers are great cage liners. You’re likely to hear some fuss and bother about black ink posing some risks to birds, but we’ve never seen a problem, and we know of no study to validate that a threat actually exists. Newspaper inks are mostly soy-based, and although they may rub off on your bird (and your hands while you read the paper), they don’t present any health issues that we can cite. We recommend plain old black-and-white pages — no color ink, and no glossy paper. (Colors and gloss add chemicals your bird doesn’t need to be dealing with.)