The Budgie Academy
Budgie Specialist and Parrot Behavior Consultant
Dr. Amy Zhao
Hi I'm Amy, I'm a long time budgie person and parrot behavior consultant. I have specialties in hormone management, nutrition and shaping new behaviors. I have wanted to work with animals for as long as I can remember, so I went to Cornell to study their physiology and nutrition, and stayed on in 2014 to start a PhD on hormones. That was the same year Dapi and FitC came home with me. Three years later, FitC laid an egg. Then she laid another, and another, and by the end of that summer she had laid twenty-four. Over the next three years, she prolapsed more than once and grew an ovarian cyst that nearly killed her. Hormone injections frequently failed, and anyone I asked eventually landed in the same place: some birds are just broken. I didn’t know it at the time, but that is the answer millions of budgie people get every year, and most have no reason to doubt it. I did. Studying how hormones are made was my whole job, and what I was being told simply was not how biology works. Over the last 10 years, I dug into the research and uncovered the real physiology underlying the reproductive process and learning process in these birds and now share them with parrot and budgie people around the world.
I primarily specialize in budgies and other small Australian granivores like cockatiels. My background in nutrition and integrative physiology is probably the most unique thing about my approach in general. From the behavioral perspective, people might call it LIMA or force-free but to me it's really just an integrated understanding of the biology of the animal from the molecular up to the whole animal and multi-individual level. You'll find that most of my explanations on behavior and nutrition really starts from their core biology and radiates out from there rather than telling people what's "good" or "bad". Outside of behavior, hormone physiology is another larger area of expertise, so hormone management and the other symptoms of that like feather-damaging or chronic egg laying are areas I support a lot. The species of those birds tends to vary a little more but still generally smaller birds rather than larger ones.
12 years working with birds.
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