Bird boarding businesses opens 4th location on Vancouver Island

If you thought a hotel for birds was a business idea that would never fly — well, think again.

Nanaimo-based Too Crazy Birdy Hotel is expanding to its fourth location on Vancouver Island, providing specialty boarding services for bird owners who need somewhere to leave their feathered friends when they go on trips.

"Birds are an exotic pet and have really specific needs that other more regular pets, dogs and cats, don't have," Megan Lewis, owner of the Victoria location, told On The Island host Gregor Craigie. "Especially larger parrots, are intelligent in the way a five-year old is intelligent."

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"They can make their own sentences, they do math, they know what day of the week it is. And they have the emotional needs of a toddler. You can't just put a toddler into a cage or into a room and just leave it there for days on end with a bowl of food."

Lewis says it's important for birds to be boarded where they can get proper nutritional care, enrichment and where they get to interact with people; however, such boarding services are tough to come by.

She says that people often give up their feathered friends for adoption "because they hadn't had a vacation ... ever."

"This was one way to say you don't have to give up your bird, you don't have to lose this family member," she said.

And while it might seem like a bit of a featherbrained business idea, Lewis says demand has been strong since she opened on Dec. 15. In fact, by the end of December, she was "pretty much full."

In addition to their Nanaimo and Victoria locations, the Too Crazy Birdy Hotel has locations in Parksville and the Comox Valley.

To hear the full story, click the audio labelled: Too Crazy Victoria Birdy Hotel offers boarding services for birds