Oliver's Garden: A Review of sorts

Two days ago, I posted about an Oliver's Garden order I just received.

One of the pictures shared was this one.



The toys in the bottom left corner, the small pieces of branch that have been hollowed out and a bead inserted from both ends, well I gave one to Shade that same evening, when I was replenishing her foot toy bowl for the next day. And less than 24 hours later, when I came back from work yesterday, this is what I found at the bottom of her cage.



I think it's safe to say that she enjoyed the toy and it didn't take her long to figure it out. Still, it looked like it would be possible to put it back together and that's what I did. But the challenge was definitively lessened by the her previous work on the branch.

I offered the toy to her out of cage last evening so I could take pictures. She immediately took it from my hands and started working on it, taking mere seconds to remove the beads with the end result that I often put it back together..






Successful extraction of the bead

Of course, each time a bird shows as much interest in a toy as Shade did with this one, Zuri will also want to play with it. So when it became apparent that Shade had lost interest, I then gave the foot toy to Zuri who seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.







But lets get back to that first picture, the one from two days ago. When I looked at the bottom of Shade's cage yesterday, I also found a pile of very shredded natural wood. I couldn't quite figure out on the spot what the wood had been from, so I assumed it was from one of the toys in her cage. In her foot toy bowl, she also had some strings of beads and some natural wood coins (willow, cottonwood) which normally don't stay intact for a whole day but these were..so something else had obviously got her attention yesterday. It did hit me later on, what that pile of shredded wood was from. In the picture from two days ago, there are natural wood pieces in the upper left corner. These were given to me by Susan so I could try them out, as these are what go on the medium Chunky Monkey and this way I could see if my birds would like to upgrade from the small to medium. Well I gave one piece to Shade at the same time I gave her the other foot toy and that is what she destroyed very thoroughly. The Oliver's Garden pine won over her treasured natural wood coins. As well, I had given her the Chipping 101 toy and she's been working on that quite a bit!

So while all my birds do like their Oliver's Garden toys, Shade, as always, seems to LOVE them, that wood is really one of her favorite things!