Cleaning the cage

Of course your need to clean the cage of your bird. A cockatoo will spill a lot of its food, both seeds and fruits, it will produce dust of its feathers and of course it will produce some droppings. As far as cleaning goes, there are three different types distinguished by how often they need to happen: the daily cleaning, the weekly cleaning and the monthly cleaning.

Daily Cleaning

In the daily cleaning of the cockatoo cage you remove all droppings and all spilled pieces of fruit. You can do this by just scooping up the dirty pieces from the floor of the cage. Usually you just take a bit of the soiled bedding with it, and that’s that.
If you do not clean daily you will get smelly pieces of fruit, fruit flies hovering around the cage and your cockatoo will maybe step into its own dropping and rotting fruits.
You need to clean the food bowl and water bowl daily with hot water. If you use soap you should rinse that out very thoroughly. Especially cleaning the water bowl is important, because algae and bacteria can grow very quickly in such a place.

Weekly cleaning

Umbrella cockatoo

Once a week you need to remove all the bedding from the cage and throw it away. If you use sand as bedding, you can also sieve the sand instead of throwing it away. Then put new, clean bedding in the cage. If any filth sticks to the bottom of the cage, you should wash this off with hot water.

If you keep your cockatoo in a large aviary or large cage, it will suffice to only remove the dirty parts of the bedding. You will figure out the best weekly cleaning method easily enough.

Monthly cleaning

Approximately once a month you need to clean the cage of your cockatoo completely. This means cleaning all the perches, all the toys and all other objects in the cage. This goes best by removing the objects and washing them with hot or boiling water.
This is also the time to remove some not-so-stellar old perches, switch the toys around and put some new branches in the cage.

Cleaning when you have a baby cockatoo

A baby cockatoo is a cockatoo that still needs to be fed with formula. It is completely dependent on you, you fill the role of parents. There is a lot of cleaning involved in taking care of such a baby bird. If there is any spilling of food or if he releases any droppings you should clean that up immediately. Generally you should clean its cage or nest multiple times a day by removing the bedding and washing any dirty parts of the nest.