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
- 5–70 years
- Adult weight
- 12 g – 1.3 kg
- Daily attention
- Daily care to 3+ hrs of company
- Alone time tolerated
- Company is not optional — theirs or yours
- Minimum housing
- Aviary or flight cage
- Noise level
- Song to air-raid siren
- Feather dust
- Low to very high by species
- 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 · 12 listed
Every entry below is a species page with its own mutations, costs and honest warnings. The portraits are illustrations drawn to show each breed’s typical build, not photographs of individual animals.
African Grey Parrot
- 50-year commitment
- Needs a person
- Very dusty
The famous intelligence is real, and it is the whole problem.
Blue-and-gold Macaw
- 50-year commitment
- Extremely loud
- Room-scale housing
A metre of parrot with a foghorn fitted, on a longer contract than your mortgage.
Budgerigar
- Flock animal
- Chattery
- Two minimum
Small, cheap, sociable and consistently underestimated.
Canary
- Song, not cuddles
- Males sing
- Modest space
A concert in a cage — to be listened to, not handled.
Cockatiel
- 20-year commitment
- Keep in pairs
- Dusty
Gentle, affordable, long-lived, and very often kept badly.
Eclectus Parrot
- 30-year commitment
- Gentle for its size
- Diet matters most
Two birds in one species: emerald cocks, crimson hens, and a digestive system with opinions.
Galah
- 40-year commitment
- Playful clown
- Watch the weight
The larrikin of the cockatoos — affectionate, comic, and built to get fat in captivity.
Green-cheeked Conure
- 25-year commitment
- Quiet for a conure
- Velcro bird
Big-parrot personality at pocket size, with the volume knob mercifully turned down.
Pacific Parrotlet
- 20-year commitment
- Tiny but fierce
- Apartment-suited
Thirty grams of bird carrying three hundred grams of attitude.
Peach-faced Lovebird
- 15-year commitment
- Busy and bold
- Pair politics
The name oversells the romance and undersells the personality.
Sulphur-crested Cockatoo
- Lifetime-plus commitment
- Extremely loud
- Experienced keepers
A seventy-year toddler with an angle grinder for a voice.
Zebra Finch
- Aviary bird
- Keep in groups
- Watch, don’t handle
A meeping, sociable little machine for turning seed into more zebra finches.
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.