@ShannyleeStuart whiting wrote:Absolutely agreew.l. wrote: I am quite surprised by all the suggestions of catching the bird at night!
Is it just my birds that are totally freaked out if disturbed by night, flying around crazily with a very good chance of injuring themselves in the dark? And that can happen if they just spot torchlight or movements outside the aviary!
I'd never, ever, consider doing this.
To me the very obvious solution to catch just one bird in an aviary is using a trap cage. Any small cage with door at floor level will do.
Put the food inside and wait till the wanted bird enters - it should not take too long. This way you avoid disturbing the others.
can't understand when others seem to think it's perfectly OK to catch birds in the pitch black,
Yea admitingly it's easy to do this but clearly not thinking of the birds,
I've seen birds actually die in the hand of heart failure when this has been practicedthankfully not my birds,
There are loads of ways in catching and trapping birds in large avaires and just boils down to basic common sence,
it has already been mentioned on this thread about how to screen off one end or corner of the aviary for easy capture, it's not rocket science
I actually find the "dark" method to be the safest and least stressful for the birds, if done correctly. I don't wait until it's night time, when the birds have settled in and are well into sleeping, because yes, I could definitely see that causing heart failure and stressing all the birds to the max.
What I do is locate the bird I want to grab in my flight so I know exactly where it is, then immediately shut off all the lights except for one in the distance/background (my LED's are connected to one switch). I can see enough to know what I'm doing, but the sudden change in lighting causes the birds to freeze since they can't gauge their surroundings. From here I quickly walk over to the flight, quietly open the door, grab wanted bird & shut door, then immediately turn the lights back on. This has been the easiest way/caused the least amount of stress in my experience. I'm not sure if this will work for you based on your walk-in aviary and lighting situation, but figured I'd share my method.
