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Pictures Anxiety/Mental Delay?

MommyBird

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If anything it's just the fact that he's older than her.
What color is the budgie that is having the problems?
The blue budgie is much younger than the green one.
If it's the blue one, I would guess he'll improve as he gets older and has more practice.
If it's the green one, I would definitely have his eyes checked.
 

Ppoi

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Yes, to the above 2 posts. You blue, male budgie, is a baby and inexperienced. The green, female budgie, is a full adult. Take care of that blue baby budgie. Make sure the female doesn't pick on it. Have a couple of bird feeders. Watch for one parakeet trying to stop the other from eating. Your blue budgie will get "smarter" as it gets older.
 

greys4u

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From what you are describing it seems hes very dependent on the female helping him out. I would have the vet check his eyes.
 

LaSelva

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The green, female budgie, is a full adult. Take care of that blue baby budgie. Make sure the female doesn't pick on it. Have a couple of bird feeders. Watch for one parakeet trying to stop the other from eating. Your blue budgie will get "smarter" as it gets older.
Agree!

I had a female budgie that followed the male around all the time. If he went down to eat she would go down and intercept him - even if she had just eaten and wasn't hungry. She was on top of him all the time, if he played with a toy or was doing anything she had to be right there to check out what he was doing.

I also share and agree with your assignment of sexes to the two birds in the pictures. One thing that threw me off in the original post is that she states that the male is older..."our younger female." Yet in the picture the older one appears to be the female.
 

Monica

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Agreed that the young blue budgie is probably male and the older, green budgie is female. Guessing you may have their genders backwards???


Males do tend to be more boisterous and potentially more "out going" than females. Doesn't explain the poor flying however, unless the female (green bird) was clipped at a young age and/or is overweight or just lacks the muscles to fly?
 

CStone

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I've never seen a study supporting this but I have heard of studies supporting the opposite - that the neuro-mechanisms for flight are attained regardless of practice...

"Some instinctive behaviors depend on maturational processes to appear. For instance, we commonly refer to birds "learning" to fly. However, young birds have been experimentally reared in devices that prevent them from moving their wings until they reached the age at which their cohorts were flying. These birds flew immediately and normally when released, showing that their improvement resulted from neuromuscular maturation and not true learning.[10] "
Flapping is instinctual. Being able to steer, land, and make quick decisions while in air are not. That is probably why the OP's budgie is still clumsy and "stupid." Decision making and agility are learned and practiced, not innate.

I have a cockatiel who was clipped for around 7 years. He crashed into everything for months after I let his flights grow in, but eventually learned to steer and land on some things. Unlike my other birds who have no trouble flying, he still has to circle the room before deciding what to land on if startled into flight, and he can't land on new objects and surfaces without being taken to and shown them first. It's been several years since he's been flying and things have not improved from there. While flapping and becoming airborne isn't the problem, everything else involved in flying is.

We know that human children can miss out on the opportunity to learn certain abilities after being denied exposure to them by certain ages, why would it be different for any other animal?
 
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LaSelva

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Dr. Jim Stone from the University of Sheffield’s department of psychology has done research to explain why birds seem to attain or “learn” the skill of flight so quickly. The reason is that the ability in the individual does not constitute “original learning.” Such as, for example, me learning to play the guitar. A skill for which I have no genetic memory.


Birds are born with latent memories for flight formed by the actions of successive previous generations. This latent memory for flight is genetically inherited and stored in neural networks (in other words, distributed over many neuronal connections). Evolution, over time, adapts as necessary the information that the bird is born with. So, learning is involved in an evolutionary sense combined with the inherited ability for complex skills (such as nest building or flight) that are refined by the individual. The benefit to flying as an instinct refined is that the bird spends less time learning and therefore less time vulnerable to predators.


A little more on this:


From "Avian Growth and Development: Evolution Withing the Altricial Precocial Spectrum" edited by J. Matthias Starck, Robert E. Ricklefs,

"Early sensory stimulation and motor practice are not necessary for the development of locomotor patterns. This holds true both for motor patterns that are present in their final form soon after hatching and those, such as flying, that emerge in the course of ontogeny. With regard to the latter, Provine (1981) convincingly demonstrated that immobilization of young domestic chicks by elastic bandages from day one until just before testing did not hamper the normal devleopment of wing-flapping and flight. Furthermore, the bandaged individuals achieved flight distances equal to those of unbandaged contol birds. Similar experiments, with the same results, have been reported for the altricial domestic dove (Grohmann 1939)."


