Squawkster

Spring is in the Air

Posted on March 27, 2012 by leland307

I finished my lab practical rather quickly this morning and was left with a two hour break before lecture. Since I had left some things here at the house, I decided to come home. Sushi, who hasn’t been our of her cage much over the last few weeks due to her bird-itude, has been going a bit crazy to come out and socialize. (However, she still doesn’t want to come out of the cage unless its on her terms, which is not ok.)

When I came home, she seemed rather calm and was simply waiting at her door, looking at me. So, I decided to see if she’d step up. I was pleased when she did. She quickly went back to her old habits – aka treating me like a jungle gym, snuggling with me, trying to chew on my shirt buttons, etc etc. It was nice to see her acting like her old self.

Then she really surprised me. She climbed down on to my hand and began lightly nibbling on my fingers, which she normally doesn’t do. She then started making these short, quiet chirps, which I have never heard before. And finally, she lowered her tail as low as she could off the side of my hand and began wiggling it back and forth.

Classic mating behavior.

Although, now I’m thinking that she is a he. My vet doesn’t do blood work (unless necessary due to an illness) until the birds are a year old, so I haven’t had her/him officially sexed yet. Sushi’s previous mom told me, for various reasons, that she assumed Sushi was a girl (so I just went with it). However, females typically raise the tail in the air when they’re in the mood, males lower theirs.

I was so caught off guard that all I could do was laugh (and quickly try to snap a few pictures on my computer).

You can’t fully see, but this was her/him nibbling on my fingers. Also, you can see how s/he was lowering her tail.

Also, this is a good time to talk about something I completely overlooked when s/he started her/his bird-itude behavior a few weeks ago. Its Spring time! This is breeding season for birds, when everyone gets super hormonal. Its basic Bird 101, and I don’t know why I overlooked this obvious detail before. Whomp whomp.

Anyways, today marks the first time I’ve ever had a bird try to hit on me.

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Bird-itude

Posted on March 4, 2012 by leland307

Sadly, for the past three weeks or so, I’ve been dealing with a bird with a ‘tude. Its as if a light switch just flipped in Sushi. One day she was extremely loving and climbing all over us, the next she had absolutely no desire to deal with me or my husband. When she was let out of her cage, she had no desire to go back in, and she had no desire to deal with us – and unfortunately there were no signs of this behavior change until she was out of the cage!

The first sign was that she started nipping at our fingers. And I mean nipping as in trying to bite the heck out of us. Many people, especially with bigger birds, will draw their hands back as a natural reflex to this kind of behavior. However, this only ends up teaching a bird that nipping makes the hand go away – so they continue to nip. So, we didn’t pull our hands back. Instead we gave a quick “no biting” response and moved our hands closer.

So, her next defense was to step up then automatically turn around and fly off to somewhere new. She hasn’t been fully flighted for some time now, but she was mobile enough to easily turn this new habit into a game of chase. This only made things worse because we had to catch her up with a towel. I really wish we could have skipped this part as catching her this way only put a HUGE dent in the level of trust we all had with each other (because of course she hated it). Unfortunately, since we weren’t sure if this was a one time fluke, we let her out the following day and had to relive the whole situation again. Whomp whomp.

Ever since then, she’s been weary to spend time with us. So, we’re going back to square one. We’re treating the situation as if we just brought a new bird into the house. We’ve moved around the furniture in the house, which has allowed us to put her in a slightly more traveled area of the house. We clipped her wings further as to limit her mobility much more so than it was before. And we’ve removed a handful of toys from her cage. If you’ve ever brought a bird into your house before, you’re probably familiar with this routine.

A cage location in a well traveled part of the house will force her to be a part of the daily going-ons of the house (she was around us constantly before, but I think this new arrangement is better). The wing clip limits her mobility, and, once she’s coming out of the cage again, will require her to rely on us to get around. And the lack of toys will give her less things to focus on (meaning she’ll be more interested in watching what we are up to).

We’re going to leave her be for awhile to let her relax and calm down. If all goes as we’d like, she should begin showing interest again in coming out and spending time with us. Then we can work on bringing her out of the cage again, put more toys back in for her to play with, etc etc.

I continue to contemplate what happened. She’s not even a year old, so I’d be overly surprised if this was somehow hormone related. Perhaps we were giving her too much freedom? I don’t know why that would cause a night and day switch in her behavior towards us. But, at the moment, that seems to be the most likely culprit. Either way, the husband and I are seriously looking back at our habits to see what we may have been doing to cause this drastic change. More importantly, we are looking at what we can do to fix it and get back to normal!