Thinking of Hand Rearing a Parrot?

by Rob Harvey

I have many phone calls from customers who want to hand rear a parrot as a pet or start to hand rear parrots as a hobby. There is a lot of work involved and a lot of knowledge required before you even start. This fact sheet is just to give you an idea of what is involved and should not be used as instructions on how to hand rear parrots.

Equipment:
You will need a brooder that can be easily adjusted as temperature needs to be very accurate indeed. To start with the chicks need to be at 36.5C after hatching and then after a few days the temperature is slowly lowered. You will need somewhere to hand rear that can be kept very clean as young chicks are very prone to bacterial infections and you will also need a pair of scales to keep an eye on the weight the chick is putting on . As well as this you will need to spoon feed or syringe feed the chick - we recommend spoon feeding as the chicks end up tamer this way. Brooders and scales do not come cheap so be prepared to spend some money on equipment as it only takes one mistake to kill a young chick, so it's always best to go for quality equipment.

Time:
You should be prepared for this to take over all your free time. To give you an idea of the time required lets look at what time it takes to hand rear an African Grey Parrot. To start with you will be feeding the baby chick every 2 hours from 5am to 11pm if you want the chick to do well and have a good weight gain each day. Only after 2 weeks do the feed times drop to 2 ½ hours between feeds. It takes 12 weeks before the chick can be weaned from the hand rearing formula and during that time the feeds drop until you are only feeding once a day during the weaning stage and this can be a very difficult time as sometime they do not want to eat on their own.

Hand Rearing Food:
This is one area where life has been made much easier nowadays as you no longer have to mix your own diets to feed to the growing chicks. We have always used Avi-Plus Handrearing Food and when I was curator at Birdworld we used this for everything from Cockatiels to Hyacinth Macaws with great success. In South Africa where it is produced over, 10,000 large parrots a year are raised on this food so it is well tried and tested. They produce two sorts, one the premium mix is for the first 10 days of life and the normal mix is for the rest of the hand rearing period until weaning. It comes in sealed one KG bags which once opened can be kept in the fridge.

Knowledge:
This is your main problem as you have a steep learning curve if you want to hand rear parrots successfully. We recommend a video so you can see exactly how to feed the chick as just one mistake when feeding can drown the chick. The Hand Rearing Video with Rosemary Low, who is one of the worlds leading experts we recommend as it shows you everything from the first feed to weaning. One of the best ways to learn is to find someone who is already rearing baby parrots and try and visit them to see how they do it. Be warned, it seems very easy when you see an experienced hand rearer at work but there are so many things that can go wrong and with these very small chicks, you do not normally get a second chance - one mistake and they are dead.

It may seem that I am trying to put you off hand rearing, but too many people just jump into this head first and learn by a lot of mistakes which means a lot chicks are lost to start with. Hand rearing parrots can be and is very rewarding indeed but also extremely tiring and needs a lot of time and dedication. I have come across many people who hand rear but only a few who I would descibe as experts at hand rearing. Please contact us if you would like some more advice.