Selectively bred budgies,throughout the world, are the most common and popular of companion/"pet" parrots. However, their ancestors, the wild budgerigars have resided virtually unchanged for at least four million years in the vast and most often harsh arid interior of Australia.

Wild Budgies of Australia

Great article, Les.

I have had several budgies in my day, and that included a good variety of the lovely color mutations as a result of breeding, along with various shades of green. An acquaintance of mine used to call these birds easter eggs with eyes.

My very first budgie was of the wild green color. His name was Chip and he was the smartest one I had. If I put my finger anywhere on him and told him to clean himself he would clean the spot I had touched. I would tell him to "go home" from anywhere in the house and he would fly back to his cage upstairs in my bedroom. It was a sad day when after one of his flights around the house he shrieked and fell off his perch, and died instantly.

Budgies are beautiful, gregarious, and chattering birds, and very entertaining.

Les, you provided us with a lot of info about wild budgies here. I've wanted to see them for 45 years. As a teen, I worked for a lady from Australia. She would tell me about the beauty of that remarkable country over cups of scalding hot tea. Budgies figured prominently in her tales of the wildlife. Thanks for telling "the rest of the story."

Thanks Debbie and Connie,

Debbie, that remarkable Chip sounds a lot like Cocoa, the amazing and intelligent budgie my family had when I was around 6 years old.

Connie, I would love to go to Australia and among others see huge flocks of budgies and cockatiels in action.

A little background about this article. So far I have written about 25 articles for the Birds site and except for one or two articles I have exclusively over written Bird Jigsaw Puzzle articles as I really do not consider them articles and they had received less than 10 "hits' per month- there are still over 100 of those puzzles left on the site-many not for long!.

Yet, there was an existing article about Wild Budgies that I desperately wanted to replace as it was extremely minimalistic in the information that it covered and birds in the wild and their relationship to their relatives in captivity is a major interest/focus of mine. So, even though it was receiving around 300 views per month even though it was written many years ago, I priortized to replace it with a more comprehensive one so that when people access it, it would hopefully be of interest/help to them. I even edited my WRITING ABOUT BIRDS WITH INTEGRITY article (that so far is laying a real egg!)to reflect my reasons for replacing an article like that.

This might be a little off the wall but I kind of view budgies like amethyst in that they are beautiful and interesting yet they do not get the respect that they deserve because they are so "common" and not rare (something can be cheap yet still be of extremely high value). So, hopefully, the article has shown how special, precious and resilient they really are.