Living with a budgie
Consistently underestimated
Budgies get filed as a starter bird, which is very funny to anyone who actually lives with one. Small, certainly. Eighteen to twenty centimeters and thirty to forty grams, with about half that length being tail. Also relentless, chatty, extremely opinionated about the curtains, and entirely convinced the household answers to them.
Three names, one bird
Budgie, budgerigar, and in most American pet shops, parakeet. Same animal every time: a small parrot from the dry interior of Australia, absent from the far east coast and the far south-west, which is to say it comes from the parts of Australia that take some effort to reach.
Every color started as one color
Here is the bit that surprises people. Wild budgies are green and yellow. That is the whole palette. Every blue, white, grey, violet and pied budgie you have met traces back to mutations that appeared in captive birds and were then bred on deliberately, and there are more than thirty basic color combinations now. The familiar blue and white budgie is simply a bird that has lost its yellow pigment, which turns the green body sky blue and the yellow face white.
Which is exactly why “a blue one” and “a green one” are not interchangeable, and why the wrong color on a gift lands with a small thud.
Small bird, real relationship
Five to ten years in the wild. Seven to fifteen is normal in a good home, and plenty have gone well past twenty. That is a decade or more of a very small animal having very large feelings about your day.
