Breakfast time!  There are four macaws, four cockatoos, three parakeets, two cockatiels, one congo african grey, a swainson’s toucan and a quaker waiting patiently for their breakfast every morning.  On the menu today is fruit pasta blend, fresh broccoli, beets, sweet potato, and kale.

Breakfast time is always one of my favorite parts of the day.  I really enjoy the preparation of foods and I love seeing the birds watching everything I do in anticipation of their first meal.  I often let one of the birds be my “helper” for the morning. This day it was Linus, and he “helped” himself to the corn that was actually on the dinner menu.  I learned the hard way to only allow one bird to “help” at a time and to never let my quaker, Libby, the resident bowl flipper, “help” from anywhere but my shoulder.

As much fun as I have in the morning, the kitchen can be a dangerous place.  Hot stovetops, boiling water and sharp knives are often present and create all kinds of potential for accidents.  It’s a good idea not to allow your birds into the kitchen when you have the stove on or have open pots of water boiling. Always be aware of birds toes when you are chopping and don’t leave your sharp knife available as a toy.  My “helper” is often unwilling to sit patiently by while I am chopping and filling bowls, so I have to be very vigilant and careful.

I always try to serve a variety of foods and I cut them up differently everyday to keep it interesting for them.  I try to serve an orange vegetable and dark leafy greens everyday because they are so high in nutrients. I also try to feed favorite foods later in the day.  This way, I am more likely to get them to eat, or at least try, the foods that are in their bowl in the morning when they are the most hungry.  It’s a good strategy for ensuring a nutritional balance.

A couple of my birds are very finicky eaters and sometimes I have to be clever to get new foods into them.  Here are a few tips for getting your picky eaters to try new foods:

• Make food fun! Placing food around the cage, woven or wedged into the cage bars, strung onto skewers, or tossed in whole is a good way to get them playing with their food, which is often the first step to eating it.  Try buying a stalk of Brussel sprouts, a head of cauliflower, or a green pepper and letting them have a ball.
• Make foraging toys out of foods. Try putting nuts into a halved head of cabbage or beneath the leaves of an artichoke (with the pointy parts snipped off).
• If they don’t like it raw, try steaming it and serving it warm. This worked well with Linus, my umbrella, cockatoo.  It was what started the ball rolling and he will now eat his veggies raw as well.

These are ways to let your bird find out that something unidentifiable might be a food.  Unlike a dog, a hungry bird will stay hungry before it will eat something it doesn’t like or recognize.  Eating fresh foods is the most natural thing in the world for your parrot and it should be considered the most important part of her diet.  If you have some picky eaters like I do, give them a fighting chance for a healthy life.  Use your imagination, have fun, and show your parrot the variety that’s available to them.

Fights, falls and flight injuries can bring about beak injuries that can come in the form of fractures, punctures, breakage or crushing.  The part of the beak nearest the head contains a blood supply that may require cauterization.  Nerve endings in a damaged beak can cause eating to be painful.  Since a parrot uses its beak in everything it does this must be considered a very serious injury and requires the immediate attention of your avian veterinarian.

BUT…

The good news is that beaks are repairable.  The use of acrylics and dental bonding reform and replace broken, cracked or missing beak parts and can give the injured bird every opportunity to carry on with a normal life until the beak tissue grows back.

One of these cockatiels had its upper beak nearly ripped off by a congo african grey.  Can you tell which one?

This one…

Photo by Anna Sloan

… Or this one?

Most species of parrot are monomorphic meaning that sex can’t be determined by visual means.  Usually DNA testing is necessary to accurately tell if Polly is truly a she.  There are a few species, however, such as the beautiful eclectus, who are notably color dimorphic.  The female is red and blue, while the male is a vibrant green. But, this is not the norm in the parrot world.

The cockatiel is another species that can be visually sexed.  Using a standard cockatiel as the example is this comparison, the male standard shown here (Tinky, my first born) you will notice the vibrant yellow coloring on his head and the clear definition of his orange cheek patch,  Aside, from the white patches on the wings, his body coloration is a solid gray, down to and underneath his tail.

The female standard cockatiel has duller and less defined coloring on her head and perhaps the most telling sign of her sex is the barring underneath he tail:

Photo by Anne Lonjak

A species that is dimorphic is the Indian ringneck,  After reaching sexual maturity, the male will devolop the famous ring around the throat which they are named for.  The female may have a faint, much lighter ring.  It is not always an entirely accurate way of separating the sexes as birds vary within the species. Her body is stockier, her feet larger and her beak is less prominent than that of the male.

The cockatoo can be visually sexed by eye color, but it isn’t a reliable method.  A typical female will have a reddish brown eye where the male’s color will be very dark brown appearing black except when exposed to light when you might see the slightest hint of brown, although I had a female umbrella with unusually dark eyes.

