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does anyone recommend harnesses? or leashes? i feel like its cruel but i wanted to see if anyone uses them

A dozen years ago, my avian vet said that she felt a bird considered a harness to be a snake wrapping around her. Flooding, in training jargon, is subjecting a bird to such a burst of unceasing restraint (or other feared stimulus) that the bird finally gives up, having no energy left to fight the threat. I've always felt that's what a harness must do to a bird, and I gave away the only harness I ever bought, unopened.

If you begin introducing your baby to the harness right now, while he's still a baby, and you do it slowly with lots of positive rewards and next-to-NO fear, I think you might be able to make it work w/o traumatizing your bird. But that means working with it all winter, even tho it's too cold outside for an outing. Every day, every year. It's a lot of work that a small, portable wire crate makes so unnecessary.

My attitude is surely colored by the memory of a young man who'd bought a blue-fronted baby I'd loved holding at my favorite bird store. He put a harness on her right away and went out to enjoy letting her fly. Somehow she jerked the harness out of his hand. He searched frantically for her for 2 days before finding her body, the harness snagged in a tree, so she'd starved ... or died of fright. He called me for comforting, sobbing until I'd cried all my tears too. It's not a pleasant memory. I use metal crates for my birds' outings.