A Birdcage can only house one bird; however, it can be easily swapped with another at any time. There is no functional difference between the different types of birds, other than the aesthetic appeal, with the exception of Canaries in the caves when Toadstool is alive and Misshapen Birds and Moonblind Crows. Birds go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. During night, the bird can be taken out and put back in to interact with it for a short time, before it falls asleep again.
Birds will slowly starve in the Birdcage, lasting for roughly 20 Days before dying, depending on ambient temperature. Once the bird has died, the cage must be mucked out before a new bird is caged. Similar to dying in the inventory or a chest, a bird dying in a Birdcage will be changed into a Morsel, which will be fresh at the moment the bird dies, and will spoil at its normal spoiling rate. Leaving the dead bird in the birdcage will eventually turn it into a skeleton, mucking out which will yield one Rot. Unlike starving in the inventory or being killed, a caged bird will never drop a Feather.
Examining the Birdcage when the captured bird is hungry or starving will make the character say different Quotes, and the hungry bird will have an additional animation, allowing the player to know when the bird needs to be fed without removing the bird. Any item the bird can eat will restore full hunger value to the bird.
Spoiling food can be saved from turning into Rot or Rotten Eggs by converting them into fresh Eggs.
The bird can be used to convert meats that are not accepted by the Pig King into Eggs, which are accepted in exchange for Gold Nuggets.
The Birdcage is good for Winter, when food resources are limited, as the player can feed the bird easy-to-acquire Monster Meat-items to get fresh Eggs in return, which can be eaten or further be used in Crock Pot recipes.
In a situation where the player is playing as Webber and does not have the ingredients for Bacon and Eggs or Pierogi, this would not be a good decision.
If the player is starving and there's no other food available, then the player can take the bird out of the cage to cook it for a quick morsel.
Trivia
In older versions of Don't Starve, the Birdcage cost 100 Research Points.
Initially, only Crows were worth keeping in birdcages because Redbirds would die in Winter and Snowbirds would die in Summer. This was changed soon after.
When Reign of Giants was released, caged birds needed to be fed to keep them alive just like if they were kept in the inventory. Because there was no "fuel" system to keep the birds fed for a few days, players had to manually feed them every day or return to an empty cage. Rather than add a feed tube, Klei removed the feeding requirement for caged birds.
The image of a bird in a gilded cage as a metaphor for being trapped in a luxury prison was first popularised in the song "A Bird in a Gilded Cage", published in 1900.
Even though the Guano spawned by feeding Seeds in Don't Starve Together is much smaller than the usual one, the icon is still the same. However, the size returns to normal when the server is restarted. Laying a piece of the small Guano into a Chest will not change the size, but stacking small ones with big ones will.
Imprisoning a Parrot Pirate will result in a normal parrot. This means that Pirate Parrots are impossible to keep around for sanity.
Bugs
If the player removes the bird from the cage but has no available slots, rather than the character holding onto it and remarking that there is no more space, the bird will either disappear or be freed.
Attention: The following categories are only for the players look up the page based on their first impression, they have nothing to do with the actual categories/DLC/function/tags of these Things. Some of them are not even .
Attention: The following categories are only for the players look up the page based on their first impression, they have nothing to do with the actual categories/DLC/function/tags of these Things. Some of them are not even .
Attention: The following categories are only for the players look up the page based on their first impression, they have nothing to do with the actual categories/DLC/function/tags of these Things. Some of them are not even .
Attention: The following categories are only for the players look up the page based on their first impression, they have nothing to do with the actual categories/DLC/function/tags of these Things. Some of them are not even Structures.
