Parakeets brutally fighting?!

[BabyBirdMa]

Okay so I’ve had to place each one of my parakeets in a separate cage recently because they all started fighting to the point where they were injuring each other. First Heisinbird really beat up Saul, splitting his lower beak down the middle, bruising his eye and inflicting a bite wound on his head. Thank goodness he’s okay! This was so unlike Heisinbird. He’s never done anything like this before but I shrugged it off as him not feeling good because he has Cancer and that he simply needs his own cage for his remaining days. However, Jessie then attacked Lydia and almost tore her toe completely off! We are at the emergency vet as I type this! What is going on with my parakeets?! Why are they trying to kill each other like hamsters?! They’ve never done this to each other before! They use to love each other and be good siblings!

 

[Shezbug]

I hope all goes well at the vet. I am sorry this is happening but I personally would just separate them all into their own cages and only allow supervised time out together. My guess is (sorry, I am unsure of the history of your flock) your birds are not bonded, they are related and want away from each other now they are mature, you have more than one bird interested in another or there are some personalities that simply do not mesh. Whatever the actual reason is, it is just not worth going through what you are dealing with right now to keep them together.

 

[BabyBirdMa]

I hope all goes well at the vet. I am sorry this is happening but I personally would just separate them all into their own cages and only allow supervised time out together. My guess is (sorry, I am unsure of the history of your flock) your birds are not bonded, they are related and want away from each other now they are mature, you have more than one bird interested in another or there are some personalities that simply do not mesh. Whatever the actual reason is, it is just not worth going through what you are dealing with right now to keep them together.

They all have their own cage now and Lydia will thankfully be just fine. The cages are next to each other so they can still talk to each other. I think Heisinbird prefers Jessie’s company and Saul prefers Lydia’s company so I’ve set those cages next to each other specifically. The vet thinks that because Heisinbird and Jessie are older than Saul and Lydia that the younger birds have reached adolescence and were trying to fight them and the older birds simply weren’t having it. We originally got Heisinbird and Jessie as a pair, had them for a year then Gus and Saul were added into the flight cage with them. We ended up having to separate Jessie because Heisinbird kept trying to mate with her. (All the eggs broke because Jessie decided to lay them from her perch.) So we got Lydia so Jessie wouldn’t be lonely because we thought them having a cage mate was a necessity.