From “Aspects and prospects of the concept of instinct” by A. Kortlandt (Zoological Laboratory, University of Amsterdam),

"According to experiments made by Spalding (1873) and Grohmann (1938) the improvement in flying abilities observed in young birds after fledging should be ascribed to neural maturation. According to experiments and other data in Cormorants, however, this improvement in flying abilities must be ascribed largely to a special type of learning, called flash-learning, which may be considered the analogon on the motor side of behavior, as compared to what, on the sensory side of behavior, is usually called imprinting….”


From “Organic Foundations of Animal Behavior” by Joseph Altman,

“Is the delayed appearance of flying in birds attributable to delayed neuromuscular maturation, or is it explained by a functional organization largely dependent on learning? Spalding (1873 [1954]) investigated this question by hand-rearing swallows in small cages. He found that once the deprived swallows were released they flew as efficiently as normal animals."
 

LaSelva

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why would it be different for any other animal?
I agree that it's counter-intuitive, as what we observe seems to mirror our own learning of certain skills. But science often is counter-intuitive as well as a challenge to the beliefs that we take comfort in. There is an extensive body of knowledge on the topic of innate, instinctive behaviors. Not only that but behaviors that come about because the animal seeks to satisfy some hard-wired need. And not because of an antecedent or consequence....another topic!

But if we re-read the original post the OP IS describing her bird as making quick decisions in flight. As in, he sweeps the room (twice), almost into a wall (meaning he avoids it), lands on a vent, then on a window, then on the shelf, and finally the top of a door (a pretty narrow perch considering). His flights seem more panicked than clumsy. If I was panicked while narrowly avoiding a series collisions with several cars (having never learned to drive) I think I would have demonstrated considerable skill. If this bird is from a pet store it's likely that he didn't fledge. In our daily lives, imagine how we'd fumble with our keys trying to get through a door quickly while we are in a panic! Not so easy although we've done it a thousand times.

I attributed the OP's assessment of her bird as "dumb" more so to the idea that he can't find his way back into his cage, out of it, etc. In other words, his (supposed) lack of problem solving ability, as in one of my past budgies. I rememer in High School panicking during a test for sheer fear of failing (where I knew the subject matter) and drawing a blank until I calmed myself down. I mentioned in one of my other posts, fear is very detrimental.
 

CStone

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I agree that it's counter-intuitive, as what we observe seems to mirror our own learning of certain skills. But science often is counter-intuitive as well as a challenge to the beliefs that we take comfort in. There is an extensive body of knowledge on the topic of innate, instinctive behaviors. Not only that but behaviors that come about because the animal seeks to satisfy some hard-wired need. And not because of an antecedent or consequence....another topic!

But if we re-read the original post the OP IS describing her bird as making quick decisions in flight. As in, he sweeps the room (twice), almost into a wall (meaning he avoids it), lands on a vent, then on a window, then on the shelf, and finally the top of a door (a pretty narrow perch considering). His flights seem more panicked than clumsy. If I was panicked while narrowly avoiding a series collisions with several cars (having never learned to drive) I think I would have demonstrated considerable skill. If this bird is from a pet store it's likely that he didn't fledge. In our daily lives, imagine how we'd fumble with our keys trying to get through a door quickly while we are in a panic! Not so easy although we've done it a thousand times.

I attributed the OP's assessment of her bird as "dumb" more so to the idea that he can't find his way back into his cage, out of it, etc. In other words, his (supposed) lack of problem solving ability, as in one of my past budgies. I rememer in High School panicking during a test for sheer fear of failing (where I knew the subject matter) and drawing a blank until I calmed myself down. I mentioned in one of my other posts, fear is very detrimental.
Neither of your responses address birds like my bird, or any of the many other birds we hear about on this forum alone, that were clipped at a young age and for a time thereafter, who constantly crashed into walls due to being unable to steer or land. My Coco was always able to flap his wings and get lift, but he couldn't even turn at first. He would just fly straight until he crashed into a wall and slid down to the floor. If flying were purely instinctual, he should not have had these problems at all, let alone still have some problems many years later. I agree that the ability to flap and gain air is instinctual, but everything else seems to require learning and practice, and if not practiced early, they seem to never gain the physical or mental quickness other birds have when in flight. That is my observation.

