Dusky Lory Care Sheet

Scientific Facts

Common Name	Dusky Lory
Scientific Name	Pseudeos fuscata
Life Span	28-32 yrs
Size	10 inches
Habitat	Primary forest and woodlands
Country of Origin	Papua New Guinea

Overview

The dusky lory(Pseudeos fuscata), also known as Banded Lories or just simply the Duskies, is a parrot that you can’t usually see. They originally came from New Guinea, and also be found on islands of Salawati and Japan in Indonesia, where they live in mountains and rain forests area with some trees. Occasionally, these duskies also visit savannas and coconut plantations.

Duskies are birds that usually called tenderhearted. They are friendly, and they have a very playful character, and beyond everything, their unusually very complicated and distinctive looks, these nonnative parrots have become a focus to everyone’s attention. Even there are some potential issues, like their being noisy, with such little tolerance, you can be recompense with a loving, smart, and jolly pet parrot also with such beautiful looks to boot. They have also exotic patterns that you will be surely impressed. Its outrageous looks are not easily forgotten.

Physical Description

Dusky Lory is a parrot that has short-tailed, its length about 25 cm (10 in) long. Its main color is brown and has white back and rump. Its beak is dark orange, and there’s an area of bare orange skin at the base of its lower mandible. Dusky lory has also two color phases; the band across the upper chest, together with its abdomen are either yellow or orange. Its iris are red, and its legs are gray.

Image Sources

Male and female dusky lory are identical in external appearance, and determining the sex can be a difficult thing. A young dusky lory is duller with a yellowish back and rump, yellowish-Grey irises, and a beak which is yellow at the base and brown or black towards its tip. Some of the different features of lories are usually well-known, having a prominent beak, thin, and broaden tail feathers and incomparable color variations.

Having some of the weirdest and chromatic color patterns in the parrot world, Dusky Lory is no doubt to leave a long-lasting impression. Its orange and black color is usually seen in the parrot world, and that color makes the dusky lory stand out in any crowd.

Dusky Lory As Pets

Dusky lories are the most playful parrots, intelligent pets, and great talkers. The only disadvantage of a dusky lory is their awful, high pitched squeal! Opposite to other parrots that usually feed by seeds and sometimes nuts, lories can feed on as much as 640 flowers in a day, but lories required a higher percentage of nectar, fruit and buds and pollen as for their diet. They also eat unripe grain and seeds.

Native Region or Natural Habitat

These parrots originally came from the humid tropical bottomland forest of Papua in New Guinea. Its native variety covered from New Guinea below from 2500m and Indonesian (West Papua) and New Guinean area of the island.

Image Source

This well-known island is habitation to different exotic and very unique birds. Dusky lory is born nearby islands of Yapen and Salawati. In addition, their natural environment includes the regional montane and mangrove forests as well as civilian orchard. These parrots can be grouped into a small community that can number up to thousands and more types of birds.

Behavior and Temperament

These bright parrots are well-known for their playful personality and stunning beauty. Their energetic personality is one of the bases behind their popularity. A roomy cage should add some toys, pole, and hanging ropes since acrobatics are the favorite pastime of a dusky lory. They will always look for an original and new method for playing, and they create fun with the toys out of anything they play with. Everything they see in their eyes, they consider it their toy. They also love some toys that play sounds such as bell and many more.

Most of the new lory owners take time to appreciate whats normal to a lory behavior. Its most attractive part of being an owner was its playful and close affection to its owner. Usually, a young lory at first will be timid, but it is easy for a lory to build its trust to its human, and frequently, this human will lories recognize as its parent.

As a bird matures, its ways of behaving will change, sometimes it starts to bite or attack its owner, and it becomes aggressive. The owner must be aware of making advance knowledge for them to easily cope with this dusky lory.

They enjoy cuddling and snuggling underneath the blankets because they are very loving pets. They are known as curious, funny as a clown, and sometimes extroverted parrot who loves to make unique behaviors. Above all things, if you consider their noisiness, you’ll see that these dusky lories can be a wonderful pet.

Speech and Sounds

Some aspects that make dusky lory inappropriate to live in apartment owners are the loud noise they make. This is the only disadvantage that they have, but through some time when you get used to it, their noise won’t bother you anymore. They always murmur and chirp to themselves; their usual calls are sharp and disturbing screams.

Housing

For lories accommodation, it would be a large cage because they are active birds. The minimum size of a birdcage for single lory should weigh 36” in height x 48” in length and 24” in width, while for a pair, the cage measurements must have a minimum of 36” in height by 60” in length and 36” in width. Keep in mind that you need an extra room for the toys that lories loves to play with, roosts, their food, and even their water dishes, you also need to provide sufficient space for them to move around.

