Budgerigar

Name and taxonomy

George Shaw described the budgerigar in 1805. John Gould gave the bird its present scientific name in 1840. Melopsittacus is Greek for a parrot with a tune. The second word, undulatus, is Latin for wavy, and it points at the barred back. The species stands alone in its genus, and the genus stands alone in its tribe.

The English name is harder to pin down. One idea traces it to gidjirrigaa, a Gamilaraay word for the bird. Another builds it from an Australian slang word for good and a word for cockatoo. Some accounts render the meaning as good food rather than good bird. Older English names include shell parrot, warbling grass parakeet and zebra parrot. Keepers shorten all of it to budgie.

Evolution and relatives

The budgerigar was once placed near the grass parrots on the strength of its barring. DNA has moved it a long way from there. Its closest relatives are the lories and the fig parrots. That likely places a dry-country seed eater beside a group of tropical nectar feeders.

The species has survived in inland Australia for around five million years. Two habits carry it through: it wanders, and it breeds on the move. Neither trait appears to need a fixed territory or a reliable season. No subspecies are recognised across the whole continent.

Appearance

Wild birds average about 18 cm long, with a 30 cm wingspan. They weigh 30 to 40 g, roughly the weight of a chicken egg. The back and wings are black, scalloped and edged with clear yellow. The forehead and face are yellow in an adult. A young bird has black stripes running down to the cere until about 3 or 4 months.

Small blue-violet patches sit on the cheeks. Three black spots run across each side of the throat. The tail is cobalt, and the outer feathers carry yellow flashes. The bill is olive grey and the legs are blue-grey, with two toes forward and two back. The cere tells the sexes apart: blue on a male, brown or pale on a female. Immature birds of both sexes have a pink cere.

Captive colour is a separate subject. Two pigments make every variety: a black one and a yellow one. The black pigment scatters blue light, and the yellow lies over it to give green. Take away the black and the bird is yellow, take away both and it is white. At least 32 primary mutations are known, in four groups. Show birds bred in Britain grow about twice the size of a wild budgerigar.

Habitat and range

The budgerigar occupies most of Australia away from the wettest coasts. It is missing from the far east and the far southwest. Scrubland, open woodland and grassland all suit it. Most of the range is semi-arid or sub-humid country in the interior. Flocks are usually small, but good conditions can gather thousands of birds.

Nothing about the range is fixed. Flocks leave a site as the seed and water there run out. Drought pushes them towards wooded country or the coast. Farm dams and troughs have raised local numbers by adding water. GBIF holds records from 120 countries, most of them captive or escaped birds.

Attempts to settle the bird abroad have mostly failed. Escaped budgerigars held on near St Petersburg in Florida for over 50 years. European starlings and house sparrows then took the nest holes. That flock declined from the 1980s and died out in 2014.

Diet and feeding

Grass seed is the whole basis of the diet. Spinifex and tall tussock grasses supply most of it. Budgerigars feed on the ground or just above it. A bird strips the husk off a seed and then swallows the kernel. Seed carries as much energy by weight as animal flesh, so no other food is needed.

Fruit, berries and green shoots are taken when they are there. Ripening wheat and lawn grass seed are also fair game. That habit worries farmers, because a flock can strip a lot of seed. Dry seed holds almost no water, so the birds must drink. Each bird takes about 5.5% of its body weight in water every day. Flocks therefore seem to stay within reach of a waterhole.

Behaviour and social life

The budgerigar is social at every stage of its life. Feeding in a flock finds food faster and keeps more eyes on the sky. There is little sign of a pecking order, because fights are rare. Females are the more aggressive sex and will drive a male off. The birds have two flight speeds and switch between them as needed.

The day starts before sunrise with preening, singing and movement in the trees. After first light the flock flies out to feed. In the heat of midday the birds sit still in shade and stop foraging. At dusk they call loudly and fly fast around the roost trees. They settle just after sunset and stay put until morning. Flock mates preen each other and pass food from beak to beak.

Movement is the rule for the whole flock, not for single birds. A site is abandoned once the seed and the water there give out. That habit probably explains why no budgerigar holds a territory. Flocks may swarm together in groups of many thousands under good conditions. Such gatherings probably break up again as the country dries.

