tookie_floof wrote:Very thorough reply, thank you.
Since I now work from home, she is pretty much out of her cage 90% of the time.
The day starts anywhere from around 8am to 10am, I uncover her cage, she poops and gets some outside time while I am preparing both of our breakfasts, usually fruits and some chop(green veggies, leafies, carrots, etc) mushed together to make gloop I suppose. I put her back in the cage to eat meals, after meals she comes back out and hangs out until I need to start working.
I have deadlines to meet so I cannot allow too much time to be "wasted" by being distracted by her. Usually she tries to hang around the keyboard and attacks my fingers on occasion while I am working. I dont have time to relocate her to a chair or somewhere else every 2 seconds. (I am taking the time during weekends though and it's getting better.) At first I would leave her in her cage with me in my workroom but she would scream and carry on. So I have since chosen to leave her cage in the living room with a youtube playlist of running water, or nature sounds and such. Every 2 hours or so I take a break and let her out for some fly time from anywhere to 20 minutes to an hour while I procrastinate. These times we hang out and get scritches or do some flight recall or shred some stuff or do chores, etc.
Her cage door is always opened to have access to her pellets, toys, water unless we have placed her there to get things done.
During the early evening she goes back in the cage if I am cooking and she comes out after cleanup until I prepare her cage for bed, which usually was 7pm, but I knocked back to 8pm to allow her more time out of the cage.
Don't get me wrong, she is a sweet little bugger, she loves to cuddle and is pretty velcro, unfortunately. It just blindsides me when I am reaching for my tv remote or my cellphone and she attacks with no warning.
I notice you choose pieces of nuts for Codee and do this infrequently, I use walnuts/sunflower seeds for training, could that be causing her to be aggressive towards things I pick up?
Well, the way I see it, you have three problematic things.
1. Light schedule. You are not allowing any exposure to dawn and dusk and keeping the days artificially long - this is making the bird produce sexual hormones all the time and sexual hormones equal aggression and screams.
2. Diet. You are free-feeding pellets which are high protein food - again, this causes them to produce sexual hormones [evolution made it so they procreate only when there is enough rich food for it thus, rich food equals sexual hormones].
3. Routine. I might be reading your posting wrong and, if I am, please correct me but it seems to me that you don't really have an established daily routine for your bird - you mention leaving her alone for some time, then letting her out for different lengths of time, changing things on weekends, etc. This is not helpful to the bird. Birds in the wild follow the same routine, unchanged, every day of their lives. They wake up with dawn, they stretch out, hang out for a few minutes while the day becomes lighter and then take off -with the entire flock- to get something to eat. Once they are full, they preen and interact with the other birds and, at around noon, they rest. In the afternoon, once the sun starts going down, they again go find something to eat and drink and, once full, go to their roosting place where they sleep until dawn the following day. Some days are longer than others and the amount of food or the place where they find it might be different, they might just stop and chill doing nothing or they might be busy working on a nest, laying eggs, raising young, etc but the activities keep a 'schedule' both within the year different seasons and within the day that repeats over and over and over from birth to death. In captivity, keeping to a steady routine helps reduce the inevitable stress of captivity and the parrot to feel safe and in control of its life. This last one might sound funny but parrots are animals that don't have a hierarchical society [there are no alphas, no leaders, no bosses, no protectors, no nothing - every single bird is the same in terms of ability to make a decision or rights compared to every other bird in the flock, the only difference is physical might, meaning some are bigger or stronger than others but that's about it. No parrot tells another parrot what to do or when to do it, a parrot decides on its own where to go, what to eat, etc. and that is something that is completely lacking in captivity as we decide everything for them. Creating a steady, daily routine that, more or less, matches their natural biorrhythms in the wild allows the bird not only to follow its body's evolutionary dictates but also gives it the impression that it's in control of what happens when the action the bird foresaw actually happens exactly when the bird thought it would. The 'fulfilled prophecy' angle is the greatest de-stressor we can give them.
I not only rehabilitate parrots, I also do it with dogs and cats as I take in the ones that other people cannot deal with and the steady, unchanging routine is essential for this even though these are animals that have been domesticated for thousands and thousands of years and have been bred by humans for thousands and thousands of generations to share the human environment. Our pet parrots are not only undomesticated [so their needs are IDENTICAL to their wild counterparts'], they are only a few generations away from the wild and, unfortunately for them, kept under conditions that are not really very good -I am not pointing at you on this, it's a fact that none of us can actually keep parrots well in a human environment no matter how hard we try. The 'not knowing' and the 'not being able to decide on their own' is hard on them. And, if you add the fact that the bird is kept hormonal through long days and high protein food day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we are talking of not only acute physical discomfort but also a high degree of sexual frustration because they are not like people, they don't 'choose' when to have sex, they are governed by the hormones produced according to the season so, when you 'make' it breeding season all year round, it's super hard on them both physically AND psychologically. And that's why they bite, scream, pluck, etc.