I've also been watching my own clumsy baby budgie who is now almost 4 months old. Cloud is less than agile, to put it mildly, but her youth and the fact that I encourage free movement and flight gives her an advantage over what Coco had in his youth. She's already a better flyer than him.
 

LaSelva

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First want to add a more complete version of the quote from above....

From “Organic Foundations of Animal Behavior” by Joseph Altman,

“Is the delayed appearance of flying in birds attributable to delayed neuromuscular maturation, or is it explained by a functional organization largely dependent on learning? Spalding (1873 [1954]) investigated this question by hand-rearing swallows in small cages. He found that once the deprived swallows were released they flew as efficiently as normal animals. Grohmann (1938) reared doves in narrow tubes that prevented the use of their wings. When the normal control doves displayed their ability in flying, the deprived experimental animals were also freed; they, too, flew quite efficiently, an observation suggesting that learning is not essential to the coordination of flying. A similar experiment was performed by Carmichael (1926, 1927). His findings were confirmed by Matthews and Detwiler (1926). Evidently, some behavior patterns that appear postnatally, particularly locomotor functions, may be slowly maturing inborn processes. “


We know that human children can miss out on the opportunity to learn certain abilities after being denied exposure to them by certain ages, why would it be different for any other animal?
Also to reinforce not all behavior is learned. And to answer in better detail, from one of the books above,

"Organisms are endowed with the ability to execute a few action patterns immediately after birth; other behavior patterns make their appearance later in life. Behavior patterns that are elicitable before or imemdiately after birth, in the absence of opportunity to learn them through experience, are often referred to as innate, or inborn, capacities. Of the behavior patterns that appear postnatally some may also be inborn properties, with a late or delayed postnatal maturation."

Neither of your responses address birds like my bird.
Perhaps there's a clue in this line from "Bird" by Lois and Louis Darling (husband and wife biologists),

"Inherited behavior works well only just so long as the bird is confronted with problems and situations that are within the norms of the way of life it's species has become adapted to in the course of millions of years of evolution."

This line could probably singlehandedly explain many issues parrots face in our living rooms.
 

CStone

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First want to add a more complete version of the quote from above....

From “Organic Foundations of Animal Behavior” by Joseph Altman,

“Is the delayed appearance of flying in birds attributable to delayed neuromuscular maturation, or is it explained by a functional organization largely dependent on learning? Spalding (1873 [1954]) investigated this question by hand-rearing swallows in small cages. He found that once the deprived swallows were released they flew as efficiently as normal animals. Grohmann (1938) reared doves in narrow tubes that prevented the use of their wings. When the normal control doves displayed their ability in flying, the deprived experimental animals were also freed; they, too, flew quite efficiently, an observation suggesting that learning is not essential to the coordination of flying. A similar experiment was performed by Carmichael (1926, 1927). His findings were confirmed by Matthews and Detwiler (1926). Evidently, some behavior patterns that appear postnatally, particularly locomotor functions, may be slowly maturing inborn processes. “




Also to reinforce not all behavior is learned. And to answer in better detail, from one of the books above,

"Organisms are endowed with the ability to execute a few action patterns immediately after birth; other behavior patterns make their appearance later in life. Behavior patterns that are elicitable before or imemdiately after birth, in the absence of opportunity to learn them through experience, are often referred to as innate, or inborn, capacities. Of the behavior patterns that appear postnatally some may also be inborn properties, with a late or delayed postnatal maturation."



Perhaps there's a clue in this line from "Bird" by Lois and Louis Darling (husband and wife biologists),

"Inherited behavior works well only just so long as the bird is confronted with problems and situations that are within the norms of the way of life it's species has become adapted to in the course of millions of years of evolution."

This line could probably singlehandedly explain many issues parrots face in our living rooms.
Unless all those swallows were followed after their release and had all their adjustments to freedom of flight documented, the old study you keep referring to will have no bearing on my opinion. The situations my other three birds are confronted with are the same as Coco, yet he is the only one with a issues, and also the only one who was deprived of flight at a young age and for such a long time. Coincidence?
 

LaSelva

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Just to be clear studies range from 1873 up until about 2007. The titles I quoted further support our knowledge of innate behaviors with studies done on other species, including mammals.
 
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