New trailer set up!

Before 2020 was over, we decided our Christmas gift to our flock was re-doing our bird travel trailer. We have had the same set up (or variations of it) for almost 15 years and the cages had been discontinued so as we began to have issue with some of the enclosures we could not replace them.

Some were hose-clamped in places, latches had fallen off and we were subbing bungees, and tape held other parts together. There was rust in the bottom trays but the birds couldn't reach them so we continued to put this off until now.

Mostly because we had no idea what to replace them with. It's not an easy task finding what we needed. Cages the length we need (so macaw tails always look nice during travel) don't usually come in bar spacing adequate for macaws. The feeding dishes are usually on the sides which takes up a lot of space for us between cages (we prefer they are from the front but not a lot of designs come this way.)

We approached Corners Limited who did our indoor aviaries in our new bird studio for 1/3 of the price we were quotes from Custom Cages. However, they came in at $8,600 for ONE SIDE of cages (we needed to put cage set ups on both sides of the trailer so for half of it to be this price was not ok!) the quote was for 5 black powder coated macaw type enclosures. So back to the drawing board we went.

Here is what we came up with!

One side:

4 Prevue stainless steel macaw cages (medium size here)

Other side:

3 Prevue stainless cages (small size here)

1 A&E divided cage (found here)

What we are excited about with this set up is that most of the cages will all match and look  nice together. They will be easy to clean with the slide out trays and all the bowls come out the front (except on the size small Prevue but those will be on one side together).

We are also hoping for no wasted space with this new set up. I love the rotating system in the A&E cage because those are my favorite types of feeding stations. We may need to replace the type of bowl feeders we use for our birds because I can see bumping around on the road, that the current ones from Prevue would likely be pulled out from the birds or shake out so we may do some locking feeders.

We hope to have this new set up ready to go before our next flight trip and I will definitely do a video tour!