Agressive behaviour from my African Ringneck

[liz]

Benjamin, it seems like a lot to absorb all at once but it is worth it.

Rambo is 30 now and I called him my pedestrian because he could not fly. He did not have flight feathers. Following what I have been told here, with this molt he grew flight feathers for the first time. It was a visible change that can't be denied.

I have UV bulbs on a timer in my Cockatiel room. They get a natural dawn and dusk but the UV in the middle of the day. Not only do they need this extra sunlight but they can actually see better with it. The Amazons don't get the UV because they are not caged and go everywhere in the house. I need to get more UV and switch out the lights in the house. They are also a mood elevator for humans.

I do gloop of grain and chop of veg for my Cockatiels for breakfast. I give them enough at 10 am for them to pick on most of the day. My Amazons like to pick up their food so their fruit and veg are cut in chunks about the size of my thumbnail. Big enough for them to pick up but not so big that they have a leftover in their hands that lands on the floor.

At 3 pm I give the Cockatiels Budgie seed and enough that they have a little left over. [i]I want to make sure they have enough and not get hungry in the night.[/i] For supper the Amazons get 1 big tablespoon of seed (I need to find a better seed) with one almond still in shell and a little salt free pretzel. The Amazons get hand outs too. They want to eat when we eat and beg for what looks good to them on my plate. I cook without salt or butter, separate what is legal on my plate for them so they think it is the same as mine. I add salt and butter or sugar after I have portioned out for them. They like to eat with the flock (us).

Mine are rescues that came to me usually with only a days warning that they were coming. I don't have time for research so I am basically hitch hiking on Wolf, Pajarita and the others knowledge.

[Benjamin]

Thanks for your response Liz but it looks like the only thing we can change is Lizzie's diet. Our flat is too small for her cage to be put anywhere else and because she doesn't like Calli the only attention she gets is from me and I work long hours (web developer). If Lizzie's going to be better off living with someone who can give her the attention and correct light schedule she needs then I'd rather give her that than keep her in an environment where I can only fix 1 out of the 3 problems.

[Wolf]

I don't know that there is all that much wrong with the environment that you have for the bird. The changes are mostly mot in the environment but in how things are done. Truthfully, not even one of us can provide an ideal environment for our birds no matter how hard we try to do so. I did not mean to discourage you, I was just explaining what occurs to birds that remain overly hormonal over long periods of time. They all get hormonal and more aggressive on a yearly basis during breeding season and then they return to their sweet lovable self.

Try to be patient with me here for a bit longer. I try to deal with problem areas first and foremost and that is why you posted that you were having issues that you didn't know how to deal with. But in order to fix the issues that you are having and to prevent them from returning you need to know what is causing the problem and sometimes this requires us to understand how their body functions or how their mind works, it is not always easy to provide the information that you need because some of it is rather complicated to explain. Lighting and diet are the most common areas that most people need to improve for their birds and even if you can easily make the adjustments needed they still take some time to work. And these two things are all that I know of that need some work on. Yes, they are important to fix but they are still only two things out of how many possibilities. Even the biting that you are describing is mostly related to hormonal and breeding issues. so we just have to figure out how to help you to find a workable way to make the changes. It may be as simple as letting your bird go to sleep as it gets dark and then covering the cage with a blackout type of cover before you turn on the lights in this room, Or perhaps keeping the lights turned down low until it is getting dark and then covering the cage. I have my birds in the living room and spend a lot of time in the dark and in fact am reading and typing right now with just the light from the computer screen. It all depends on how willing you are to changing some of how you are accustomed to doing things until you can work out a better way of doing them.

I really wanted to discuss the biting issue in more detail to help you understand ho it is related but I think that it may be better to try to keep my answers a bit shorter. So since I suspect that the biting is related to the hormonal issue I think that the reason why the two of you are getting bitten is that the bird is jealous. You are the favored person and the bird thinks that your housemate is a rival for your attention, affection and time. For this reason the bird is trying to make your housemate to leave and when she fails in this is biting you trying to get you to not spend time with her rival she is trying to get you to leave with her. I don't know the nature of the relationship with your housemate, but your bird thinks that there is too much physical interaction between your housemate and you and is trying to tell you that you are hers and that these actions are inappropriate. If I am reading your bird correctly then if you hold these physical interaction down in the birds presence the biting will also decrease in both frequency and is how hard she bites. also when she does bite set her down right away saying something lie " No Bite" and ignore her for just a few minutes. Always use the same phrase for this so that the bird can make the connection with the words and the action with what you want. They are very intelligent and can be a source of much amusement, amazement, they can be very entertaining both with their antics and with their intelligence. Give all of you a chance to work this out, I can promise you that it is well worth your efforts.

