The Best Pet Bird Toys

Find the best toys for your feathery friend

Pet bird toys can provide your friend with hours of fun, entertainment, and even intellectual stimulation.

Providing toys for your pet bird is absolutely essential. He needs toys to prevent boredom and keep his mind active. Without toys, your bird can easily develop behavior problems like screaming, feather plucking, and biting.

Pet bird toys come in all shapes, sizes, materials, and colors. However, all toys are not made for every bird. It’s important to provide the right toys for your pet bird’s particular species. Some toys for larger birds can be harmful to smaller birds and some toys for smaller birds can be harmful to larger birds. It’s important to know what to look for.

The Best for Your Bird

See the best pet bird toys we recommend for your bird’s species:

• The Best X-Small Toys
  For Canaries and Finches
• The Best Small Toys
  For Cockatiels, Lovebirds, Small Parakeets, and Parrotlets
• The Best Medium Toys
  For Caiques, Small Conures, Lories, Large Parakeets, Pionus, and Poicephalus
• The Best Large Toys
  For African Greys, Amazons, Small Cockatoos, Large Conures, Eclectus, Hawk-Headed Parrots, and Mini-Macaws
• The Best X-Large Toys
  For Large Cockatoos and Macaws

What To Buy

Pet birds need a variety of different bird toys to ensure that their physical and mental needs are being met. Pick a few toys from each category to make sure your pet bird is happy, healthy, and well occupied.

It is important for your bird to have:

Types Of Bird Toys
Image	Type
	Foraging Toys Foraging toys are highly recommended by avian professionals because they provide an outlet that requires your bird to work for his food like he would have to do in the wild.
	Preening Toys Stress and boredom can lead to your bird over-preening or feather plucking. Preening toys (such as rope) are a great outlet for birds to satisfy their need to preen.
	Shredding Toys Shredding toys are also great for relieving stress and boredom for your pet bird. Nothing is more fun than tearing up a new toy!
	Chew Toys Chew toys are great for pet birds because chewing is a major part of a wild bird’s life. Chewing is especially important for larger parrots.
	Comfort Toys Birds enjoy physical contact with each other in the wild. Pet birds need the same thing–they like to cuddle with or crawl into something soft. This help alleviate stress and provides a sense of security for your bird.
	Exercise Toys Exercise toys such as swings and ladders are perfect for encouraging movement and physical exercise.

Important Toy Features

For your own reference, and so you will know that the bird toys we recommend really are the best for your bird, here are the most important toy features you need to take into consideration when shopping for toys on your own:

• Attachments – The safest toy attachments are C-rings. They are safe to use for all pet birds. The most dangerous attachments are the keychain ring and split rings. Bird toes have been caught in a number of these rings because of their size and shape.
  

  C-Ring/Quick Link

• Rope and Chain – Pet bird toys are usually hanging by a rope or chain. Make sure that they are close-linked chains (at the right size) and that whatever holding it is strong enough for your bird (or you’ll just be replacing it the next day).
• Bell – No jingle bells. These are the round bells with small slits in them and are unsafe for any bird.
• Material – Toys are made out of all kinds of material. The most common are acrylic, bungee cord, fabric, wood, plastic, leather, and rope. Acrylic toys are easy to clean and are often interactive-type toys which are great for relieving boredom, but make sure they are strong enough for your bird. Bungee cords are fun and most are safe, just make sure that your bird can’t get himself tangled in it. Fabric is another favorite and are great for birds with a habit of feather plucking. Wood is very common and great for chewing–choose wood toys that are made with natural wood and birds really like ones with colors (non-toxic, of course). Plastic toys are best for smaller birds because larger birds can crack them and ingest pieces. Leather is fun, but difficult to clean and you need to make sure that no toxins were used to treat it. Rope is definitely a popular favorite because birds love to preen them. This is probably the best preferred toy material for canaries–they just love it! Just make sure that your bird can’t get any strands wrapped around his toes and that the toy is always clean.

While keeping all of these things in mind, it can become difficult to find the right pet bird toys. And on top of that, it’s difficult to find a good variety. Many birds need toys rotated out often to keep them entertained. Some birds are said to not really “need” toys (like canaries and finches), but many are said to love and play with toys. It’s also a great way to enrich their environment with variety and entertainment.

We know toy hunting isn’t easy, so we’ve done the hard work for you and have found the best parrot toys on the market at the best prices and with the largest variety for each type of bird.

We hope we’ve helped you in your bird toy hunting endeavor!