Howdy folks, I came across this post today and even though it is a little older I thought a reply was prudent. I am in the medical field myself and a happy owner of green cheek conures too! Although physical therapy and nutrition are my main areas, I am a huge medical research nerd and study all sorts of therapy out there. I wanted to chime in on the care of your beloved birdie my dear and also on your own mental health. I read everyone's replies and people gave you great advice! It's good to see such a positive forum!
A few things to note on conure health is to mimic their wild environment as much as possible in a human home. Conures as a species are LARGE GROUP pack animals that never leave the nest. Unlike other more solitary species of parrots, conures NEED other birds to not get sick over time. That is why your one single bird is so attached at your hip. You are its only other pack member and it will stress your baby out in a dangerous way to be separated from the "pack". In the wild conures stay in groups of 30 to 100 birds that stay together at all times. There are two distinct personality types; dominant and submissive conures. The dominant ones tend to stay on the outside edges of their pack and watch for predators, signal tree hopping time and food finds. They typically don't preen other birds as much but demand to BE preened a lot. They are very aggressive even when it seems they shouldn't be. While the submissive conures stay cuddled more in the center of whatever tree they are all in at the time, helping to take care of chicks, preening, and getting beat on by the dominant conures if they fly too far away from where they should be. This is why your bird may bite you or your friends that leave and come back later. They are punishing you for "leaving the nest group when you are part of the pack and conures don't leave the nest!"
When a conure gets stressed from being away from adopted "pack" members, their bodies secrete a higher amount of linoleic and lactic acids that can poison and kill your bird, even a perfectly healthy one. Conures were NEVER meant to be single bird pets!!! They need a pack to be at their healthiest. Like other people here said, you can't be with your baby at all times in life and it will do damage over time leaving them home alone or locked up in a cage. Think of a two or three year old human child, would you lock them up in a cage when you couldn't be with them for hours for work or other reasons? What would it do mentally to that child to sit in a box while everyone they know and love are gone? They stress out the whole time. That's what. And stress kills birds. Now, if you have 3 birds together or 4, then they have a group and are never alone. Each bird will bind with you, but also each other, so when you are gone they are busy playing with each other, preening each other, harassing each other lol which is natural and fine. They don't just sit there alone full of stress taking a toll on their health each time you leave or lock them up.
Another very important factor is heat. Conures are from areas of South America where it is typically not colder than 75 degrees farenheight at NIGHT time! One of the biggest death sentences for a conure if being cold, another big stressor. It's not ok to just have some kind of heating element in or next to their cage, the ambient air temp in the room they are in should be in their healthy zone. Minimum 75 degrees. This stops so many health problems they have in captivity!
In the wild, conures eat spicy red peppers. Like cayenne. Which is loaded with vitamin A which is missing from a lot of their other food sources. But it also contains strong antibiotics, antiviral, and antifungal medicine that keeps wild conures healthy even though they are bombarded with all sorts of tropical diseases and funguses! As well as when they chew through the rind on the citrus fruits they eat almost daily in the wild. Their beaks get coated with the peel oils which they lick and it is like medicine. In the USA our citrus fruits have been sprayed with poison to keep off pests and plant infection, so do NOT give your bird citrus peels from the grocery store unless you buy organic AND have contacted the producer to ask about pesticide, fungicide, and herbicide use, which does not disqualify them for organic status like most people think..... I give my birds a tiny pinch of fresh cayenne pepper powder mixed with an equal amount of raw local honey into a firey paste. Just about a drop on the tip of my finger per bird. They love it and lap it up. Be forewarned that it is legal for commercial herb and spice sellers to fill and dye the content of the spices they sell with wood pulp and not list it as an ingredient!!! Frontier brand doesn't do that. But when in doubt, call the company and ask. If it looks unnaturally bright red, or has a more "fluffy" texture, it's probably been dyed to look fresher and has been diluted with filler. Real dried cayenne should have a granular feel.
Conures nibble on fresh greens every day in the wild that we don't have in the USA! A lot of our grocery store greens are not good for conures except raw spinach. That one is full of the right vitamins and is safe to feed to conures on a daily basis. They have trouble with making a mess tearing leaves up instead of eating them though, so I juice fresh leaves and freeze the spinach juice in a mini ice cube tray. I will put one mini cube on a little plate in the evening and watch my birdies have fun playing with and licking their spinach juice popsicles! Evening is when they eat greens in the wild, so evening is when I feed mine greens.
They also don't eat many seeds in the wild with the exception of quinoa, amaranth, and chia seeds, but not daily!! They eat fruits and bugs as their main daily diet, bananas, and citrus types mostly. All the commercial feeds for conures contain such crap :-(
Soy and corn and as almost nothing they really eat in the wild!
