My Timneh is clipped but she's still flying. She was fully flighted as were my other two (Blue Throated Macaw and Galah) right before we had to board them to go on vacation this past summer. I don't personally take chances with boarding and will clip my birds so they are retrievable in the event they get out of their cages, for example, while an employee is changing their food/water, etc. I feel safer that way. Prior to that and for the last several years I have allowed their feathers to grow in fully. But before that (when we lived in NY) they were always clipped. I have never, I have to say, seen a difference in their happiness or demeanor one way over the other. I think that (truthfully, I know) that being clipped made their lives better. They simply were able to be out more and had a better quality of life with us that they wouldn't have had if they were fully flighted. And, I was easily able to exercise them by getting them to flap their wings regularly. They always seemed to care more about where they were rather than how they got there. This is back then, of course, and lifestyles and logistics do matter and do change. We, as humans, tend to place a poetic meaning on flight (it's in our songs, etc.) but from all I have ever researched, it is simple locomotion (getting around) and if a bird can get around another way, nature is perfectly ok, as are birds, with losing the ability. Think of the Kakapo, or the Galapagos cormorant, both of which have lost the ability to fly recently in their evolutionary history. Nor does it seem that any of the adaptations we have been taught exist to facilitate flight, actually came about initially for that purpose (feathers, air sacs, gizzards, hollow bones, warm bloodedness, etc.). Not to debate the issue, but that is the current understanding of those adaptations.