Parrot life stages?

Question

Just curious- how long did it take for your birds to "grow up"?

I noticed that it took my oldest goffins about a year to fully wean and get out of the "infant" stage (eventhough he was fully feathered), and then he went thru the "terrible twos" of screaming and chewing on EVERYTHING (which lasted until he was about 3 or 4), and then early puberty (starting at about 4 or 5- in which he began to have favorite "toys" and figured out what "feels good"), and now (age 6 and 1/2) he seems to be actively trying to court and bond (has started to feed me and my boyfriend, is protective of the younger goffins- who is in HER terrible twos, and in general has decided to be a watch-bird).

I'm curious what developmental stages other bird owners have noticed with their feathered friends :-)

Answer 1

It took our african grey a few years before he matured totally. He's now 10 and a very well behaived bird. I have a menagerie of different ages and stages going on. I have our 10 yr old grey, a 6 yr old female eclectus, a 1 year old female eclectus, a 4 yr old male eclectus and 2 13 week male eclectuses. OH, and a newly hatched baby eclectus of 4 days old. LOL With the older birds it took them all least 4 years before they "grew up". They went through the, I'm a baby stage, then the terrible two where they are tearing everything up and noisy. That stage always lasted a couple of years and then they seemed to get mellow out.
Also depends on the type of bird..i know cockatoos are quite a bit more high strung then eclectus parrots so you may find the duration of the stages longer than I do.

Answer 2

n general, an area which has, relative to other areas, a great concentration of different species within a particular family is likely to be the original ancestral home of that family. The diversity of Psittaciformes in South America and Australasia suggests that the order has a Gondwanian origin. The parrot family's fossil record, however, is sparse and their origin remains a matter of informed speculation rather than fact.

The earliest known record of parrot-like birds dates to the late Cretaceous about 70 million years ago. A single 15 mm fragment from a lower bill found in Wyoming is similar to that of a modern lorikeet. It is not clear if this find should be classified as a parrot or not.

Europe is the site of more extensive records from the Eocene (58 to 36 million years ago). Several fairly complete skeletons of parrot-like birds have been found in England and Germany. Some uncertainty remains, but on the whole it seems more likely that these are not true ancestors of the modern parrots, but are a related group which evolved in the Northern Hemisphere but have since died out.

The Southern Hemisphere does not have nearly as rich a fossil record for the period of interest as the Northern, and contains no known parrot-like remains earlier than the early to middle Miocene, around 20 million years ago. At this point, however, is found the first unambiguous parrot fossil (as opposed to a parrot-like one), an upper jaw which is indistinguishable from that of a modern white cockatoo .