Our tiel, Baby, has had minor feather plucking for some time. My theory is that it originated when my boyfriend went off to school and Baby was left in the care of his mom from September 2019 till April 2020.
No shame to his mom (she is Baby's next favorite person and loves him very much) but I don't think he was given top quality care. His mom did not have much experience or knowledge with birds and neither did my boyfriend for that matter. Baby was on a poor diet, did not have very many toys he liked, and was probably left alone too much during this period.
Now he has developed a minor feather plucking habit. When he preens under his wings, he sometimes chirps and pulls out a bit of down feather with pink on the end so I know it's not just falling out normally. He has slight balding patches right at the wing-pits, but lets the feathers grow enough to where it's not super obvious unless you actually watch him do it.
He doesn't pluck anywhere else, but he does overpreen his tail feathers. He breaks a lot of them off halfway, but no bleeding occurs.
It makes me pretty sad. It's a period in Baby's life that bothers me quite a bit even though I didn't really have control over it. I also didn't know much about birds until I started becoming interested in getting one myself, so I didn't even know enough to step in and say something. But good pet care is something I value incredibly highly because of certain experiences I've had, so it is upsetting that life events and lack of knowledge on my boyfriend's part resulted in this. He's not a bad person and cares about Baby, but this happened and Baby is left with a seemingly unbreakable destructive habit because of it.
Anyway, enough of my woes. Now that we all live together, I've been able to share a lot of my bird knowledge with my boyfriend and taken a stronger role in improving Baby's care. We've switched him to a better diet (now eats pellets and a veggie/grain mix instead of just seeds), provided a wider range of toy materials to find things he likes, given his cage a more enriching and thoughtful layout, and we decided to adopt Russet as an additional flockmate to help with Baby's separation issues (which has turned out to be mutually beneficial for both of them).
Does anyone have any experience with feather plucking for cockatiels? Is it possible that he will recover from this and eventually stop the behavior? From what I've read, it seems unlikely unfortunately. But if there is anything we can do to lessen or begin to remove the behavior, I want to try.
This is kind of hard to talk about and it makes me feel quite guilty. Even if I wasn't "directly" at fault, I was still complicit in the ignorance.
Thank you for reading and offering advice if you do.
No shame to his mom (she is Baby's next favorite person and loves him very much) but I don't think he was given top quality care. His mom did not have much experience or knowledge with birds and neither did my boyfriend for that matter. Baby was on a poor diet, did not have very many toys he liked, and was probably left alone too much during this period.
Now he has developed a minor feather plucking habit. When he preens under his wings, he sometimes chirps and pulls out a bit of down feather with pink on the end so I know it's not just falling out normally. He has slight balding patches right at the wing-pits, but lets the feathers grow enough to where it's not super obvious unless you actually watch him do it.
He doesn't pluck anywhere else, but he does overpreen his tail feathers. He breaks a lot of them off halfway, but no bleeding occurs.
It makes me pretty sad. It's a period in Baby's life that bothers me quite a bit even though I didn't really have control over it. I also didn't know much about birds until I started becoming interested in getting one myself, so I didn't even know enough to step in and say something. But good pet care is something I value incredibly highly because of certain experiences I've had, so it is upsetting that life events and lack of knowledge on my boyfriend's part resulted in this. He's not a bad person and cares about Baby, but this happened and Baby is left with a seemingly unbreakable destructive habit because of it.
Anyway, enough of my woes. Now that we all live together, I've been able to share a lot of my bird knowledge with my boyfriend and taken a stronger role in improving Baby's care. We've switched him to a better diet (now eats pellets and a veggie/grain mix instead of just seeds), provided a wider range of toy materials to find things he likes, given his cage a more enriching and thoughtful layout, and we decided to adopt Russet as an additional flockmate to help with Baby's separation issues (which has turned out to be mutually beneficial for both of them).
Does anyone have any experience with feather plucking for cockatiels? Is it possible that he will recover from this and eventually stop the behavior? From what I've read, it seems unlikely unfortunately. But if there is anything we can do to lessen or begin to remove the behavior, I want to try.
This is kind of hard to talk about and it makes me feel quite guilty. Even if I wasn't "directly" at fault, I was still complicit in the ignorance.
Thank you for reading and offering advice if you do.