After being on PC for a while now, I feel comfortable enough to comment on our experiences wrt pet birds during our trip in Austria.

After becoming owned by a very high maintenance (and spoiled rotten) GCC in the states, I realized that bird keeping here is different from what I remember in Austria. So, during our trip home over christmas we tried to gather a feel for the pet bird community there... here is a (very) short summary of our findings which were mainly gathered in a 300,000 people town in Upperaustria (state):

*) parrots are not easily available in Austria... it's hard to find them... unlike here, you can't buy a conure in a regular pet store (not saying, that's a bad thing)... highly frequented pet stores carry budgies and a few tiels... however, we did end up in a tiny, tiny neighborhood petstore that also sold budgies and tiels and had a wonderful cockatoo and amazon in the back (i assume they were the owner's birds - they looked healthy and entertained, although i'd have added more toys to the too's cage)... these were the only two larger birds we got to see (besides our handmade parrot at the future museum)

*) have fun finding a bird store... we spent plenty of time with phonebooks and online trying to find a store specializing in birds... while they can be found, they were not located somewhere close to the city (the most interesting we found was in vienna connected to the Austrian parrot association - needless to say, we didn't make the 2hr trip just for the store after checking their selection online)

*) available bird supplies are a joke... you can find a few elementary toys in stores, such as bells, ladders, and sometimes a chewing toy but there's no way you could get the variety offered in the states at chain-petstores... so, very little toys for the birdies....

*) the situation is similar for cages... in common stores, you can hardly find a cage sufficiently large for a good-size tiel... if you do, bring your kidney since you'll need that to pay for it

*) finding easily accessible information about proper bird keeping is about as difficult as finding the birds... here you just head out to regular book stores and get yourself a few introductionary books for proper bird keeping, and often you can find specific training and behavior books... yeah, it's not like this in Austria - we went to a ton of bookstores, and we spent way too much time in them... but i could not find A SINGLE book dealing with training and behavior and needs of a pet parrot even close to the extent of basic books here.... i'm not going to extrapolate this statement to bird keeping, since i'm sure everybody here can do that themselves.... (besides, valo and bella did not appear in any of the books we could find - it's almost like conures don't exist in the parrot world)

of course, there are more differences wrt clipping attitudes and general bird keeping issues which i won't discuss here since they are less factual and only partially based on real experiences.... but i'm happy to discuss those if somebody would wish so.... however, the above statements are conclusions from 2 weeks of trying hard hard hard to get to a bird store, find books, look at birds etc.... we really tried (partially because we missed our sweeties soo much and didn't dare to call our vet daily, i think we annoyed them enough with calls every other day )

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Wow, I am surprised because there seems to be a reasonably active bird communtiy in the UK (looking at Parrots magazine), I just assumed all European countries would have similar but in their own languages. Even the UK is nowhre near the US in terms of toys and supplies, neither is Australia for that matter but at least we are well supplied with native birds! I heard that African species are most common in Europe.

Wow...it's great to hear what the avian community is like in other parts of the world. I think Australia has the BEST parrot keeping anywhere...wish we were like them here in the States

Dani

no bird magazines... the only thing beyong books that i found was monthly meetings of the parrot association in vienna (too bad for you if you don't live there )

also, yes... from what i saw, african species are the most common...

Thanks Dani! Just wondering what makes you say that? The one thing I am very proud of is that we don't have much need for rescues because birds aren't being chucked out. Unfortunately the RSPCA is full of dogs and cats but you rarely hear of birds needing rescuing.

From what I have heard you guys have a cage minimum on the different species right? Every pic I have ever seen from AUS, these cages are huge! I talk to anyone living in your part of the world says that there is a cage 'law' that you need to follow. But here in the USA you could stick a macaw in an amazon sized cage and get away with it.

We have waaay to many fids that need a home...and the breeders are just making more. We need stricter guidelines when it comes to pet care

Dani

Dani, there isn't a law about cage size that I know of. I think there is a better knowledge of parrot needs because most Aussies grow up with them (except for immigrants like me). More like common sense, but you do see weeny little cages too.

Noise seems to be less of an issue, none of my birds can outsquawk the lorikeets outside the window, which also means unless you live in an apartment, you don't have to worry too much about neighbor complaints. So less need to rehome birds.