Smart Bird – Interesting fact about the Budgie memory

In this article, we are solving any single one mystery about budgies’ memory. We bring you the most interesting facts about the memory of these little Smart Bird and answer your most common questions. Let’s go and learn something new and interesting together. Hope you enjoy it.

Like most parrots, you know that budgies live a fairly long, long time. So looking from an evolutionary point of view, we can sum up that this sets up the species for the development of memory and learning.
We can say that budgies are quick learners, they are able to pick up new behaviors, to pick up some tricks to obtaining food, and the like after just one or two trials. Because of this, they are pretty easy birds for people to train and develop. And we can all get along that their memory is pretty good, too!

Once a new “trick,” focalization, behavior, or anything you try, is learned, it remains in their working memory for a long, long time.
When we say a long time, we are talking about years. Who would say…little budgies but the big brain.

This makes sense if you live a long time. If you learn a flight path to a specific resource, it would be such a great thing for your survival, but also for the survival of your family or population, if you could remember it for the next time even if the situation doesn’t come up again for a long time. It shows us that you have to remember some crucial things for your survival because you will never know when you will have to know the next time.
The exact same thing would be with budgies, for recognizing predators or other environmental dangers.
We can say that budgies in the wild and captivity are quite successful, in part, due to their ability to learn and their long-term memory.

Nevermore suspect your budgerigar’s memory. They are Smart Bird

Like we said before, budgies are capable of storing a lot of information in their memory, including facial identification. The fact is that they identify you as their owner, they recognize their flockmates and they will eternally recognize their soulmate. This can cause problems with breeders sometimes, who want to put two budgies together that already have a mate. When this happens you know the story coming after that. Just, it is not too hard to imagine that these budgies will simply refuse to breed. Even when they are separated, they don’t want to take a newcomer as a mate when they already have perfect memories of their love!

When a flock member dies, you have to know that the other budgies will become very silent. Firstly, they won’t understand why this budgie, why their mate is gone from them, but because of their long-term memory, they will remember him and they will be sad because he is gone and he is not anymore with them. It is also proven that budgies can recognize a budgie just by knowing them from a picture. Budgies who live together and spend their time in the cage together become very attached. Some budgies who lose their mate or their best buddy will just fade away like a flower. When you see any sign of this happening, your task is to do whatever you can to heal their sorrow: satisfy them, put their cage outside in the sunlight, give them lots of physical activity because it is very important that they keep moving and not sit down on the cage platform, and talk to them. 

Budgies remember the sound of their mates

A necessity for budgies is having the ability to recognize your companion, even if you don’t see them for a while.
In many birds, mates recognize each other just by their vocalization. For example, colonial seabirds can remember what their partner sounds like even when they are not seeing them for months at a time.

When you heard talking and a bird in the same sentence the first thing that will come to mind is the parrot. Parrots are unusual for birds in that they can learn to make new vocalizations during their lives, and not just when they are newborn.

Well, let’s begin…

Some particular parrot species, the budge is monogamous. Both the male and the female have characteristic calls. When a male and female budgie are together and they are in deep love, they love each other very much, they call each other more often, and that is a normal thing during their lifetime.

This means that their calls are something to do with keeping their pair close and securing their relationship. In the early days of courting the male budgie will mimic the female’s call to impress her. The females do not do the same to the males but prefer males that are particularly good at copying their calls. Once the male and the female have produced eggs, their calls start to become more and more different again. Therefore, when the next breeding period comes around, the females can’t rely on the males’ calls being the same as their own.

Looking at the scientific side, from the laboratory, it is known that female and male budgies identify each other after being segregated for 70 days. However, it is not known how much of this identification is based on what the other bird looks like, and how much is based on what they sound like. A new study examined to see whether females recognize the males they have paired with based on what they sound like. To do this and to research this topic, the researchers paired male and female budgies. They were then separated, and they did not have permission to hear or to see one another. The female was then played the sound of her mate’s call and some another male’s call, to see if she would prefer the sound of her mate’s call, estimated by how much she called back to it, and consequently describe whether she had some remembrance of it.

Female Budgies are very good at remembering calls

As females will in general calls that are like their own, and as the male Budgies’ call turns out to be increasingly like hers as time went on, the researchers expected to control for this. They did as such in three different ways: right off the bat, they matched male Budgies and females together aimlessly, so females were not choosing male Budgies with calls progressively like themselves to mate with. Secondly, they filmed males’ calls before they had matched with the females and they started to make their calls more and more similar to hers.

And thirdly, when the researchers were playing back the two calls to the female they made sure that they were uniformly different to her call.
The researchers tested with the female’s answer to her partner’s call and the other male’s call at different times after being divided. They found that the female favored her mate’s call after one month, proving that she did remember what he sounded like after this period and that she knows what her mate sounds like. However, she did not answer his call after a long time. A probable motive for this result is that the female has forgotten what her partner sounds like.

However, previous work has shown that budgies, female budgies are very good at remembering calls. So, it could be that the female is not misremembering what her partner sounds like but rather she just doesn’t like him anymore after this point.

To sum up, now you will know why parrots need to remember

What are the most important things for a budgie to remember? In the wildness, they need to remember the location and navigational pathways to some food sources that may be available only once in a year. Therefore the necessity for some form of long-term memory is now cristal clear. What we also know, is that parrots that have been abused, suffer from some symptoms just like PTSD symptoms, but also respond negatively to any situation or object that reminds them of the abusive situations. Just like humans, these smart bird can be de-sensitized with some relevant practice and care over time. In the wildness, representations for triggers such as precious predators could be so important and life-saving. Therefore the evolutionary purposes for this form of memory are clear.

READ MORE: Budgie bird talking – Smart Bird

Mimicking voices is an exceptional quality of almost all parrot species and our little budgie is also not immune. He catches words and sounds around him extremely well. It is something which he is adept at inherently. But if a budgie doesn’t know the art, it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t ever. All one needs is simply to help his little budgie polish the talking skills. Pour in your time and effort in your little bird and who knows your budgie might become a pro like Disco or Puck. Continue reading here