I was reading this short news article about unsafe bird toys. When I first started buying toys for the Fids I assumed if they were bird toys they were made with only safe parts. I have since learned this is not automatically so.

I have checked metal parts out with magnets, but this is not foolproof as a magnet will attract to Nickel and that is supposedly safe.

What do you do to determine if a toy is made with all safe parts?

And, how do we know exactly what toy parts are made of? That is why I prefer wood for the Greys and plastic or acrylic for the budgies.

I don't know. I am getting very disappointed in purchased toys lately. I bought Kita a cute hard plastic toy at a local pet/bird store (not a national chain store) and when she destroyed it I found out the little chain was attached to the plastic with a metal eye screw that had the pointy sharp screw end on it! Like this one....



I was disgusted when I saw that. That could have really hurt her.

Yes, I had a wooden toy constructed with those screw eyes as well! Chico went right for that part of the toy, too, and chewed the "shiny thing" out of the wood, and ka-bang, down came the whole thing. Except the screw eye.

Have you noticed that a lot of bird toys seem to be designed by people who apparently have no knowledge of how birds "work" a toy? I got what I thought was a nice wooden one for Tausi, it looked quite durable in the picture. Design was like four dangling columns of spools, beads, etc. hung from crosspieces, tied together with a center column. All the columns, besides having the wooden pieces strung on them, also had square bells on the ends. I thought "great, those bells look rugged"! So did the toy in general. For a small bird, Tausi is a pretty aggressive chewer. Well, the first thing he did was extract the clappers from the bells. Took him less than a day to get all five of them out. Then he went to work on the wooden crosspieces that hold the outer four columns on. Still less than one day, and now the toy only has two columns left. I mean, come on people! You construct a toy using metal chain (I wasn't wild about that either), with nice beefy rugged blocks and such strung on it, and then hang them on a quarter inch thick piece of fairly soft wood with a hole drilled through it! Sheesh.