To buy an UNWEANED (who cannot eat by itself) baby parrot. The two most vulnerable times in a baby’s life are at hatching and at weaning. People assume that hand feeding and weaning is the same thing but it is not. Hand feeding is feeding the baby with a syringe every 3 hours a day depending on how old the baby is. In addition, feeding by hand doesn’t mean that the baby parrot will bond to us easily. Bonding is something which occurs slowly and bonding with a parrot depends on the friendship that develops. Not who holds the syringe. In the end, hand feeding is very rewarding, but it is an art that requires time and care from the hand feeder.
NOTE: Bigger baby parrot will take longer to wean- from 9 weeks to 24 weeks in other words 2 months to 6 months.
Weaning is when the baby starts trying to eat by himself but you still keep feeding him to make sure he is getting his nutrition till the baby will start to eat by himself (weaned). Most of the time the customers are not given written instructions or even a hand feeding demonstration, they are told that hand feeding is very easy and nothing goes wrong. However, inexperienced hand feeders are not able to recognize problems before serious damage occurs or even death, you will often find bacterial and yeast infections. Crop burns, crop stasis, and many other problems, but the worst of all to find is a perfectly healthy baby that died of starvation because the amount to feed and the number of times a day to feed was not available to the new hand feeder.
I want to encourage the practice of buying only weaned babies, we love our parrot babies.