Living with a conure
The bird picked you
Nobody plans to have their laptop screen colonised. Conures handle that part themselves. They ride shoulders, tunnel into hoodies, hang upside down off a curtain rail for reasons known only to them, and complain bitterly the moment you leave the room. For an animal that weighs about as much as a deck of cards, a green cheek occupies a remarkable amount of household space.
They are all conures and none of them are the same
This is where gift buying goes wrong. Conure is a keeper’s word rather than a scientific one, covering several different groups of New World parrots that ornithologists mostly file elsewhere.6 A green cheek and a sun are both conures roughly the way a terrier and a great dane are both dogs. Hand a green cheek owner a sun conure shirt and they will be very gracious about it, and they will absolutely notice.
Green comes in about eight flavours
Pineapple, yellow-sided, turquoise, cinnamon. Not separate birds. They are colour mutations of the green-cheeked conure, bred in captivity, so you get the same build and the same attitude wearing different feathers.10 When you are shopping for somebody else, the colour is the entire assignment.
This is a long arrangement
Green cheeks run about ten to fifteen years in the wild and comfortably longer in a good home.1 That is a bird you might take on in your twenties and still be negotiating with in your forties. Conure people tend to describe theirs the way other people describe a difficult but much loved relative, which is about right.
One of them needs help
The sun conure is the showstopper, all yellow and orange, and it is in real trouble. It is listed as Endangered, moved up from Least Concern after a steep decline driven largely by trapping for the pet trade.3 Most of the wild birds left sit in a small pocket of Guyana and northern Brazil, though there are early signs of recovery where trapping pressure has eased.
