Your African grey may have upwards of 8000 feathers. Feathers keep a bird warm, and dry and enable flight.
For a molt to occur, the old feather must be removed. Before molting begins blood vessels that support the feathers dry up so the attached feather becomes loosened by the surrounding tissue.
Hi
I am hoping you can help. We have a parrotlet and he will be 10 months old July 3 (2017).
We haven’t had any problem till about a month or so ago. He is biting hard and lunges when we go to take him out or if he is out and we reach toward him he comes after us.
We were told to have his wings clipped which we did and that worked for about a week and a half then he started right back in they clipped his first five flight wings. He did good for a short time, then we took him back again and they clipped # 6 & 7 it helped about a week and he is right back to biting and lunging.
Do birds in cages suffer all their lives?
Define suffer? If you don’t know any better how do you know you are suffering?
As good as our intentions are met by many things, they don’t necessarily meet our bird’s “instinctual expectations”.
Define a “cage”. If you talking about a big metal thing with bars that sits in your family room? In reality the entire home is a (bird) cage because the bird is not allowed to leave it unless it’s in a smaller travel cage
Some points here to help you through the winter months with outside aviaries – flights and to prepare for the new breeding season ahead:
You’ve been elevated to zookeeper
Dear Mitch,
I need advice in so many “bird” areas that I don’t know where to begin. It seems that all the personal bird stores are disappearing and even the good vets are a rarity. I have been involved with birds for almost thirty years.
I ordered a small crock on Amazon about a year ago and that is how I became “connected” with Windy City, your Sunday newsletters, etc. It is the result of a vision “issue” that discourages me with the computer and I do much better “talking”.
Calling all veterinarians and PhD’s
to answer this one simple question
(none of you return my emails or respond to my Facebook questions)
How does artificial light really aid enable vitamin D/D3 syntheses in birds?
The following content is from 3 inquiries we received that we thought would be helpful by sharing.
We have four zebra finches in an outdoor aviary, with three walls being the exterior of our house, and the fourth wall is wire mesh.
We are in San Diego, and our nights can drop down to 40-50 degree. We are planning to add plexiglass panels over the mesh at night, and we are trying to decide on a heat source.
Water Wind & Stars replied – Oct 4, 10:12pm
After writing my first message I took a big pile of towels and curtains from the bathroom where my birds’ cage had been located and carried them to the basement to wash the bird dander out; the pile was big enough to cover my nose and mouth.
Not more than 5 minutes after I came back upstairs, I started to cough in the breathless, slightly spasming way that has been the main symptom of my lung issue.
What is the best parrot for an apartment? The answers thus far have been pretty limited (on Quora).
We (Mitch & Catherine) used to (until 2019 when we migrated to Indiana) live in a three-flat apartment building, erected circa 1885 in the geographical center of the city of Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood.
It’s 1800 ft.² with 9 1/2 foot ceilings. The all-brick building is quite solid.
We like parrots. We are in the (caged bird) pet supply business. It’s our job to know about them.
For the record, we don’t sell any birds. We simply teach proper care for about 750 captive bird species out of approximately 10,400 species of birds on the planet.