Baby Bird Behavior

About a month ago or so, I was having some really weird issues with my rose breasted cockatoo (aka galah) named Bondi. She is a female and is a little over 4 years old now.

One day while minding my own business, I heard a sound that sounded familiar, but weird at the same time. I looked into my bird room to find Bondi hand feeding off of a metal toy. The only time she had done this in the past is when I thought maybe she had a problem of foot tapping (which ended up being a false alarm)

So you know EXACTLY what I mean, here is a video of her doing it because eventually, she didn’t care if I was right there watching her do it.

Besides the fact that it was annoying as ever, I completely freaked out and my first thought was that it may be health related, maybe to her diet? I thought maybe she was craving iron, calcium or other foods rich in some essential vitamin that she wasn’t getting enough of. So I tried it all… cuttle bone, cooked egg whites and egg shell, birdie bread rich in everything I thought she needed but changing her diet hadn’t changed the behavior and a week went by where it was only getting more obvious.

I had already tried taking all the metal out of her cage, but when I did, she would start doing it on plastic and when all that was taken out, she would do it on rope. I stripped one cage bare of all toys and she did it on the cage bars. It really didn’t matter what I did or didn’t take away, she was finding ways to do it no matter what I did.

I separated her from the other birds, thinking perhaps it was a sexual maturity thing and it would be best to keep her away from them. I started implementing MORE sleep instead of letting her go by the summer hours of nature. I would literally get woken up to the sound of her doing it in the dark bathroom that she was supposed to be sleeping in. It seemed like it was NEVER going to stop.

Finally, some knowledgeable bird owners from Happy Birdy Forum pointed out that it was merely Bondi WANTING something. Most likely attention. And because I had been babying her ever since she had been doing it, I had merely been reinforcing it for about a week!

I felt like the biggest moron.

I tend to jump into health related things first because the topic of health and nutrition is what I would claim to know LEAST about when it comes to birds. I feed my birds really good, though. They get tons of fresh foods and eat organic pellets. But still, I always question whether or not it’s enough because it’s not what they would eat where they come from so that makes it feel like there’s lots of room for error. I was relieved to find out she just wanted attention rather than anything health related.

I started teaching her that doing the behavior = me LEAVING the room. When she was quiet for a while, I would come in and give her attention. In a sense, only rewarding her normal good behavior. I also began feeding her more in foraging toys to occupy her time, started working on new tricks to teach her and started including her more in my daily routine (she helped me get dressed yesterday).

It made me step back and realize where she might be lacking in attention and how I can fit all my birds in my routine more.