Fixing feather destructive behaviour in a female eclectus parrot
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- Опубликовано: 14 окт 2024
- Animal Behaviourist/practice manager Mel Vincent discusses a recent feather plucking case that presented to Burwood Bird & Animal Hospital for a behavioural consult.
Feather destructive behaviour cases are always complex and need to be tackled from both a medical and a behavioural perpective if you want to actually help the bird.
Mel discusses the advantage of working in an avian clinic where both the medical and behavioural perspectives can be addressed, which ultimately helped determine the cause of this bird's plucking and allowed the vets, behaviourist and owner to put a practical plan in place for Evie.
Hi Pet Parrot Lovers,
Our male Eclectus (Mambo) has been living with us for 20 years now (Australia).
We hope this feedback "Comment" helps other pet parrot owners, as this is why and how we have had no difficulty with Mambo 🦜plucking his feathers:
1) Early in Mambo being our young, hand-raised, tame pet parrot family member we noticed that Mambo would intentionally bath itself when given its morning fresh clean drinking water 💦 (fresh water also given late afternoon before his tea), but he would choose to bathe himself only once weekly, and would also get our attention too!
2) We early read that the Eclectus parrots' original natural habitat is the Tropical Rain Forests of North Queensland and the Tropical Highland Rainforests of PNG (Papua New Guinea), & some of the tropical Pacific Islands. That’s when we thought that they would live with showers of rain 🌧 in their original tropical rainforest habitat, and we put this together with Eclectus’s also being a very high DANDER bird that Mambo would probably enjoy, at his chosen time to bath, with us also giving him a gentle shower spray with an indoor pot plants water 💦 spray bottle. Well yes indeed! Mambo LOVES his weekly bath 🛁 plus light water-spray shower all over and under his body -- he even spreads his wings wide so we can spray under both his wings and both sides of his chest. Mambo prefers this weekly wash in the morning, and he happily chats away after his bath and water spray.
So pet parrot lovers, our take on why Eclectus parrots 🦜 (& some other parrots too!) have a reputation for being feather-pluckers is NOT necessarily a nervousness condition, nor consequent to a health issue or boredom either, but rather with their high dander skin-replacing body, the build-up of dander becomes irritating to them. Thus the scratching and pecking at their irritated skin (with feathers coming out while trying to relieve themselves of the dander skin irritation) is why parrots understandably scratch & peck their skin.
I would be scratching my skin too if I didn't shower daily, and I don't even have a high-dander skin!🤗 And yes, the stress-factor to the parrot with the DANDER irritation can understandably impact their general health and wellbeing, and happiness!
This DANDER skin irritation probably adds to bad behaviour, like screeching, etcetera.
We have 3 pet parrots, and they have never had the problem of plucking feathers.
They all live indoors in our home with us to keep them safe from outside predators (snakes, rats, and predatory birds - e.g. Butcher Birds, Magpies). I have had pet birds most of my 70 year life - and approximately 100 racing pigeons as a young teenager and belonged in the latter 1960’s to the Brisbane QLD Racing Pigeon Federation (the best I got was a 3rd place 🥉 in a long distance pigeon race back to their loved home lofts -- birds love an easy resort-lifestyle and security).
Enjoy wonderful pet birds, as they love human company too!
Cheers, Garzo 🎶🦜- see in the RUclips Channel “ILLUSTRA MEDIA” documentary entitled “FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds” Trailer on RUclips, and with a Google search, the complete documentary is available for purchase on DVD 📀, it’s an awesome documentary. Enjoy 😃
How is Evie doing now?
Thank you for valuable video, and valuable work 💖
Please, can we hear the 90 reasons you have ? I have an animal not a bird, but the plucking/pulling behavior is there. Please make a video listing as much as possible.
Amazing video
Hi Mel i enjoyed your video can you do a video on Male Eclectus on infertility problems in cock birds and possible causes also and what to feed to help increase fertility ,probiotics diet when breeding etc cheers Mick
I am from India and having the same issue with my pet...I am completely dependent on the collar as off now...but she try to pluck her self given a chance
What would be the cuase of her sickness, is it her diet doc?
Excellent question. Feather Destructive Behaviour is always complicated and multi-factorial. Determining a single cause, particularly in such an advanced case is unlikley. FDB may start due to one trigger, but other triggers often arise meaning multiple causes are playing a part. This particular case, multiple things were identified. Diet certainly played a role in her recovery as a change was needed in order to help control her medical conditions. A good behaviourist/avian vet will put an action plan in place which will include changes in medical treatments, husbandry and training so that causes will be identified, controlled and hopefully eliminated.