[Benjamin]

I really wanted to discuss the biting issue in more detail to help you understand ho it is related but I think that it may be better to try to keep my answers a bit shorter. So since I suspect that the biting is related to the hormonal issue I think that the reason why the two of you are getting bitten is that the bird is jealous. You are the favored person and the bird thinks that your housemate is a rival for your attention, affection and time. For this reason the bird is trying to make your housemate to leave and when she fails in this is biting you trying to get you to not spend time with her rival she is trying to get you to leave with her. I don't know the nature of the relationship with your housemate, but your bird thinks that there is too much physical interaction between your housemate and you and is trying to tell you that you are hers and that these actions are inappropriate. If I am reading your bird correctly then if you hold these physical interaction down in the birds presence the biting will also decrease in both frequency and is how hard she bites. also when she does bite set her down right away saying something lie " No Bite" and ignore her for just a few minutes. Always use the same phrase for this so that the bird can make the connection with the words and the action with what you want. They are very intelligent and can be a source of much amusement, amazement, they can be very entertaining both with their antics and with their intelligence. Give all of you a chance to work this out, I can promise you that it is well worth your efforts.

Reading this made me smile...Calli and I are best friends, but there's almost zero physical interaction between us so I doubt Lizzie is jealous. What I've noticed over the last two days is that the biting happens mostly when I want to take her off my shoulder. She'll bite my finger and then push my hand away with her beak and I think this is a result of my interaction with her during the holiday season.

Because I'm a web developer I spend a lot of time in front of my pc and Lizzie doesn't seem to like being on my shoulder when I'm using my pc and during the holidays I was spending moments of ~30min breaks with her when I'd take a break from dev work and then go back to doing work on my pc and I think this is why she's started biting me.

Lizzie's been a little less aggressive over the last day so I'm going to keep giving her attention and see if I can somehow get her to tolerate being with me while I'm in front of my pc.

[Pajarita]

You can change the diet, that's no problem. The solar schedule can be achieved even when the cage is in a human living area by not turning on the artificial lights until the sun is out and turning them off when it's halfway down the horizon. Then when it's dark and the bird is in its roosting perch, you can cover the cage completely with a black-out material which would allow you to turn on a soft light for the humans to be able to function in the same room - OR you can put the cage in your bedroom and not turn on the light when you go to bed (you can use a flashlight pointing down so you don't trip and/or stub your toes ).

If you are a web developer, you must be able to work from home a lot, right? I don't know anything about these things but I would imagine that this is entirely feasible as you basically work in a computer on your own, right? If you do, you can put perches for her all over the place and keep her company without her been on your shoulder. The thing is that she needs to stop producing sexual hormones to stop biting you all the time so although she wants to be on your shoulder, if she is going to bite you because you are not paying attention to her or every time you need to remove her, that can be a problem. But, let me ask you this: when you remove her from your shoulder, is it to put her in her cage?

[Wolf]

As I said, I don't know anything about your relationship with your housemate and I don't have any intention of prying in that, but the physical contact is or should be interpreted as through the eyes of the bird and not necessarily by our ideas of what is physical contact. This could be a simple as standing or sitting close together in the birds point of view. This is somewhat speculation as we really don't know enough, but birds don't have arms like we do but they do cuddle and perch while being very close to each other or in actual contact with each others body, so sitting close together might be enough for them to consider it contact. A birds ideas of this would be based on their action when they are bonded to another bird and how they express this relationship to each other. I mean they feed each other, they perch in contact with each other , but they don't usually hug the way that humans do, and that is the context that we must use to understand why they respond the way they do.

Yes my birds are either jealous of the time I spend on the computer and they get mad about it or they just see that it is a big toy that I am playing with and in that case they want to share in the fun and play with it too, sometimes to the extent that they will claim it as theirs and then they expect me to leave it alone while they are playing with it and get mad at me if I don't.