Here is a quick guide of a dusky lory’s housing:

Bird-caged shall be more spacious, for there is a tendency for them to squirt.
It is not advisable to place a cage beyond a fine decorated wall or to a susceptible carpet. Simple flooring is advisable, as well as a pre-washed wall.
It’s good to put some drinking plate for them to easily drink while it’s hot.
Lories always climb, so a cage that has high quality coated is a good choice.

Diet

Lory or lorikeet loves to eat a lot, and they most probably have persistent and frequent to loose projectile poo. Dusky lory has a brush-tipped tongue that they used to get the pollen. Its tongue tip has hairy projections (sometimes called papillae) that used to suck up nectar and grab pollen, well modify for its usual diet.

It is said that lory’s life span can live up to 28 to 32 years when they provide its specific dietary needs, sometimes one of those major caused of poor health and early death in pet birds is their nutrient needs that neglected.

Just like all other animals, birds also need the right balance of carbohydrates, fat, minerals, water, vitamins, and proteins. This brush-tipped parrot needs a highly specialized dietary plan due to its distinctive tongue. Lories and lorikeets have a high dampness diet and comparatively short digestive span, which makes them poop easily. By this means, dusky lory shall eat a lot and probably have often loose droppings.

You should also be concerned about what your lory often eats. You should consult your lories nutrition into a veterinarian. Some pet owners think they are giving a proper diet to their bird, but in fact, they are not. This is a habitual cause of many health problems for their pets. Lories’ life did not depend on how they sufficient to feed, but this parrot needs a highly specialized diet. Lories’ health will always depend on how well it fed.

Handle your bird-like your little child, give a small size of different food daily. But don’t forget to maintain its balanced diet most of the time.

How to Deal with your Dusky Lories Screaming

Screeching is typical for every bird. The utterance is a sign of a healthy parrot. But there is a point that sometimes they become excessive when, as every time you pass into them, your parrot just screams to get your attention. It does not stop screaming until you pay attention and notice them. So how will you adjust to this kind of behavior? It is quite funny, but the best technique to reward that screeching was to screech back at your parrot; they find your scream as you talking back and finally notice them.

Another procedure to teach your bird to stop when they started to make harsh noise is you need to look for a form of distraction or some other else except your presence. Search for a way like hiding a portion of food in their cage before you leave, and they soon learn that every time your leaving their room means you left them treats.

Other than that, look for ways that much entertaining than calling back when the birds scream, try to ignore them until they stop screeching and reward them with a treat. Reward them for being quiet, if they start to screech again, then just stay out of their room, wait for them to be quiet again, and you come back and give them a reward. Soon the bird will not scream every time yours out of its room.

Teaching Your Lory to Talk

Most lories can teach to learn for them to talk and imitate all kinds of sounds they hear. Like other pets, you also need patience teaching lory to talk. Lories may learn to obtain words that it usually hears even without such effort like common expressions like “hi” and “hello.” Parrots acquire to talk on their own.

They easily pick up those words that they usually hear. You motivate them to talk by the used of talking to them itself. Repeat those words or phrases that you want to teach them. If you want to motivate your parrot to say a phrase, you need to choose five or more phrases that you really want your bird to learn and try to teach them on a usual basis. Talk to them, especially when they are attentive or in a heightened condition.

Constantly, the parrots are always excited when they saw you just walk in their room, that’s the best way to teach them to talk. Usually, most parrots’ first word was hello because its the first word they hear when someone is talking to them. Give your pet a treat once they learned the phrase that you want them to learn.

Dropping and Potty Training

Most lories are feeding on nectar, and they lived mostly in the liquid diet. This means that its normal ways of their poop are to squirt, they poop liquid between the distance where they roost. This means that lory will poop anytime and anywhere they want to release their droppings. There is early conduct that can be used to teach a lory where to poop indefinite place and by the order from a human or its owner. While young, some lory learn to go to the edge of its cage to poop, they leave the center of their cage clean and dry.

When you observe a lory, it well frequently show that indefinite condition they will poop. Generally, every parrot has a signal sign when they are about to poop.

Here are some of them:

Once they awake, mostly after its night sleep that’s the time there having a large poo
Raising their heads above its wings
While receiving a treat or just before it sees that it was about to fed
Before it begins to play
After it removes out-of-cage

There’s a lot of things you can look for as far as when they are going to poop. Once you master its checkpoint training, you may begin on a parrot poop training. It’s natural for them to poop anywhere, especially when the urge hits. You should never stop or make a shame to a parrot even they accidentally poop on your sofa, in your shirt, or even on the floor. Cage pooping is you wait for your bird to poop inside its cage before leaving; a command was given along with an action giving to achieve the desired outcome.

Some pet owner starts this training procedure having a tissue or old newspaper as they see the bird’s about to poop signal for them to catch its squirt. Some lories have literally identified what the old newspaper or tissue is used for, and seeing it will make them poo. Emphasize this action with the word like “poop” will eventually lory will learn that pooping is related to that word as well also as the tissue.