The male parakeet can be differentiated from the female by the color of the ceres.  A male typically will have blue to purple colored ceres, while the female will generally have pink to brown.

It is important to keep in mind that, except in the case of the eclectus, none of these methods for sexing are absolute.  The only certain method (with 99.9% accuracy) is DNA testing.

The move went fairly…smoothly.  There was a last minute change in the date we were to leave which created a bit of chaos for us all, and by us all I mean me.  The six days I thought I had left to finish my packing was shortened to two.  I managed to get most of it done, but I rushed through so much of it that I don’t remember which box contains what.

When they first arrived at my place with the trailer, Dave, always the comedian, came in and looked at the pile of boxes in my living room and just shook his head.  I took that to mean that there was no way it was all going to fit.  I went pale, especially because there was still quite a bit that hadn’t even made its way into the stack in the living room.  When they saw my reaction, the two of them doubled over in laughter.  I was very glad to have been able to amuse them.  I had to forgive Dave after he managed to fit everything in the trailer with room to spare.  That may be his greatest feat of magic to date.

The 18 hour drive went really quickly, mainly because Jamie and Dave are SO fun to hang out with.  We laughed through most of the ride, but they made me drive the whole way.  The birds were amazing – all of them.  I knew and expected theirs to be seasoned travelers, but I expected mine to be pretty stressed with the road trip.  They weren’t.  Of course, they did put Linus in a hermetically sealed, sound proofed plexi-glass carrier, so I can’t say for sure whether he screamed the whole way or not.

The first day at the house went equally as well.  My birds went seamlessly into new cages and all the birds were tolerating each other. Linus, my umbrella cockatoo, was being a little love, and spent a good part of the day out in one of the aviaries.  Theo, my easily spooked goffin cockatoo, thrilled with being tossed up in the air into flight alongside Bandit and Bondi, Jamie and Dave’s Galahs,  and Cressi, their African Grey in the living room.  Never in my wildest dreams did I see that coming on day one.  Libby, my quaker, and the cockatiels did fabulously and just went with the flow.

Yesterday presented a few bumps in the road.  Linus woke up in the morning feeling less than cooperative and gave me a few nice bites on my hand and shoulder.  He was showing signs that he was feeling things were beyond his control and I am feeling badly that I may have pushed him too far and expected too much of him on day one.  I set up his cage from Austin in the bird room.  I prepared his favorite foods and tried to fill his day with things more familiar.  It was not a great day with him, or for him.

Today Linus seems a  bit more willing to interact.  He has stepped up nicely a few times and is no longer threatening the humans in the household.  He definitely seems to feel more comfortable in his own cage.  Lesson learned.  I think that as he settles in and I continue to keep him feeling at ease as best I can, he will be fine.  I’ll post new developments.

*I suppose I should add that we did not actually entomb Linus in his carrier.   It was a moving strategy that was up for consideration but not actually carried out.

There might come a time when, because of illness or injury, you will need to medicate your parrot.  It’s a good idea to start preparing for that possibility now, before the need for your bird’s cooperation arises.

Several years ago, after I had first gotten Linus, he managed to escape his cage while I was at work.  I came home to a complete mess.  A quick glance showed that all the other bird’s cages were still closed, so I spent the next several minutes assessing the damage and trying to determine if Linus had gotten into anything dangerous that might require medical attention.  It was about 15 minutes before I noticed the blood in the cockatiel cage.

My cockatiels had been raised around Abu, a uniquely gentle and patient umbrella cockatoo, who never had shown interest in harming anything besides my laundry basket.  I assume that when Linus found his way to the cockatiel’s cage, they went over to greet him, not realizing that Linus did not have the same good intentions as Abu.  Whatever took place happened through the bars of the cage.  Tinky’s leg and foot were badly injured and I was surprised that an amputation was not found necessary.  Still, the injury was serious, and I was sent home with a course of antibiotics that was to be injected into the breast muscle of a squirming, angry little cockatiel twice a day.

Cockatiels are so little and the needle on the syringe was so big.  It was actually a gauge used for human medical needs and it seemed like the equivalent of pushing an ice pick into the muscle tissue of a human.  Tinky was a trooper and we only had a problem with one failed injection.  After I got more comfortable with the process, I began to realize how much more efficient the injections were, in this circumstance, than administering the medication orally would have been.  So much can be lost in the struggle between an unprepared bird and owner, that its effectiveness can be substantially diminished.

Years later, Linus contracted AGY, a serious, and very contageous fungal infiltration, which required oral medication – three 30 day courses over a period of about nine months.  The combination of the symptoms of the disease and spring hormones left him disagreeable on a good day – a raging demon on a bad one, and there was this medication that I HAD to get into him.  It was bright yellow, thick, chalky and bitter tasting.  Even though it had been “cherry flavored”, it was just horrible to the taste and I braced myself to be showered in it on the first dose.  To my huge surprise, he just swallowed it, and continued to do that with each subsequent dose through every course of treatment.  This is not very Linus-like behavior.  I got really lucky.  I was not prepared, nor had I given any previous thought to preparing any of my parrots for what happens during times of ill health.

