Conure Information

[Jay_Bunny]

I was wondering if anyone knew of any good websites on conures. We were in the pet store (Petco) the other day and they had some young conures that were just beautiful. My husband loved them and I was thinking of possibly getting him one when we get our own place. (months from now).

If anyone on here can tell me about them, that would be great too. I love hearing it straight from someone who has experience. We are not sure what kind of conure we are interested in yet, but we want some basic info.

My husband wants a macaw at some point and I told him we'd need to work up to it, since macaws are very big birds with very special needs. I don't want to dive into a responsibility like that. We have one cockatiel right now.

[kjhowland]

Hope you like a noisy bird. My experiences with conures is that they are very noisy.

[dsirkle]

My mother had a green conure for years that loved her and would violently attack anyone but her when out of his cage. My mother died a year ago and my father kept the bird even though it hates him. He has to wear gloves to feed him or to reach in the cage. I don't know if that is typical behavior for a conure but that is how this one is.

[Shadera]

I have a cinnamon greencheek conure, and recommend them for first-time bird owners. The aratinga conures can be the noisy ones, but the sweet pyrrhuras tend to be much quieter. They can still be obnoxious when they want to be, but it's nowhere near as bad.

They can be cuddly, sweet, playful, stubborn, and opinionated. Greencheeks do typically go through a pinchy stage, but if you work them through it patiently they make great companions. I recommend buying through a good breeder rather than a pet store, as you get healthier better socialized birds at much cheaper prices.

http://pyrrhurabreedersassociation.com/

[spottysnake]

aratinga (sun, jenday, blue-crowned, etc.) conures are very very very much like macaws, but more manageable because of their size. They do tend to be less "serious" than macaws, so more playful. Playful doesn't mean they're necessarily tolerant, both macaws and conures are playful purely on their own terms. I have a lot of bird experience (a lot of medical restraint and medicating, too) and I still think macaws are terrifying birds, and such pains in the @ss. Back to conures, they're VERY LOUD, expressive (can mean bitey), pushy, constantly need something going on. They are best suited to being constantly active, cracking shells, eating, flying and interacting with huge flocks at once. In reply to the person here talking about the aggressive one, that's not necessarily common conure behavior specifically, but rather common behavior for all birds. They are very complex in the way they interact with their environment, extremely social animals, incredibly needy, it's just loud hustle and bustle of flock life for them 15 hours a day, and all the sounds and nipping and such is like kindergartners on a playground interacting. They mate for life, their favorite person is pretty much that mate. They react when people stick hands into their personal space/cage, unless they want that hand there, that's a very rude violation to them, just like it would be for a person. They're just communicating when they bite that hand. You have to understand that parrots are incredibly social complex animals and not very well suited domestication: living a solitary life in a cage without being able to fly and with people who misinterpret their behavior all the time. You just have to think of parrot behavior in the context of flock life. It really is like a bunch of little kids playing and not wanting to share and getting in little fights, etc.

-as far as noise, people always say 'oh it depends on the individual bird' and of course it does, but I've never met a quiet aratinga conure.

Only get an aratinga conure if your bird can spend many hours a day out of the cage, and you can understand that normal behavior for them is to make a lot of noise and express themselves possibly by biting.

Pyrrhura (most of the small green ones, like green-cheeks) conures are smaller, quieter, and much less pushy and demanding. They can be smooshed and poked and cuddled more, in general. They're actually pretty similar to cockatiels.

nandays and patagonians are both their own groups, and they're both more like aratingas. They both are especially known for being loud. Patagonians are pretty much mini-macaws.

http://www.conures.net/conures.shtml#types


edit: I do agree, find a breeder rather than a petstore. Pet store animals, especially petco, are often disgustingly unhealthy. I don't recommend getting an unweaned bird, either,