During the captivating, thrilling journey of enrichment I have discovered something incredible. I will by no means be the first to notice it, but it’s important to raise awareness as it so perfectly highlights how incredible their minds are. I have found with several of my Birds who have been introduced to enrichment at a young age learn to enrich themselves. This may seem like a bizarre situation, so I will try & explain it in a way that allows this incredible situation to make sense.
HOW ON EARTH DO THEY DO THAT?
Birds who receive enrichment from a young age & find it particularly life enhancing begin to get a feel for what their body needs. Providing enrichment materials is about providing things their sensory system & brain needs to feel regulated, stimulated, calmed or engaged (depending on the activity). The Birds who fully engage with the activities & materials experience the effect on the part of their body, or their mood. Slowly, this allows the Bird to begin to understand what they are feeling &, ultimately, what input their body needs to feel its best.
When this occurs, the Birds then begin to interact with activities & materials in a whole new way- they start to modify it to suit what their body needs. This can look very different depending on the situation & individual Bird, but below I will give 2 examples of this happening & what it looked like for the Birds in question.
- FORAGING FINCH – We were blessed to care for a clutch of rejected Zebra Finch chicks. They were so well accepted that the special needs Finch flock ended up adopting them & rearing them as their own (‘parents’ included Canaries & Bengalese Finches too!) Unlike all of the other residents (who came from various pet shops who couldn’t sell deformed Birds), these 4 angels were exposed to foraging & enrichment from the very start.
From the moment they fledged, they learned how to stand on pebbles, sand & other safe materials & how to forage for fresh foods in foraging activities. One in particular, Leonardo Da Finchi, loved foraging. He found the whole process incredibly calming & loved finding hidden food. One day, I decided to hand feed the flock some sweetcorn on their platform. Everybody took their piece of corn & ate it neatly on the platform, not Leo!
He carried each piece away & hid it underneath the pebbles, only to uncover & eat it straight away! He knew that foraging made him feel regulated & calm & he knew that his body needed to feel this way, so he set up his own activity.
- THE PACING COCKATIEL
Pamela came to me at 10 years old with no name & a history of abuse. She engaged in severe stereotypic pacing behavior. She wasn’t even able to eat & drink enough to be healthy because she couldn’t stop the cycle long enough. I began a sensory therapy program that focused heavily on sensory enrichment as I believe that she engaged in stereotypies due to a lack of sensory input. The moment I placed barley straw on her platform, her life changed instantly. She stood still for the first time in years & stamped & stamped & stamped on the straw. Her feet were so hungry to feel SOMETHING.
At first it only broke the pacing cycle for a few moments at a time, but gradually it stopped the behavior entirely. Pamela now, several years later, is a totally different Bird & is free of stereotypic behavior. She actually comes up & asks for straw or shredded paper to stamp on when she needs input. The moment you realize & give her the material, she drags it all off to wherever she needs it to be & stamps in the pile until her sensory system feels stimulated enough. This has replaced stereotypic behavior.
Receiving sensory therapy has allowed her to understand the feelings in her body & what to do about them. People say that stereotypic behavior has no function, but to the Bird it does- we just have to work out what that function is & re-direct it into a better, more helpful strategy for the Bird. Rather than pacing due to a confused & under-stimulated sensory system, she now knows what that feeling means, why she has it & what her body needs to solve it. She now lives a normal, happy life because her sensory system is receiving the input it needs to blossom.
- THE THROWING BUDGIE
Humphrey came to me after an accident at a breeding facility left him with head injuries & a damaged beak. He was still a baby & was introduced to enrichment to aid his recovery. Humphrey has gained deep insight into his body & how it feels, he now sets up his own activities by adapting or combining activities he has been given. Pictured is Humphrey playing with a floor bowl of wooden blocks & beads. Every time he emptied the bowl, he placed all the items back before throwing them out again.
Not only this, but he gathered some shredded paper that was used in another activity & covered over the blocks so that he had to uncover them. He understood what his body needed & created it with the materials he had access to. They really are more self aware, more intelligent, more amazing than we ever give them credit for.
It is so important that we allow Birds to interact with their enrichment activities in any way they choose. They know what their body needs & that may look very different from the interaction with the activity that we had imagined. Autonomy allows a Bird to learn about how they feel & gives them the freedom to adapt activities without punishment for ‘making a mess’ or ‘not doing it right’. There is no wrong way to be enriched, even if you are enriching yourself!