Based on the information that you have shared with us there is no reason that you can't fix both of the current issues. I know that you see it as three, but due to the fact that I see them as so closely related that I see them as parts of one issue I think that I am being generous by saying two problem areas. That is humorous in some ways and really is just a difference in perception. Fixing the light issue may sound a bit complicated but in reality it is an easy thing to fix, it is however, inconvenient to do so as even with your circumstances, which are easier than mine, it requires you to do some things differently than you are accustomed to doing them. Once these changes are actually made and you get accustomed to them, they become almost second nature to you. Changing their diet is a much more difficult task and is also far more time consuming. Most of the biting is probably hormonal in nature and when that is fixed most of the biting will cease too. The remaining bites fall into the category of simply understanding your bird and its body language enough to avoid getting bitten and the last remaining ones are that you are not listening to when the bird is saying no, don't do this to me and changing what you are doing to cooperate with the bird. An example of this last is that you normally ask the bird to step up just to put it in its cage so the bird first tries to avoid stepping up and when we continue the bird is left with only one way of saying no and that is to bite us. The cure for this is to listen to the bird and ask for the step up and don't put the bird in the cage, take it for a walk around the house or place it on a different perch or play area and reward it with a treat. Make asking for the bird to step up to go to the cage a more random thing and when you do put the bird in the cage give it a treat and another one or two in its food dish.

[liz]

Your housemate could add enrichment while you are gone just by being animated near the bird. He will not bond to the housemate but can be entertained by actions and sound.

I don't know if it would work for you but Myrtle would touch me long before I could touch her. When she would clime me and sit on my shoulder I could walk to anything the same hight and she would step off. It still works with her. When I go out the front door she gets off on the top of the TV.

[Benjamin]

You can change the diet, that's no problem. The solar schedule can be achieved even when the cage is in a human living area by not turning on the artificial lights until the sun is out and turning them off when it's halfway down the horizon. Then when it's dark and the bird is in its roosting perch, you can cover the cage completely with a black-out material which would allow you to turn on a soft light for the humans to be able to function in the same room - OR you can put the cage in your bedroom and not turn on the light when you go to bed (you can use a flashlight pointing down so you don't trip and/or stub your toes ).

If you are a web developer, you must be able to work from home a lot, right? I don't know anything about these things but I would imagine that this is entirely feasible as you basically work in a computer on your own, right? If you do, you can put perches for her all over the place and keep her company without her been on your shoulder. The thing is that she needs to stop producing sexual hormones to stop biting you all the time so although she wants to be on your shoulder, if she is going to bite you because you are not paying attention to her or every time you need to remove her, that can be a problem. But, let me ask you this: when you remove her from your shoulder, is it to put her in her cage?

Unfortunately I can't work from home. The company doesn't allow it.

When I remove her from my shoulder it's because she's bitten me and I never put her in her cage as a result of the biting because I know that causes parrots to hate their cage. I'll look into buying a perch. I'm still waiting for the parrot training manual I bought off Michael's website. Hopefully that'll help the situation. I don't think my ears and neck can handle much more biting.

[Wolf]

Do you have any " imperfections" to your skin on your neck? I didn't include ears with that simply because all of my birds are interested in my ears, maybe because they don't have ears that stick out from their heads. If there are birthmarks, moles, scabs ( possibly from a previous bite) or anything of this nature then the bites on the neck could be that the bird is trying to help you by removing this strange thing on your neck that it does not think should be there, in which case this is not the same as biting it is preening. Some times the best answer to a bird that is preening your neck and ears painfully or even just biting them is to cover them. I tend to use a knit cap for my ears or a towel for my neck. With some of my smaller birds the towel moves the far enough from my ears that they quit biting them. It seems that if they are sitting on my shoulder and are close enough to them if I move my head a little they think my ear is attacking them, or so it seems.

Kiki, my Senegal, and biggest offender for ear biting, does so only when my head moves as I am working on the computer or just turn my head, but she is learning to perch further from my head while on my shoulder and also is becoming more comfortable with perching on my forearm instead of my shoulder. Yours may just need a little more of a distraction while on your shoulder. Let me know if any of this helps.

[Pajarita]

Yes, my husband walks around the house with a wool cap on his head and stuffed all the way down to his neck because he is afraid of getting his ears bit (he used to walk around with a hoodie tied around his head so this is actually an improvement!). I don't get bit in the ears any more but I do get a warning or exasperated nip to let me know that I am doing something I shouldn't or that I am ignoring them too long. Maybe you can try some sort of 'protection' too.