in this clip we're going to be talking aboutwing clipping in budgies. i'm going to demonstrate how, if you're going to clip your budgie'swings and you feel up to doing it yourself, in just a minute. i want to talk to you aboutsome pros and cons. the pros to letting your budgie be able to fly around is that it cankind of choose where it wants to be, you know, whether on top of your ceiling, you know,like curtain rods, or you know, just hang out at your desk; gives the bird good musclegrowth to be able to flap and actually fly; it's a good cardiovascular exercise for theanimal, as well as putting on some pectoral mass, they can get some atrophied musclesin the front if they don't get enough opportunity to fly. it's a very natural behavior for thesebirds, so any natural behaviors that you can
give them in captivity that they would normallyhave in the wild will generally give you a happier pet all around. some reasons you mightwant to have their wings clipped: these birds can get into a lot of trouble. the same thingthat gives them the freedom of flight can also allow these birds to fly out your windowand you'll never see them again; it can allow them to fly into a boiling pot of water; itcan allow them to fly on, again, onto your curtain rods and then poop on everything theyland on. so you can confine where your budgie goes a little bit better by having clippedwings and keep them a little bit safer if you're going to have them loose. if you havea bird in a cage and it doesn't get out, something like this, and they're going to fly back andforth, it's probably not necessary to clip
their wings just because, you know, they'renot going to get into trouble if they're staying in their cage. just again, you need to bevery careful when cleaning their cages that they don't get startled or that the cage doorisn't open or that you don't drop the cage and the bird flies away if they're not clipped.so if you're going to go about clipping your wings, this is a very tame budgie here soi'm just going to use my hands to grab it, but if you don't have a tame budgie you canuse a small dish towel or paper towel to just come over the back of your budgie and cupit, and what you want to do is put your little fingers on either side of its head, just likethis, you just kind of stabilize their head. and they'll chirp and they'll complain, butthey generally won't do any damage. these
guys generally can't bite hard enough to drawany blood. so i'll just stabilize our little bird here, and here's his wings; and theseare here, his flight feathers. so on the flight feathers these are secondary flight feathershere, and the primary flight feathers here. it's very important you do not cut these secondaryflight feathers because these secondary flight feathers are covert feathers and they coverup the bones in this little bird's hand. so you want to be very careful, you want to makesure that there is no bone or skin attached to these lasting feathers. some people willclip the feathers leaving these two outermost feathers for cosmetic reasons; i don't recommenddoing that. these guys are such strong fliers that if you leave those outer two covert feathersa lot of times these guys still have enough
power to fly and fly away. so you'll cut thefirst six - so one, two, three, four, five, six - these six feathers, and you'll cut themright where these covert feathers end. so you'll cut them right here, right at thatyellow line, and clip those off with a pair of scissors, and you would cut right here.this is a baby, who i'm still trying to learn how to fly, so i don't want to clip his wingsright now, but that's where you would cut. there's no bones there, you can see rightthrough those feathers if you have any question about it, and if you look at the undersideof the wing here you can see the bone structure that would be on that part right there. sothat's the way you would clip your bird's wings if you needed to. you can see the bird'sno worse for the wear. and just make sure
that you cup your bird gently when you'reholding or restraining them for clipping their wings. don't apply any pressure to their chests,they need to expand their chest to breath. so, it's very safe to just grab them on eitherside of the head and then just cup the rest of their body holding their feet away fromtheir body if you need to restrain your little bird. ok.