About ForpusFacts
Who's behind this website?
My name is Melanie and I'm the woman behind ForpusFacts. Although I've had a special interest in birds since I was a child, it took surprisingly long for me to consider them as pets. Zunächst bin ich durch meinen Beruf auf den Papagei gekommen. At first, I came to know parrots through my work. I'm a psychologist and cognitive biologist with focus on animals by training. Through this I have researched play, social behaviour and innovation in New Zealand Kea parrots at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the University of Vienna.
For this job, my partner and I moved from Saxony to Vienna in 2021. Later that year we decided to get our own parrots and eventually came across the cheeky South Americans. In June 2022 Sunny and Milo moved into our apartment and our hearts.🦜💗
The backstory
Before and also after our parrotlets had moved in, I spent countless hours researching. I realized how little high-quality and available information there actually is about parrotlets. I also quickly noticed that the hobby of pet birds is quite outdated and includes a disproportionate number of elder people. Modern views, current information and young people – in short supply. Due to my professional background, I had high demands on my own husbandry of these birds and on the quality of information available about them.
Due to the sparseness of relevant information, whether in book form or on the internet, I was thrilled and grateful when I found the wonderful Desiree's parrotlet blog. She has managed to put together an impressive collection of very well-researched, up-to-date information on parrotlets and their contemporary husbandry. She followed a mission that I could immediately identify with: Because she, like me, had invested so many resources into researching the best possible way to keep her parrotlets, she wanted to make it easier for future interested parties and share her knowledge in a compact way.
Now, through my training, I had access to original scientific literature that is not available to most other people. That's why I contacted Desiree, who happily accepted my offer to benefit her blog with it. However, it soon became clear that my ideas didn't really fit into the blog format and we decided that I would create my own website for it. Our different approaches should enable our websites to complement each other, which is why I always like to link to Desiree's work.
Project ForpusFacts
My own project ForpusFacts grew quickly. The heart was thought to be a kind of wiki about parrotlets, in which scientific information about these species and their keeping as pets should be made available to everyone in an easily understandable way. However, it should not follow a typical blog structure but rather serve as a reference work. This resulted in the ForpusFacts encyclopedia.
In addition, I also decided to embed the content in a blog in order to offer a kind of online magazine in addition to an online encyclopedia. That's why you can now find blog articles on all topics on the website. It also allows me to cover things that don't fit into an ecyclopedia, e.g. craft ideas and DIY instructions, experience reports or current news for parrotlet keepers.
Nevertheless, when writing all my posts, it is very important to me not to rely on my own experiences or those of others, but rather to consult scientific sources wherever I can and to identify experiences as such. As a psychologist, I know that experiences are extremely error-prone and, above all, often distorted by our subjective perspective. Therefore, even years of experience are no guarantee of accuracy and caution is advised even with “experts”.
Mit ForpusFakten möchte ich eine möglichst objektive und aktuelle Wissensbasis über Sperlingspapageien schaffen, damit diese Arten, vielleicht sogar Vögel allgemein, besser gehalten werden und glücklicher und gesünder leben dürfen. Dabei sollt ihr euch auf mich als „Expertin“ genauso wenig blind verlassen, sondern auch in meine Quellen schauen und eure eigenen Schlüsse ziehen. In diesem Sinne schätze ich besonders Feedback aus der Community, denn zusammen wissen wir mehr.