18 Paper toys for birds - shredders, foraging boxes, brain teaser shapes

thingiverse

THIS IS ESPECIALLY USEFUL FOR ZOOS, BIRD RESCUES, AND BREEDERS - PLEASE SEND A LINK TO SOMEONE WHO YOU THINK COULD USE THESE These files are for paper cutters or laser cutters to make bird toys. The toys are foraging box toys, mentally stimulating complex 3D form to manipulate, and hanging shreddables with lots of little corners to chew off! Files are mostly for 12 x 12 cardstock or scrapbook paper, but the nature shapes file is for 8.5 x 11 inch paper. They are flat, the gyroscopes and foraging boxes are pop-up toys so **you can store thousands of them flat in a drawer, or hanging file folder to avoid bulky, disorganized enrichment bins**. I pop up 40-50 at a time, and add those to the flat shapes to give 200 birds enrichment per day, and have them distributed during feeding. (Also check my foraging basket "thing" if you like pop-up bird toys: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4167360) Some of the layouts are tessellated. This means there is almost zero waste! If you are making toys for a lot of birds, the tessellated designs will make the most out of a $0.10-0.60 cardstock sheet. I've included multiple tessellated designs, so if you need to make toys for 2,000 small & medium parrots, and large finches on a budget (I know, we've all been there) you can mix colors and designs to create a lot of variety. The nature shapes file is for bird mommies who do not need to make hundreds of toys, but just a few really cool ones to help liven up the sleeping cage. I have used all of these with parrots ranging from parrotlets (little cut out shapes) to macaws (over-sized heavy paper gyroscopes) and had good luck with about 90 species of parrots. They are light enough for your kakarikis to run around with after they rip them down! The files include both SVG which is used by most papercraft cutters, and the Silhouette *.studio3 files as that company upcharges for the ability to open SVGs, so here they are pre-converted if you have one of their machines, which means they will open really quickly, too. As a note, the lobster file has a LOT of lines to cut. If you've never run a super complex design before, do this one last. Not all cutting systems are programed well enough to actually process the job. Depending on what software you have, importing the SVG to the native format might take a WHILE, like 20 minutes and you think the software crash kind of a while. Once you save it in your native format the files will open really fast. To test, I suggest the nature shapes or tension boxes files, they are both small. If you have an animal facility here are some fun ways to use these: JUNIOR INTERN/ZOO CAMP The kids who do camps or young volunteers that "work" at animal facilities don't get to actually work with the animals, typically, because they will hurt themselves or the animal and are unreliable little s***s with the attention span of a gnat. Paper toys can fix that! The zig-zag toys are long and thin, sized to fit through and then hang from 1 x 0.5 inch wire. So from outside even fine wire mesh, kids can hang toys that will reach far enough to be played with on the perches. Also, if you have a paper cutter or desktop laser cutting setup, you can have a kid load, run the cutting job, and unload the machine and make you a thousand paper toys. Then, you hang a couple up with the kid there, the iris lorikeets shred them immediately and the kid feels super good about it. ENRICHMENT DAY ACTIVITY If you do public enrichment days or school programs, the tension closure foraging boxes are an awesome way for kids to make toys that the animals will immediately use. You can make the filthy children wash their hands in front of you with Purell or a wet classroom sink, and assign teachers and parents to walk around and monitor. You have a dried fruit and seed mix bin for the kids to take little dixie cup scoops out of. (Be firm that anything put in a foraging box that's not from the bird treat bin means student is removed from event!! Emphasize animal safety to kids.) The fold is dead simple, so this is an elementary school-appropriate or mixed-ages activity. The kids place a small item in the box, then bring the tabs together and it will pop closed. Thirty minutes of kid time = 100s of foraging boxes. After the birds learn that these are treat bombs, you can toss a big handful into a conure, lory, ring-neck or other aviary and watch the birds go nuts! I like to scatter them on a feeding shelf and a few on floor areas. The dominant birds guard the shelves and the lower ranking birds play at ground level. So many toys and locations that no one fights over any one item. CLASSROOM STEM Send the files over to a Technology Teacher who has a paper cutter or laser cutter and ask them to do zoo animal toy making as a way to teach kids how to work with computer-controlled cutting equipment. The kids can take shifts picking out designs and learning how to cut them, and then at some future date you come in and do your zoo mobile schtick and they present you with a bunch of toys! If the kiddos do laser cutting be clear with the technology teacher that visibly burned edges will not be accepted as you want to limit the animals' contact with carcinogenic burned stuff (Paper has dyes, glue binders, and sizing. Those elements can burn into nasty chemicals.) Similarly, they need to use a self-stick cutting mat for a cutting machine. Spray glue or glue sticks are unacceptable as they leave residue on the paper that the animals may ingest.