Moody Budgie! Help!

[Rebajoy]

Hi there,
Four of my budgies live in one, spacious cage (with out-of-cage time whenever I'm home). The four of them get along well enough. However, one of them has recently started showing signs that SHE is, in fact, a HE. And one of the four is a more-mature female (not his bonded pair). She is now super hormonal, screams all day long, and chases him around the cage (the other two birds either pay them no mind, or join in the screaming). She has since turned so very mean (her personality is not as cheery as some of the other budgies, but now she is excessively mean). She bites the other birds and bosses them around the cage, oftentimes going after even her bonded friend.

Help! How should I handle this? Is there anything I can do??

[Wolf]

You may have to remove this one from the same cage as the others and place it in one right next to them. this would of course only be to keep it from injuring any of your other birds and should be looked at as a temporary situation. The actual cause of this problem has got to be in either their diet or light schedule or both. They need to be on a solar light schedule and on a low fat, low protein diet. With this in mind what do you feed them and when? What type of lights are they exposed to and when? What time are they getting up and going to sleep?

[Rebajoy]

I usually put them to bed around 9 at night, and remove their cage-covers at 830/9 am.
I'm in a basement suite, so there isn't too much natural light, especially now that we're in to the fall. But I keep the house-lights on during the day when I'm back at work - so not enough natural light.

As for feeding, I check/change all their food every day. But, they haven't had much fresh food in their diet, other than small samplings every now that then (gah!). I was going to pick up some quinoa this weekend to make a salad for them.
They have access to multiple food dishes all day/night long. Should I take out their dishes at night and replace them in the morning?

[Wolf]

More on the light shortly. What is in the dishes for food?

[Rebajoy]

Food: generalized mix of seeds/small pellets. Small seeds and there are some sunflower seeds in there, too. Yesterday, they were offered some fresh broccoli. They get plain noodles when I make them for myself, or bits of kale when I have it in the house. I sometimes mix fruit and oatmeal together for them, as well. But none recently.

[Wolf]

They really need to be exposed to the twilight periods that occur at dawn and at dusk. I am not sure that you can really replace those but you can use a full spectrum light with a CRI of 94+ and with a K Temp of 5000 to 5500 to deal with the lighting issues and try using a dimmer to slowly bring it up to full strength in the morning and to dim it to full dark in the evenings to mimic what the sun does . A regular natural solar schedule is best but we do have the technology to copy the way that nature does things. The twilights are needed to set the birds biological clock to keep the endocrine system in tune with the seasons. This solar schedule is one of the main triggers for hormone production in a birds body.
Diet is also one of the triggers for a bird to go into or remain in breeding condition and thereby being hormonal out of season. This is one of the reasons that we are concerned with the amount of protein in a birds diet. Birds do eat seeds as a natural part of their diet but seeds, like so many other items in their diet are only available on a seasonal basis, so they don't get to eat them the way that we tend to feed them. Seeds are only a portion of what they eat and pellets, which were meant to replace feeding seeds are just ground up seeds with a variety of artificial vitamins and other stuff. So both seeds and pellets should only be fed on a limited basis, preferably for their dinner only. The rest of their diet should consist of whole grains, veggies and a little fruit.
The biggest difficulty that you are now faced with is that even thought you are only noticing the effects of being hormonal with one of your birds, they all have hormonal issues and it takes a long time for the proper diet and lighting to correct this problem, also this is the only way to resolve this type of problem.
I hope this helps you.

[Lizz]

I agree with Wolf on your solar problem but then I usually do agree with Wolf.

The diet problem: You do not eat a healthy diet is why they are not. I have found that frozen vegetables are the solution. My babies get whatever veggie I have going on at the time I have it but on my out of house days I thaw the frozen ones for them to forage. I use natural unsweetened whole grain cereal for their fiber if I run out of grains and don't have time to go to the farm store.

I just got a call that a farrel cat colony need my help so it will be sometime before I can get back to my computer.

[Pajarita]

Yes, the hen is overly hormonal. But no human cereal! It's loaded with iron which is real bad for birds livers. Budgies are not big fruit eaters but they love their greens so start putting a couple of very wet (dripping!) leaves in their cage every morning (one between the bars next to a perch -not dowels, tree branches- and one laying on the bottom of the cage (they love to take 'leaf baths' on them). Cook some couscous, barley, brown rice and steel cut oats (you can easily find all these and sometimes even wheat and quinoa in a regular supermarket), mix this with chopped broccoli (comes in bags in the frozen section) and sweet corn and put it on a white paper plate at the bottom of the cage in the morning (sprinkle a bit of the budgie seed mix you've been feeding them and mix it in BUT eliminate it once they start eating the grains). After they've been eating this for a week, add peas and carrots to it. They should get baked sweet potatoes (you can do them in the microwave in 4 minutes if you get the 'Potato Express' bags -they sell them in Walmart for $10) twice a week.

Place the cage as close as you can get it to a window (you can install a shelf on the wall right under it) and get yourself the full spectrum lights for during the day - I doubt you will be able to put them on a dimmer because they are fluorescent but you can put them on a timer and have it turn off at 4:30 pm this time of the year. Once you get home from work, cover the cage BEFORE you turn on the lights -use something thick so the light doesn't shine through (you can use a blackout curtain for it).

[Rebajoy]

Thank you so much for all of your help!
I've started feeding them more fresh food. I will have to figure out a lighting schedule and what can work in my living space - but it's on the brain now!

I have separated my one mean budgie, and there is considerably less screaming throughout the day (or so I've noticed over the last couple days).

Thanks for all your help again.