Mary Allen
Manuel Eisenring from Wallenwil is interested in the behavior of parrots. He trains different types of parakeets to fly back to him when he whistles. He has also successfully let fire-bellied and citronella parakeets fly free.
There’s a lot going on in the Eisenring family’s living room in Wallenwil, Thurgau, when Arnold, Charlie, Caspar, Chem, Dokrates, and Lemon are flying around. But a whistle from Manuel Eisenring is enough for the five cockatiels and the citron parakeet to flutter onto the outstretched arms of their breeder. However, it does not always work out right away, because the birds are still young. Docrates, the youngest of the bunch, is even fed something. “I give him some hand-rearing food three times a day with the syringe,” says Eisenring.
The 20-year-old works intensively with his birds for up to three hours a day. “I’m particularly interested in the human-animal relationship,” says the young man, who graduated from the teacher training school in Kreuzlingen TG. During the week he lives with his brother right next to the training center. “I have a room there, but I like to come home to my parents in Wallenwil at the weekend.”
He doesn’t see his parents during the week, but his birds are always with him. He takes them in a shipping crate to the city on Lake Constance, where he places the parrots in a flight cage in his room. His parakeets know the living conditions, and under his supervision, they dart through the hallway into the communal kitchen. “I have a special permit that I can keep the birds in the school,” says Eisenring. It wasn’t difficult to get them, as he is writing his high school thesis on hand-rearing and the behavior of parakeets. He teaches them useful behaviors, specifically how to come back to him at his whistle.
Hand Rearing is Ideal
Meanwhile, Arnold flies in circles in the room, Dokrates begs on the table for food and Caspar flutters onto a ficus, which then clatters to the ground. Bettina Eisenring laughs. Manuel’s mother is used to all sorts of things: For her, the feathered roommates have long been normal, as her son Manuel used to ride a tricycle through the apartment with feathered passengers when he was a small child. A budgie and a cockatiel were sitting on the handlebars.
The household of the Eisenring family is geared towards animals. Father Rolf is a passionate bird breeder and breed judge from Ziervogel Schweiz. He and his son Manuel are members of Kolibri Wil. It goes without saying that the birds that Manuel Eisenring raises by hand also hatched in the aviaries in his parents’ house. “They’re white-headed pearl piebalds,” the young man explains the cockatiel’s special color impact.
He finds it important to be able to hand raise birds he wants to train. “The bond is greater from the start.” If they had been raised by parents, it would also work, but it would be much more difficult to establish a bond, Eisenring suspects. He took the cockatiels all from the nest box when they were three weeks old. “They got used to it from day one and picked up the hand-rearing food without any problems.” Eisenring feeds a ready-made food that he mixes with warm water. He gives it directly into the beak with a syringe so that the parakeets swallow the solution themselves.
Cockatiels incubate their eggs for around 18 days. The young fledge at about five weeks and are fed by the parents for up to three weeks while they slowly begin to feed themselves. This is the stage at which little Docrates finds himself. But when Eisenring feeds him, Lemon also flutters over and is happy when he gets some of the food. The little Lemon Parakeet is also a young bird this year.
“I have a lot of experience with lemon parakeets,” says the young parrot friend. He once raised five young lemon parakeets by hand and trained them so well for six months that he could take them outside. “I always went to a hill and let them fly their laps there.” He shows a short film on the mobile phone. The small South Americans can only be recognized as small dots in the greyish sky. He tried the experiment on the hill because it was clearly visible to the parakeets from afar and because there was no vegetation around.
He has also done this successfully with fire-bellied parakeets. “Once when a kite appeared in the sky and screeched, the fire-bellied parakeets scattered.” Eisenring thought he had lost her. But his father Rolf wanted to know in which direction they flew. They searched the trees there. In fact, the outliers sat hidden in the leafy green.