I feed my birds their fill of banana in the morning after they have eaten some pellets. Then citrus mid day and fresh or baby food sweet potato purée. Again vitamin A. Very important. And the tiny spinach popsicle at night. They should be offered food once per hour all day!! They have very fast digestive systems and they also forget to eat when away from a food bowl! In the wild, food iOS everywhere and they eat constantly all day, but in a human home they tend to be cuddled away from their cage for long periods which takes them away from food in their face to remind them to eat. Even if you have a bowel of food pellets siting with you and your bird, YOU are distracting them from remembering to eat. So you need to actually offer pellets softened in a little water dip once per hour you have them off the cage! They don't eat dry food in the wild, and they need the water for proper digestion.
Now for you my dear on the anxiety side of things. First and foremost I do NOT recommend mental health drugs! Most are more harmful than good even if they keep some of your symptoms in check their effectiveness usually wears down after awhile and it teaches your brain to secrete even more incorrect levels of hormones and endorphins that screw you up more over time. With the exception of certified scitzophrenia. If you hallucinate then you need drugs. But if your symptoms are in the bi-polar, anxiety, depression range without hallucinations, then you probably have a digestion issue that is making a long domino effect in your body that results in the wrong hormone amounts being produced by your brain. This also creates neurological pathways that learn to react with stress responses instead of healthy responses which compounds the problem. Have you actually had your serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, estrogen, testosterone, and thyroid hormone levels checked? Most of these master controller hormones require a lot of B vitamins to build them. B vitamins are only broken down in the intestines by specific beneficial gut bugs that eat your food as it comes down the pipes, then their bodies poop out the vitamins in the correct molecular form that pass through your intestinal wall and into your bloodstream to go get put into all the places that need to to build stuff in your body. B12, B6, B3 and B2 are all needed together in the right molecular form to make your brain chemistry correct. A lot of things we eat in the USA and do here kills off the bugs that inject us with these vitamins. Taking antibiotics, drinking alcohol, eating certain healthy foods often that have strong antibacterial properties like garlic, dill, lemongrass, thyme, oregano, cinnamon, honey, clove, and nutmeg will also affect your good gut bugs. Vitamin supplements often have the incorrect form of a vitamin that your body doesn't recognize and so doesn't use. You just make expensive pee! Take B12 as a good example. It's almost always put in supplements as Cyanocobalamin. A cheap man made form. Which we only absorb about 1% to 2% of. The rest you pee out. It's crap. The form you need is either methacobalamin or Hydracobalamin. These are the correct molecular shape for the body to recognize and use. They are much more expensive. Blood tests can trick you into thinking you have enough of a vitamin because a lot of doctors are lazy and run the wrong tests! They commonly only run a "syrum level" test which just looks at what is floating around in your bloodstream. But taking the wrong kind of vitamin like Cyanocobalamin, will trick the test and show you have good levels when in fact your actual cells aren't taking any of it in. This happens often with magnesium too! What they need to run is an "intracellular level" test. Which looks at how much stuff actually made it into a cell to really use! You need to compare the syrum level taken at the same time as an intracellular level!!! If the syrum level is normal but the intracellular level is low, you have a problem getting nutrients into your cells. Could be blocked receptors OR could be the wrong unrecognized form of the vitamin not going in the cell at all. A lot of things will fill up cell receptors so they don't take in the right stuff. Read up on this with legitimate studies. It will open up world's to you in understanding how the chain reaction caused anxiety, depression, and bipolar swings!
Lastly, auditory Neurofeedback is AMAZING for people with anxiety and depression!! It is so much better than visual neurofeedback. Fixing a nutritional issue isn't everything needed for a long time or life long sufferer. You have to unteach your brain's neurological pathways to not hyper react like they have built themselves to do. Auditory Neurofeedback makes the brain build new neurological pathways that are not screwed up. It CURES anxiety, depression, and Bipolar disorder. Permanently. With no drugs or needles. As long as you have fixed up your guts to be getting the correct nutrition to your brain. Look up the company BrainState and the research published from Wake Forest university on neurofeedback therapy benefits. It's amazing. I have seen it do miracles and it's painless and pleasant to sit through! They are using it on patients now that we're declared brain dead on life support, and making their brains come back to signalling again and waking people up from comas with this therapy! And a lot of doctors haven't heard of it yet so read up on it! I hope some of this enlightens and helps
) . She is a Cinnamon Turquoise Green Cheek Conure. She is so precious to me, my whole family tells me that it feels as if I have a human baby. I have rid my home of anything and everything that is toxic to her. We no longer have Teflon items, no household cleaners (all natural), we have resorted to all-natural laundry detergent, etc. I am constantly researching on Green Cheek Conures, and ways to extend their life span. I have read so many stories of owners who have experienced a terrible loss. Stories where they come home, to find their perfectly healthy Conure on the bottom of its' cage. Even just reading their stories makes me so emotional. I get this huge lump in my throat.
