Clothing Destroying Frenzy!

[Kirsten]

Skittles ( ) has been grating on my nerves the last few days. Now, for the record, it's just a minor annoyance really, and he's still the center of my universe, but I just need to vent.

I've been Skittles mom for about three years now. I've finally learned that no matter how well I know his personality he will always be utterly unpredictable. From hormonal mood swings and biting, to his rapid change to being a total douche around people in our home that he doesn't know, it seems like some sort of new crazy thing changes about him every week.

One of his habits that he has is a desire to chew clothing beyond recognition. It started with just bras. So I stopped wearing them with him out. Then, he suddenly started chewing on my jeans, so I started wearing pajama pants whenever he was out. Now he likes to chew on pajama pants and I just let him go for it since it's not like I'll be wearing those outside of the house anyway. Within the last two days though, he has taken up a new interest in making swiss cheese out of my t-shirts I wear underneath my button-up "bird shirt". So far, he's only destroyed one shirt that I love and he's working on a thrift store t-shirt I wear in bed. It's just incredibly frustrating to have to come home and change into a completely different set of clothes just so I can have him out.

Gone are the days when I could just wear whatever shirt as long as I have my poop protection shirt over it. Now I have to buy some thrift store bird shirts to wear under my other bird shirt (he likes to cuddle inside the flaps of the button-down shirts and has a blast chewing on some of the buttons).

This is a little like a simultaneous blessing/curse because now that I know he likes to chew on certain types of cloth, I have a whole bunch of new DIY toy ideas for him. However, I still mourn for my Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla shirt. Hopefully they will be selling it at future anime conventions so I can get a new one and keep it safe from Skittles beak of death.

In the end though, I would gladly sacrifice a million more favorite t-shirts if it means I can keep that crazy bird. He's helped me get through so much in the past three years and a few hole-filled t-shirts won't keep me mad at him for long.

I'm under the impression he's just being a typical bird, but if anyone has any tips to share, I would hugely appreciate them.

[Michael]

I would say letting him fly and doing more training is the only viable long term solution to buying lots of clothes. He's bored, has too much energy, needs stuff to do. Providing more personal attention when he's out, letting him do his own thing, and getting him to focus on training are ways to work on the general problems of boredom and excess energy. Diet is another thing to reconsider. Freefeeding a parrot is cause for disaster to the same extent as clipping.

[GreenWing]

I know what you mean, Tiki does this too; she wants to "preen" buttons and zippers into oblivion. So, when I handle her I wear "lounge" clothing, and give her a shiny new toy. If you can find a toy for your guy to shred that is shiny (eg, bells) then get it! I found a toy that had bells and pretty plastic loop things with straws that she could shred apart. It distracted her away from my clothes and she wouldn't leave it alone. ^^

[Pricey_boy]

what about a large piece of material like clothes that he could chew on its not a permanent solution but there could come a time where he stops chewing cloths

[marie83]

I think that distraction is your best bet. Its possible that offering similar materials will just lead to confusion, they always say not to give a dog an old shoe to play with because it wont differentiate between that and your best, most expensive pair of shoes. Parrots aren't dogs but you get the idea.

[terri]

My sun conure [who has such a fun personality]Can be such a beast .Im always saying were changing her name to the CAN OPENER

[Kirsten]

You're all right on the distraction bit. Sometimes I'll give him the lid to a medication bottle (washed off of course) and he just goes to town on it. We were giving him parts of clothes pins to chew on, but that got messy pretty quickly and my OCD aunt who cleans the house was having none of it.

I have discovered that Skittles was targeting shirts with graphics on them. Whatever the material is that they use to press images onto t-shirts is, Skittles goes nuts over it. So now I only try to wear shirts that don't have images on them. Now he's gone back to destroying pants.

Now that I've finished school for awhile, I'll have more time to set aside for training him. I'm planning on seeing if I can schedule an appointment with a behaviorist who works at a bird shop an hour or so away. I'm hoping she can give me some good tips on what I'm doing right and wrong with him so we can go beyond just doing target over and over. Not that this website doesn't help, I just sort of need to see things in person and do them myself to understand.

Also, Michael, can you explain what you meant about freefeeding? Establishing scheduled feedings would be more difficult, but if I can do it with the dogs, I'm sure I could do it with Skittles.