How do you prepare for effectively delivering oral medications? First, be sure you understand the nature of the bird’s illness and what the prescribed medication is intended to achieve.  Follow your vet’s directions for application to the letter and be certain to administer all doses, even after the bird appears to be feeling better.  Know what side effects might be experienced.

While it may be necessary to towel your parrot to give the needed doses of medication, it is also very stressful for her.  If there is a way to achieve this goal without causing distress, it only makes sense to take this route.  Target training your bird for just this sort of situation is an excellent way to prepare yourself.  Try offering fruit juice or liquified fruit as the reward in a syringe (no needle!!) or an eye dropper.  A friend of mine targets her bird directly to a filled syringe.  There are several great videos on this site teaching you methods of target training.

Parrots can be most difficult and unpredictable when it comes to any unfamiliar procedure.  Without preparation, medicating your bird usually goes like this:

HOW TO MEDICATE A BIRD:  (author unknown)

Occasionally, we find it necessary to medicate our feathered friends.
Here are some pointers to help you with this task.

FIRST APPLICATION:

Retrieve the bird from the cage.
Set the bird on a table and hold its head by carefully grasping the neck where it joins the lower jaw, or mandible.

With your other hand, grasp the medicine syringe and place the tip into the left side of the bird’s mouth.

Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.

Wipe excess medicine from the bird’s beak.
Place the bird back in the cage.

SUBSEQUENT APPLICATIONS:

Attempt to retrieve the bird from the cage.

Apply bandages as necessary to wounds on your hands and arms.

Retrieve the bird from its new hiding place under the coffee table.

Carefully immobilize the bird’s head to prevent further tissue damage to your body.

Attempt to break the “Vulcan Death Grip” and remove the bird’s feet from your hand.

Apply more bandages and a strong analgesic cream to the new wounds on your hands and arms.

Immobilize the bird by carefully wrapping it in a bath towel.

Watch in amazement as the bird “morphs.” Its head and tail will probably swap position,
putting your tender flesh in mortal danger again.

Hold the bird snugly in its terrycloth prison.

Grasp the medicine syringe.

Try to stop trembling in fear and pain.

Place the tip of the syringe into the left side of the bird’s mouth.
Ignore the crushed tip.

Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.

Wipe excess medicine out of your eyes.

Release the bird and squirt medicine in the general vicinity of its face.
Some medicine may actually go into the mouth.

The rest will be absorbed by osmosis.

Shoo the bird back to the cage.

Spend the rest of the day attempting to regain the bird’s affection with yummy snacks and new toys.

Of the five parrots I currently have, I have only experienced travel with two: the cockatiels.  Linus, my umbrella cockatoo,  has had some fairly extensive travel experience from when he lived with Dave and Jamie.  I have the expectation that Libby, my quaker, will do just fine.  She is one of those rare birds that just rolls through life, never letting too much get in the way of her fun.  The cockatiels, though confident enough to handle the changes, are old.

Theo, my goffins cockatoo, is a concern.  She has no travel experience at all and fears unfamiliar things.  She also sometimes becomes mysteriously afraid of things which are familiar to her.  I came home from work one night to hear her screaming.  Upon investigation, I found the source of her terror to be a set of hand crafted little wooden dogs that my daughter brought back with her from a trip to Mexico.   These little animals had been in the same location since long before Theo came to live with me.  I am sure they stayed inanimate while I was at work that day.  I put the wooden dogs in the closet and she settled down, but kept a watchful eye on the closet door in case they tried to escape.  I never know what she might decide is unacceptable.  This will be an interesting adventure for both of us.

Finding the right perches for the ride is probably the biggest problem I am facing. I need to provide soft rope perches for both the cockatiels and for Theo.  Following an injury, one of my cockatiels has three toes forward and one back on one foot and he lacks a good grip with that foot.  Theo has had problems with pressure sores on her feet and needs the comfort of a soft perch for the trip.  Normally, that would be no problem, but Theo is terrified of rope perches or perches covered in vet tape.  I have been trying to slowly adapt her to accepting a comfy perch for months, but she’ll have no part of them.  So this is where we are with her:  the rope swing in her cage is okay, rope perches are evil.  Wooden perches are wonderful, little wooden dogs, not so much.

I never thought I’d be saying this, but it looks like Linus, the diva, might be the easiest of the bunch to move.  Libby, if she will tolerate the drive being surrounded by large, unknown birds, will be a close runner-up.  I have written in previous posts about the importance of change in your everyday routine to keep your parrots adaptable for just this type of situation.  Hopefully, we’re prepared.