M African Grey Hormones

[Smokey]

I have a male Congo African Grey named Smokey, he will be 12 years old in July and I have had him since he was 4 weeks old. We live in one open room, his wings are clipped. We are very close and his hormones are raging not just in the spring but year round. He has never been aggressive to me but gets really sexually aroused often. It gets me really anxious to see his sexual frustration because he never seems to be able to climax. Is there anything I can do to ease this for him?

[Wolf]

Yes ! Indeed there is a lot you can do to solve this problem. I do not know if you are aware of why this is occurring, but I suspect that you do not. The very first thing to do is to allow Smokey's wings to grow back and grit your teeth when he tries to learn to fly, if he will even try after all this time. While you are waiting for that to happen encourage him to flap his wings as some exercise is better than none. This will begin to help by dissapating the hormones that are building up in his bloodstream. Secondly put him on a strict solar light schedule. This is the very same light schedule as the wild birds are on. He will need to be exposed to the full twilight period that occurs at dawn and then to the sunlight that exists during the day. It does not need to be direct sunlight as that would probably cause him to overheat with bad thing occurring from that. But then he also needs to be exposed to the full twilight period of dusk and then he needs to go to bed by full dark. These two twilight periods are very important as these are what sets and maintains his internal biological clock. This clock is what starts and stops the breeding cycle and starts the molting cycle and then the resting cycle. Almost every system in his body is regulated by this clock. It will also be necessary to make sure that he eats a good diet consisting of fresh, raw produce( vegetables and fruit) whole grains and a limited portion of seeds or pellets. I will be honest here and say that I am not a big fan of pellets.
I feed all of my birds a cooked mixture of whole grains, vegetables and white beans and lentils along with some fresh, raw produce for breakfast and for all day foraging and then a measured portion of seeds for dinner, which is removed after they go to sleep for the night.
This is the only way to correct the problem that your bird is having and it is not fast but it does work and then it maintains his system right as nature intended for it to function.
I will be happy to help you through this, so feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

[Smokey]

Thank you for your reply Wolf. I will rearrange the room and put him by the window. He eats a seed diet, always has. He actually has no interest in fresh fruits and veggies unless I am eating it, his favorite pass time is to eat what I eat. We live in south east TN so you know the weather we've been having and the power outage, it probably has messed up his internal clock, thank you for reminding me. I will make some adjustments today and try to overcome my personal anxiety of letting his wings grow.

[Wolf]

You are going to need to adjust his diet and it is not going to be easy nor is it going to be quick. I have a female Congo African Grey, she is 15 yrs. of age and came to me on an all seed diet. Now don't get me wrong as I am not against seeds in their diet as it makes up a portion of it in the wild. But therein lies the problem, it is only a part of their diet and not their total diet or even a very large part of it. They eat more vegetation, flowers and such in the wild than they do of seeds. Seeds are much too rich in protein and fat for them and this always results in liver disease, kidney disease and heart disease. I work every single day to get my Grey lady to eat fresh produce with only little successes and many regressions on her part. It would be so much easier if the breeders would wean them to a proper diet from the beginning instead of weaning to seeds and encouraging people to keep feeding them an all seed diet when they know the problems that it causes. But seeds are much cheaper and breeders are driven by the dollar.
It was precisely because of the fact that we were killing our birds by feeding an all seed diet that led to the development of pellets as a food source in the first place. The prevalent thinking at that time was that the birds were picking the high fat seeds and then the high protein seeds and leaving the better seeds untouched, which was true. So in an effort to stop this picking their favorite seeds out and not eating the rest they ground all of the seeds up and mixed them with a binder and applied heat and pressure to produce a better food, or so it was hoped.
With the dryness of pellet and with the addition of artificial ingredients such as vitamins, which are not absorbed in the same manner as natural vitamins, sugars, and various preservatives, they did reduce to some degree the rate of liver disease but they did not prevent it, because the pellets themselves are still too high in the very same proteins and fats as the seeds from which they are made, and they added mild dehydration and allergic reactions to the foods that the pellets are made from to the list of possible issues. Which are the reasons that I am not a fan of pellets.

[Pajarita]

Wolf is 100% correct and I urge you to start him on a strict solar schedule today because, after 12 years of producing sexual hormones, his gonads must be huge and causing him constant pain, the poor thing! Now, you mentioned a single open room, does this mean you live in a studio apartment? Because, if you do, you might have to install a ceiling to floor black out curtain separating 'his' side from yours (I have a friend who did this in her Manhattan apartment and it works great) as he cannot be exposed to artificial light before the sun is out or after the sun is halfway down to the horizon.

See, their reproductive system is completely different than ours. We are on moon cycles but they are on daylight hours and, when they reach a certain high number and the food is rich (and, if he has been eating seeds for 12 years, he has been on a rich diet all his life), they start producing sexual hormones (we produce them all the time). This makes their organs grow (birds testes are inside their bodies, not like mammals which have them outside) but, when the hours reach another certain low number, they stop - and that makes their gonads shrink and, eventually, become dormant - a state which continues during the entire resting season (we would call it winter) until the days start getting long again and the whole thing starts again. So your poor boy has been on breeding mode for many years now and it's a wonder and a credit to his good nature and the love he has for you that he hasn't gotten aggressive or started to pluck.

You also need to change his diet and pronto! Has he been to an avian vet for blood work lately? Because I bet that if you do a bile acids test on him, his liver values would be off and, if you don't supplement it, his calcium levels too low.

Both my grays love gloop and although they are not big on leafy greens, they do love their fruits and veggies and both came to me as adults and seed junkies so switching them to a better diet is doable. It takes quite a long time to get them to eat a good enough diet but it is perfectly doable. Try cooking him some brown rice, barley and wheat kernels and/or quinoa (you find them in the regular supermarkets these days) al dente and putting this in his feeding dish early in the morning (you need to take the bowl with seeds out of his cage after he falls asleep) with a sprinkle of budgie seed mix (no more parrot mix for him, too much protein and fat) mixed in. He will start by picking just the seed but in a few days, he will be eating the cooked grains and you will be on your way to a healthy bird! When you see that he is eating the grains (you will find empty 'grain skins' in the bowl), eliminate the seeds and then start adding some sweet corn and, when he's eating it (all birds LOVE corn!), add some baby peas - then some diced carrots - then some chopped broccoli and so on and so forth until he is eating a 'normal' gloop. Have you been giving him any multivitamin/mineral supplement? If you haven't, please do so for a while and until he is eating a good diet. And, if I were you, I would get some liquid, non-alcoholic milk thistle and dandelion root extracts and add them to his water to help clean out his liver.

[GreenWing]

The others are absolutely right. I'm glad you made the decision to let your Grey's feathers grow out and to not clip.

My Grey came to me clipped, I do not clip, and she flies around the house at times. I am so proud of her when she does, and her landing is getting better. She beats her wings when on her perch and it's great exercise for her.

And it's true about the solar schedule. My Grey and I cuddle a lot and I kiss her lots and she is not sexually frustrated. She gets a varied diet and is exposed to day light and twilight. It really makes a difference.