Do budgies normally have a leader in a group,i have six and i was wondering if there is a pecking or

Actually, no.

This has been a subject of discussion for ages and most people are still not familiar with recent scientific data.

The following is a quote from a paper titled, "Height Dominance" by Steve Martin of Natural Encounters Inc.

It was published in August of 2001, in "Psittascene Magazine", a publication of The World Parrot Trust.

"That leads me to my next question: How does it apply to the behavior of the species in the wild? Some have said that is it 鈥渘atural鈥?for a parrot to want to be dominant. Many people have talked about, and even described in

great detail, hierarchies in flocks of wild parrots. Some even go as far as to state that you can tell the rank a parrot

holds in the hierarchy by its height in a tree. The higher the perch in a tree the more dominant the parrot is over the others. I am fortunate in that I have had many opportunities to observe several species of parrots in the wild.

I have never seen anything that even remotely resembles a hierarchy in wild parrots.

But, don鈥檛 take my word for it. I have also talked to many parrot field researchers (at least six) whose profession is studying parrots in the wild. None of these experts could recall ever seeing any form of hierarchy in wild parrots.

Plus, the description of ranking the dominance position by the height a bird takes in a tree brought puzzled looks, laughter, cynicism and worse from almost every expert I spoke with. All of these experts talk about the aggression