Oh the day I dread!!! Cage cleaning day. Once a week the cages get scrubbed and the surrounding areas get cleaned…including the walls!! Yes…you can’t tell me that the occasional flicking of food stays neatly in your birds cage…falls through the grate at the bottom and precisely onto the news paper in the tray…life just isn’t that easy!!!
I’ve experimented over the years with several types of cleaning methods. The obvious soap and water effect does absolutely nothing but make my arms feel like they are rubber extensions of my torso that are about to fall off (due to incessant scrubbing). The ever popular take the birds out to the aviary and scrub with a potent all purpose cleaner and then pass out from the fumes…then there is the natural all purpose cleaner with enzymes…which costs about as much as my brand new monthly car payment and I have to use 3 times as much and more scrubbing then soap and water…not to mention that the walls need to be scrubbed as well so now I am spending my car payment plus 2 weeks worth of gas!! Now while an enzyme based cleaner can be used while my birds are still inside, my pocketbook will not allow the dollars to be spent…then one day it hit me…hydrogen peroxide!!!!
Hydrogen peroxide is used to kill germs in cuts and wounds, why can’t it be used to clean, disinfect and clean germs on the surface. It’s about 97 cents a bottle at the local grocery store and guess what??? It bubbles!!!!! Although I was so intent on trying it out on the cages, I was a bit hesitant and wanted to check its cleaning capacity first. My tile floor became the guinea pig. Kacey (my 11 y.o. Blue and Gold Macaw) has this fantastic little thing she does with her butt…she hangs on the side of her cage, does a 3,000 decible jungle call and then proceeds to shoot her poop about 5 feet across the room being ever so precise through the bars of her cage. It’s actually a quite amazing little trick…however…it sometimes gets annoying when her aim is at me!! So with that said, I managed to break out the 1970’s vacuum cleaner, vacuum the bird floor and then down went the Hydrogen Peroxide. WOW!!! Would ya look at all those bubbles!!! Could my floor be that dirty??? There’s no smell to the peroxide so it’s safe as far as my birds respiratory systems are concerned and I’m not passing out from fumes either…hummm…I think I’m onto something here.
After a few sweeps across the floor with my mop to spread the peroxide around I noticed something else…it evaporates!!!! Yeah!! No drying!!! My tile grout is white???? Didn’t know that! And the tile has a beautiful design to it??? hummmm…thought it was grey but it’s actually a pretty coral color!! And the dried up Kacey poop??? Lifted right up with those fun little bubbles! Now the real test…the cage grates…ugh!
Ok…even though you might think with Kacey’s little trick with her poop shooting she wouldn’t get that much in her cage…HA!!! She’s the messiest out of all three of them! And talk about the food mess as well…you all know I am OCD about the CHOP method of feeding so you can imagine the flinging of food that goes on in my house! I have what you would call…CHOP wallpaper! It’s actually quite unique looking…Thanks Patricia!! Anyway, back to the grates…I filled up a spray bottle with the peroxide, took the grate out of the cage and onto the porch to start spraying away. I cracked off the larger amounts of waste and then started spraying…COOL!!!!…More bubbles!!!! Left the peroxide on for about 5 minutes (drank a cup of coffee) and then took a sponge to it. Talk about sliding right off!!! This is going to be a good cage cleaning day!! I got all 3 grates in the sun drying in about a half hour.
Now I got time to enjoy the beach this afternoon!!!
Happy cage cleaning!!!!!
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