Goals updated!
About a month ago, I wrote up a post about my various parrot related goals, which can be found here.
I’m going to keep updating these roughly monthly to show how things are going and to let people get a glimpse into my life.
1) Diet.
My preferred parrot diet is a base of pellets (I use Roudybush and Hagen Tropican mixed together) along with sprouts and chop.
We have three new parrots in the house, and all three of them easily transitioned to eating the pellets that I was feeding. One of my goals is to get all of them to eat fresh food.
Tlalli seems to have a major issue with anything wet. We’ve shifted to giving her her chop mixed with a lot of rolled oats, and she’s now eating more, though still not with the gusto I want.
Keela will reluctantly eat a little in her cage, but she’d really prefer it if we ate in company. One thing I’m going to do to encourage this is rearrange the location of the food dishes of the cages on either side so that she and Cin and Ky can eat in company.
Cody also doesn’t really want to eat in his cage, though he will eat some out with the rest of us. We’ve added another bowl higher up to encourage him to eat more, and will experiment with chop there.
2) Feather destruction
Tlalli is finally molting. Her old feathers are not great, quite worn even when they weren’t barbered. She’s having a disastrous-level molt, where we’re finding feathers all over the place all the time, which in my experience frequently happens when parrots shift to a much better diet.
She’s getting baths more or less constantly, and we’ve upgraded the level of enrichment nearly everywhere so that she can keep her beak on her toys and not on her feathers.
This beak, right here.
It seems that the barbering is decreasing, and definitely, the toy destruction is increasing, so we’re still hopeful that she’ll have actual feathers and not the tattered grey look at present.
3) Cohabitation
With the addition of Cody, we’ve added another level to the cohabitation department, so I’m currently working on the relationship between three pairs. Some of this is helped by the fact that of a sudden, every parrot in the house is nesting. Others, not so much.
Cody has decided that he’s in love with Tlalli, and is a little horrified by Ky, but we’ll continue to work on it, rewarding them for good interaction and having them better interact.
And hopefully, he’ll stop thinking that Tlalli is so damn sexy.
Mar 28, 2014 | Cody has a crush, but she is a little bigger. by stejacks on Keek.com
Why would you want the scary giant rumpled parrot when you could have this?
Cody is not convinced.
Tlalli and Theo
They’re doing a lot better together. I’m being very careful not to reinforce Tlalli with my presence when she’s acting aggressive towards Theo, and to do so when she’s calmer with him, and that seems to have made a big difference. No pictures of these two this time around though.
Keela and Cin
These two are doing really, really well, as you can see. One of the major issues I was having with Cin was related to his level of motivation and his activity when out of the cage. I cut back his pellets to a smaller amount, and it seems to have helped. What do you think?
He spent nearly an hour last night banging that swing from side to side, telling himself ‘Good bird’, and flapping like crazy.
He’s much more active, is playing more, will take treats happily from the hand, and is in general vastly happier. I don’t know if he’s actually lost any/much weight, but my focus was always on his behaviour, and it’s pretty clear that this is the right level of food for him.
He also thinks Keela is less scary.
They spent a while on the same stand, playing with toys, looking at each other, with much better body language.
The one little argument was really mild.
We’ve still got some time before they might want to share the same cage, but I’m happy about it!
Ky, in the background, is less happy.
4) Flight training
Keela and Cody both fly, though Keela is a significantly more accomplished flier.
Right now, rather than simply working on flying to hand, I’m encouraging flying all over the place, and also working with Keela particularly on having lots of fun places to fly to that aren’t just my shoulder.
Things like the fun bucket on my side table that’s significantly more entertaining than my shoulder, even if less in focus. :)
Cody’s flying significantly more too, and starting to land better. I will probably work on more formalized flight training once he’s in a little better shape. He pants if he flies too far. :)
That’s it for our updates! Fun times in our household.
Originally published at Rational Parrot Blog. You can comment here or there.