Group Guide
Birds
Long-lived, intelligent, loud, and the group most often bought without any idea of the timescale.
Birds outlive the reason most people buy them. A cockatiel bought for a ten-year-old is still alive when that child is thirty. They are flock animals kept singly, flying animals kept in boxes, and dawn-active animals kept in bedrooms. Done well they're extraordinary. The gap between done-well and done-typically is wider here than anywhere else on this site.
At a glance — all birds
- Lifespan
- 5–25 years
- Adult weight
- 30–120 g
- Daily attention
- 2+ hrs out of cage
- Alone time tolerated
- Keep in pairs or more
- Minimum housing
- Aviary or flight cage
- Noise level
- Loud at dawn and dusk
- Feather dust
- Moderate to high
- With children
- Supervised only
- With other pets
- Not with cats
Mutation names are breeder shorthand for colour. They do not change a bird's care, diet or housing needs in any way.
Species · 2 listed
Every entry below is a species page with its own mutations, costs and honest warnings.
Cockatiel
Gentle, affordable, long-lived, and very often kept badly.
- 20-year commitment
- Keep in pairs
- Dusty
Budgerigar
Small, cheap, sociable and consistently underestimated.
- Flock animal
- Chattery
- Two minimum
The three things that kill pet birds early
- A seed-only diet. This is the big one, and it's still what most birds are sold eating.
- Loneliness. A single bird in a cage in an empty house is a welfare problem, not a quirk.
- Non-stick cookware fumes. Genuinely lethal, genuinely common, and almost nobody is told.
Availability, registration and keeping requirements differ from place to place. Check the rules where you live before you commit to any animal — we describe animals, not law.