Budgies are awesome. Everyone who has them knows it, but if you’re still on the fence about becoming a budgie parent here are eight reasons budgies make great pets!
- Budgies have an average lifespan of 5-10 years. With the right diet, exercise and care they can exceed that upper limit. It’s amazing to me that something so small has such a nice long lifespan. Imagine the bond you’ll have with your budgie after spending years together.
- Budgies are comparatively inexpensive to keep. Sure, the startup costs can be more than you expected, but spread out over that fairly long lifetime it’s really not that much. Your preferred base food (seed or pellets, likely) probably won’t break the bank, and budgies can eat many of the vegetables and fruits that you do too. The costs also scale to fit your budget. You can get a quality good-sized cage secondhand for next to nothing or buy a new massive cage with all the bells and whistles for several hundred dollars. The same can be said for toys, want to build your own, go for it! Or, if you want to buy toys there’s a vast array available too!
- Budgies are a huge boon to mental health. Having any pet to take care of is tremendously helpful to one’s mindset, but I think budgies are particularly well-suited to lifting moods. Not only are they generally cheery and many of them like to sing, they are also very sensitive to the moods of their flock, including humans. After taking part in several parakeet groups through Facebook, I have seen tons of heartwarming stories about budgies comforting their humans after a bad day, and I have personally experienced my own budgies reacting to our collective grief after losing Kevin, as well as just generally being there for me when I need a lift. Knowing that they need me to be okay has also helped me to regulate my own moods.
- Although you can develop a very strong bond with your budgie, the relationship can also be a bit more distant with a larger flock. If you want to spend hours a day with one budgie, that’s great, on the other hand, if you want a flock that maybe keeps to itself more and doesn’t rely on you for its social needs you can do that too. A flock of two or more budgies will likely lean on you a lot less for their entertainment and will probably bond more closely to each other.
- Budgies have individual personalities! You might not think it of something so small, but budgies are extremely social creatures with very distinct personalities. Some are shy, some are bold, some are silly and humorous while others are very serious. They have individual preferences for foods, styles of music they enjoy and what they like to amuse themselves with. In many ways they are just like tiny little people.
- There’s a ton of stuff you and your budgie can do together. You can try training your budgie in basic things like recall, feed your budgie different vegetables and fruits in a variety of shapes and sizes to see what they like best, watch tv and listen to music together, and your budgie may be interested in preening you. I am barely scratching the surface here. There are tons of things you can do to provide enrichment to your budgie that will increase your bond and amount to a really great hobby for humans.
- Budgies are smart. They learn their names, can be trained to do tricks and some may even learn to mimic human speech. Showing a budgie almost anything new and watching him think and explore the object is fascinating.
- Budgies are beautiful and seeing them fly around your house is a thrill. It’s magical, at least for me, having these spritely little creatures that live in my house and fly around. It never gets old! And neither does having them because they are constantly evolving and surprising me. It’s just a general low-key miracle.
I hope this post helps you understand reasons why budgies make great pets! Before you run out and gear up for your new budgie, be sure to check out the counter point to this post, 10 reasons budgies make bad pets. Not to be a downer, but it’s important you know what you’re getting into!
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