by Pajarita » Wed Aug 21, 2013 3:52 pm
My dear, birds never get better on a steady curve, it's a jagged thing at best and you need to measure improvement over a long period of time. For example, I took in a 17 year old lesser sulfur too which had lived his entire life in a cage adequate for a cockatiel (as a matter of fact, I am using it for my blind tiel and her VERY old mate who can't fly any longer) and which had not come out more than an hour, if at all, a day for the last two years. The bird was scared of everything when he first came and, although now he lives cage-free in the birdroom and is eating great, he is a sad, sad boy. As I had no other cockatoo he could bond with and I could tell he wasn't going to bond with me, I decided to start looking for a companion for him. And here comes Freddy whose mother was undergoing cancer treatment, the father had a heart attack and, because they couldn't work in their own business, they lost their house so they had to look for a new home for Freddy. Freddy is the typical cockatoo (he is an Eleanora) with his dance moves, his sassy talk, his friendliness and his legs all plucked and his pterodactyl screams that can go on for hours.
I immediately put him on a strict schedule, a better diet (he was getting High Potency pellets as his every day meal), good lights, etc. He comes out 2 hours in the early morning and about 4 or 5 from 12 or 1 to 4 or 5 in the afternoon. At 7 pm, he gets his dinner while it's getting dark and at 8 or 8:30 pm (depends on how bright the day is), he gets covered for the night. As he got used to his schedule, he very slowly stopped screaming so much and we were making very gradual and very good progress but we had a TERRIBLE day yesterday. He screamed and screamed and screamed all day long. Did I worry? Not at all. It's normal.
Same thing with Zachary, the scaredy one. I simply ignored him and went about my business in the birdroom. At the beginning, I kept his cage closed to see how he reacted to the other birds and so the other birds could get used to him without having real 'access' to him. When I saw that my other birds were fine, I opened his door but it took him two weeks to come out on his own. He then moved from his cage to a stand next to a window but he used to hide under the tray whenever I would come in. Now, he perches on the top tier of the stand and not only does not hide or run away when I put the food and water in front of him, the other day, he came down and grabbed and shook the hem of my skirt playfully while I was changing the papers on the tray.
Give it time. Watch your movements around her. Keep your hands down or behind your back. Don't look at her directly, always do it out of the corner of your eye. Never approach her cage directly, always go a bit around and slowly before you get to her cage. Sit on the floor close to the cage and just read or watch TV from there. And keep on talking to her in a singsong and soft tone of voice. I usually sing two songs while I am working in the birdroom, one of them is a very short one I sing in Spanish that goes Cuuuuuckoooo, cuuuuuuckooooo sings the cuckoo (my grandson learned to sing cuuuckooo to the birds before he learned to talk). I call this my 'cricket' song -you know how, in the forest, when everything is OK, you can hear the crickets but, if you don't, you know something happened somewhere near? Well, this is why I sing the same song over and over when everything is OK - because, when something happens that scares them (like when I have to go into the birdroom to adjust a heater or something like that and it's already dark), I sing it very softly and everybody immediately calms down. It's like a pavlovian reaction.
She will calm down, you just need to put a bit more time and a bit more work into it. That's all.
I'd sooner cut my own arm off!
