Are they anything like parrots who come to see their masters as lifelong family members ?
I don't want to de-rail the thread on flyers (they really do seem to be cool animals and can acclimate to people), but the "bidness" with parrots tends to be a little more complex.
First of all, when parrots are hand-raised (which is what Skul appears to be doing with his flyers), they ordinarily lose their innate fear of humans. This is a rather new phenomenon as parrots really haven't been widely seen as pets (hence the term "exotic" when used to describe them), therefore they as a collection of species, really haven't been out of the wild that long.
Once they're hand-raised, re-releasing parrots into the wild would be cruel, seems to me. They have not learned to identify, locate, and feed on naturally-found food. And they've not learned to be defensive necessarily, although their natural fear and thus flight is instinctive.
There are still many, many individual parrots that are out there that were captured in the wild and thus never learned to acclimate wholly to humans. Mrs. E and I have two such animals at present that we are fostering: the first is a Nanday conure and the second is an orange-winged Amazon.
Skul is completely correct when he says that parrots are social animals. They look at humans as part of their overall flock, that's to be sure, but the relationships are a little more complex than that. For example, Mrs E and I have a Solomon Islands eclectus parrot - female - who selected me as much more than part of her flock. She selected me as her
mate. She exhibits all sorts of typical behavior along those lines -- tries to get me to feed her from my mouth, exhibits nesting behavior, raises her hind end, lays eggs, all that kind of stuff. And she's frustrated when I don't respond like a male eclectus would.
Our African grey, on the other hand, has not sexually matured yet. So we don't really know how she might react when she does mature -- if, in fact, she wants to procreate. Some individual parrots don't indicate an interest in procreation, oddly enough.
Despite the two foster birds being wild-caught, Mrs E and I are working with them. The conure has responded very well and once you get him away from his cage, he'll readily step up on your hand and otherwise accept you. The Amazon -- who is much older at about 50 years old -- is a much tougher nut to crack. In order to move him around, we have had to towel him. But with leather gloves on, I'm able to handle him (with him furiously biting the gloves which is definitely powerful enough to feel significantly through the gloves) and I was able to get him to step up yesterday for the first time.
These two birds are what the bird club calls "custodial birds" since it's unlikely they'll ever be adoptable. We hope to change that with the conure and maybe with time, also the Amazon.
One thing I meant to ask Skul about the flyers -- what about bites and other types of aggression? Do you see any of that?