Communication and senses

Budgerigars chatter almost constantly while awake. They use sight, sound, touch and chemical cues together. Mutual preening and shared food appear to keep a pair and a flock bonded. Both sexes sing, and both can copy sounds they hear. Males learn far more words, and a lone pet male learns most of all.

A female rarely gets past a dozen words. A male may reach a hundred. The record holder, a bird called Puck, used 1,728 words and died in 1994. Vision is the strongest sense, and it works in four colour channels. Feathers glow under ultraviolet light, which probably matters in courtship. The throat spots reflect ultraviolet differently in each bird.

Reproduction and life cycle

Budgerigars pair up and stay together through a breeding attempt. They nest in colonies, sometimes with several nests on one branch. Holes 3 to 5 metres apart in the same tree are normal. There is no fixed season, because rain sets the timing. Northern birds usually breed from June to September, southern birds from August to January.

The nest is a hollow in a tree, a fence post or a fallen log. The pair line it with rotted wood dust and other soft material. The female picks the site and does all the sitting. She lays 4 to 6 eggs, white and about one to two centimetres long. Eggs arrive on alternate days, and she incubates for 18 to 21 days. The male feeds her at the entrance while she sits.

Chicks hatch blind, bare and unable to lift their heads. Their eyes open at about 10 days and down appears soon after. Feathers grow in at about three weeks, and the colour becomes clear. The male often joins the feeding at that point. Young birds leave the nest around their fifth week and feed themselves by 6 to 8 weeks. They can breed at about 180 days old, and a pair may raise brood after brood.

Predators and threats

A 30 g bird on open ground has many enemies. Flocking is probably the main answer, because many eyes spot a hawk sooner. Sources on wild budgerigars name no single major predator. Drought is likely the larger danger, since it removes both seed and water. Nest hollows are scarce, and other hole-nesting birds compete for them.

Captive birds face a different list. Lice, mites and worms spread quickly between caged birds. One zoo flock averaged only 3.6 years because of fungal and bacterial disease. Most defects in show lines are inherited, so breeders avoid pairing relatives. A seed-only diet gives caged budgerigars fatty liver disease.

Wild flocks also meet people at harvest time. A large flock feeding on ripening cereal draws complaints from growers. No control programme appears to have threatened the species as a whole. The bird likely recovers quickly, because it breeds as soon as rain returns.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the budgerigar as Least Concern. No national listing and no CITES appendix applies to it. One published estimate put the world total near five million birds. Wild numbers appear to rise and fall with rainfall rather than with any long trend. Naturalists have logged 11,653 sightings on iNaturalist.

The species is not farmed for food and is not hunted. Trade in wild-caught birds is probably pointless, because captive stock is everywhere. Water points on farms have helped some inland populations. Because the bird is so common, more is known about it than about any other parrot.

Relationship with humans

Keepers have bred the budgerigar in captivity since the 1850s. It stands behind only the dog and the cat as a household animal. American keeping took off in the 1950s, when it overtook the canary. The bird is small, cheap and easy to house, which probably explains much of that. Cockatiels have since caught up in popularity.

A pet budgerigar needs company, toys and something to chew. Mineral blocks, cuttlebone and soft wood keep the beak in shape. Cuttlebone also supplies the calcium a laying female needs. Captive birds average about 7.8 years, and some reach 21. Show budgerigars live a shorter 7 to 9 years. The dust from the feathers can cause a lung allergy in sensitive owners.

In culture and myth

The bird appears to carry Aboriginal words into English through its own name. Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay speakers had names for it long before 1805. People of the Liverpool Plains used the spelling betcherrygah. The reading good food, rather than good bird, may be the accurate one.

Talking budgerigars seem to have made the species a fixture of popular culture. Puck entered the record books in 1995 for the largest bird vocabulary. A budgerigar called Disco became widely known online in 2013. His best remembered lines were absurd quotations from politics and film.

Australian slang, in general, gave the bird one more life. Tight men's swimming trunks are called budgie smugglers there. The joke rests on the shape of a small parrot under close-fitting cloth. The Oxford English Dictionary added the phrase in 2016. Few small birds, probably, have travelled so far from their own desert.