How Do I Stop My Budgie Digging Holes In My House?

[chenyun 0]

My budgie is extremely playful and tame and we have an open-cage deal going on where he has full run of the house and can go anywhere he pleases. He's always been a very paternal bird, regurgitating onto mirrors and putting his toys inside shoes. And until lately he was content with "nesting" in a coconut shell, but recently he seems to have gotten more ambitious and has started digging just about anything. His favourite place to burrow now are the corners of rooms and legs of furniture. We've managed to teach him that furniture is naughty (although sometimes I'll find new beak marks so I guess he still tries, I think these are more just for beak sharpening or for the sake of eating wood) but he is still going for the corners of the room when he knows we aren't watching. He can shred up the wallpaper in the time it takes for us to take our eyes off him for a second so just in case it was the wallpaper he liked, we put some around his toybox, but he hasn't touched that. On all the corners in the house we've put up barriers but he will either devise a way to get past them or he'll just start on the corner between the barrier and the wall. It can't be boredom because he has millions of toys that he plays with all day, I think just this time of year is making him feel like digging because he is trying to dig through the bottom of his playpen too. As soon as I cover up one hole in the wall he'll find another, it's starting to get unreasonable. He does have multiple wooden playpens and branches for perches inside his cage for normal chewing, this isn't just normal chewing though, he's trying to tunnel to China. Keeping him locked in his cage would be an extremely cruel thing to do to this bird because his entire life he has had the freedom of the whole house.

[dillster 0]

Is it the bottom of walls if so put paper or card board around charis and on the bottoms of walls hope this helped

[Bird Junky 0]

Hi, are you sure your bird is a cock. Some of what you say sounds more like female behaviour. If he's definitely

a cock, he could could have gender problems. Does he have an Iodine block & cuttle bone in his cage?

Try removing half his toys so you can rotate them occasionally, so he has something new to play with...B.J.

[Finnie 0]

I think it sounds like female behavior, too. You mentioned that you think it may be triggered by what your bird thinks is mating season. Would it be feasable to confine him/her to the cage just for a brief time, until the phase passes, and then hope that the behavior is diminished afterwards?