Lories can acquire this way considerately fast and with such command to do a poo or when it attempts to. Don’t anticipate a 100% achievement when the potty training will at least succeed its goal of not having the poop on furniture or in its owner, then that means this should be dealing with a major step forward.

Nipping and Biting

This seems the most common problem between lory and human relationships, a lory starts nipping with an unexplained basis, and it sometimes causes to draw blood from the human. This etiquette can become agony and sometimes the reason to devastate a friendly relationship. The human started to be afraid to have a bird pet; it can lead to further distance between the bird and human.

Here are possible causes for its biting behavior, and what steps can be taken to reduce it?

Bites- lory has no teeth to bite, so when it says bite it when it jumps or lunges with its nib. Grateful that most bites are actually just pinched that don’t impale or cause actual bleeding. When these happen, one method is to grip the bird with its beak sideways between your thumb or forefinger then mildly press to force its upper and lower beak apart. Then briskly move the bird away and prepare to repel another bite aims.

Too excited, too playful – Lories want human attention; sometimes, they feel they’re being ignored, so they remind you that they need some attention through nipping. Some just being too excited to play so nips happen until blood draws unintentionally occur. Be more cautious, especially to your eye; in some cases, lories accidentally nip to an eye that can cause a very serious problem. It’s good to wear sunglasses or other glasses that can protect your eye, especially when you play with a group or lories.

Need Companion – One of the common causes of sudden behavior change of a lory is when they reached the age where they want a mate, or they want to make a baby lory. This problem usually happens to male lory. Primarily there is no remedy to this situation other than getting a bird to be its companion, preferably get a bird-like its same type but opposite sex.

Protecting its mate/nest-box – biting attacks can be very intrusive and serious when lories try to protect its mate or nest-box. Expect to have intrusive feather rumpling displays, loud noise, and leap attacks. The best way to avoid its attack was to keep away from the lories until its nesting is over. Try to inspect its nest-box, then catch the bird using a net and place them to its temporary cage. Make sure that lory does not go to panic and possibly injure itself place a cover in its temporary cage so that it can’t affect them seeing you at its nest-box. Wear protecting cover when trapping the bird temporarily is not possible.

Availability: Where to Get One?

If you want to have a Dusky Lory, you can visit pet shops selling such type of birds. If not, you may search online sites and see if they are selling dusky lory.

How to Care

Once your Dusky lorries take their first bath, they won’t be able to get enough of it.

Cage. Choose a big cage for your dusky lory. The bigger the cage, the happier your dusky lory will be. Provide your lory with a lot of toys, food and water dishes, perches, and wide space for them. Place water and food on both sides. The perches shouldn’t be so near the food containers. It should be moved outdoors for fresh air and sunlight.
Diet. A well-balanced diet gives them a good foundation for their health. They are fed on soft fruits and nectars. They use tongues to get the nectar. Again, they don’t eat seeds, but sometimes the insect larvae will do. There are some nectar replacements available in the market. Also, give them supplements along with veggies and fruits. Mix vitamins into their water every after 2 to 3 days.
Let your pet stay in another cage and have it adapt naturally before you introduce new birds to the cage. Give them 2 weeks allotment for their adaptation.

Hygiene. Once they take their first bath, they won’t be able to get enough of it, so avail them of their favorite toys. Take the leftovers and old food, do it regularly. Change their water daily.
Deworming. Have your dusky lory birds take vitamins in several weeks. Deworming is best done every six months.
Lice and Mites. Parasites are likely to attack birds. Lice and mite spray helps you to kill them. When you spray, spray on everything inside the cage, even the bird, but make sure not to spray on their eyes.

Training. Train them in a calm and quiet situation. Don’t give them stress after taking them home. Spend more time with your bird until you get their love and trust

Breeding. They breed easily and get mature 8 months later. Both sexes look the same.

FAQ Section

Can you make a dusky lory as your pet?

Yes. They actually make excellent pets. Just make sure to devote time because you need to keep their beaks and minds busy.

Can dusky lorries eat bananas?

Yes. Also, they can eat other fruits, such as mangoes, stone fruit, citrus, grapes, apple melon, and pawpaw. They also love vegetables but avoid giving salty, fatty, and processed human foods.

Can Lory birds talk?

Yes, with proper training that can lead them to learn good vocabulary and talk.

What does black lory usually eat aside from commercial feeds?

They eat fruits and vegetables and sometimes larvae.

Do they have emotions?

Yes, just like humans. They often get jealous when their owner talks to someone on the phone, and they also find a member of the family to talk to.

Why makes a dusky lory noisy?

They usually scream when they get excited, especially when there’s food.