"My parakeet likes to peck at my beard. I stuck my tongue out and he drinks spit from my tongue! Is this bad for him?"

Parakeets are lactose-tolerant and cannot eat a lot of dairy product. Also, parakeets are HIGHLY allergic to chocolate and avocados and should never be given either. Junk food such as pretzles, potato chips, etc. aren't good for a parakeet either!

You can feed a parakeet fresh fruit such as apples and cherries, but be careful about the seeds as those have toxins in them. Lettuce is fine, but it really has no nutrients in it. It's better to give them other, healthier greens.

Poisonous plants to keep away from parakeets:
amaryllus
calla lily
daffodil
english ivy
foxglove
holly
lily of the valley
mistletoe
rhubarb


VERY IMPORTANT: if you have a parakeet, it's best to rid your house of non-stick cookware. If you EVER accidentially leave one of these pots or pans on the stove and it runs dry, the odors put off from the cookware are fatal to parakeets. It's far safer to not have any in the house than to take that chance.

Some of us sing, and some of us just mouth the lyrics, but we all rely on our brain to coordinate even the simplest motor behaviors. Scientists interested in the brain activity behind motion often use birdsong as a model because certain songs are sung the same way every time, providing a naturally controlled setting for investigation. Now researchers have solved a long-standing mystery about the hierarchy of brain regions essential for birdsong using a chilly technique that could tease out the interconnected processes behind many complex actions.

Birdsong experts have debated whether the HVC (for “high vocal center”) controls both the duration and onset, or timing, of a melody’s notes—or whether duration or onset is controlled elsewhere, such as in the robust nucleus of the arcopellum (RA). But they were stymied because surgically removing either region prevented the birds from singing at all.

Because brain cell activity is known to slow at low temperatures, Michael Long and Michale Fee of the Massa­chusetts Institute of Technology inserted tiny wires that transmitted heat into and out of the HVC and RA in zebra finches. Cooling the HVC reduced the speed of the song by up to 40 percent. Cooling the RA had almost no effect, implying that the HVC plays a more central role in song generation, controlling both when notes begin and how long they last. The birds recover fully from this “localized cooling,” making it a powerful tool to investigate the many complex behaviors that rely on a combination of brain regions.

Studies using localized cooling could “probably explain processes beyond a song-control system, even beyond a speech system,” predicts Erich Jarvis of Duke University, who was not involved in the study. The neural networks that control the timing and sequence of motor behaviors are relatively poorly understood, Jarvis explains; cooling could illuminate how the brain orchestrates everything from wing flapping in birds to, perhaps, sign language and dancing in humans