Paquita and Rajah: A Love Story ?

[Wolf]

It is pretty early on but I don't see any reduction as of yet and if it has changed at all she seems to want to hang out with me a bit more and not less. It also occurs to methat a bond is meant to grow and develop and change over time, but also that even if her bond with me changes it does not always signify that the bond is weaker. I think that most of the time people who buy into that before seeing for themselves tend to give up before there is any reaction and thereby create a self fulfilling prophesy.

[Wolf]

It has now been 5 days and 4 nights with Keeta and Rajah living full time together with no serious fights. There have been a few very minor tiffs with either one of them pecking at the other briefly, but there has not even been one feather pulled or any actual attempts to bite the other at this point.
Rajah loves feeding Keeta and this has been the basis of most of the tiffs to date as he wants to feed her and she doesn't want to eat right then. I do see Keeta asking Rajah to feed her off and on through the day, but he wants to feed her all the time.
I am seeing that I do need to be careful about Keeta coming out of the cage to be with me and will probably have to take her into another room to spend time with her. She loves the attention, but Rajah who watches very closely appears to be starting to get a little jealous of Keeta spending time with me each morning. Today he is a little more pushy with her than usual and it appears that he is trying to get her to start perching next to him mostly. Keeta is accepting some of this but not all of it. There is still no serious disagreements between them but to be on the safe side I am watching them and their interactions very closely.

[Pajarita]

He'll calm down in time. Don't forget he is an ex-breeder and must have been kept at a human light schedule all his life so the poor thing is not only overly-hormonal, he has found a new mate after been uprooted from his previous life and separated from his entire family so he is trying his best to do 'his job' as he sees it.

[Wolf]

Yep, that is what I think as well.
Rajah watches and he now calls for her when she comes out to visit with me and this messes with his head a bit, first because he is scared of humans while she is not and then because he thinks that she needs to be right beside him and not with me.
This is the point where the real work of earning his trust begins.

[Wolf]

This morning Rajah is pestering Keeta a lot and she is not really very receptive to this. From where I am observing them he appears to be trying to get her to preen his head and back of his neck and seems to be having mixed results with that as she will preen his head just a little now and then. But since he also wants to preen her, he is running into some difficulties as she wants no part of him preening her at this time.

[Wolf]

So yesterday, I did not let Keeta out for her usual morning visit with me and waited until mid afternoon to let her out for a little almond and juice and a visit. This was one angry little bird and she let me know about it in no uncertain terms, you would have thought that I had not let her out for a week. She waited until she was firmly on my hand with a really good grip and completely out of and moving away from the cage and then she struck and bit me about 6 or so times as hard as she could, biting down and shaking her whole body to drive her beak in as deeply as she could. She then spent a couple of minutes pacing up and down my arm growling at me. Then she relaxed and asked for her usual piece of almond and her couple of capfuls of apple juice and then we talked and played as usual.
I did this, in spite of her asking to come out sooner, I wanted to leave her all day but gave in to her begging to come out, because Rajah is starting to show signs of being jealous of her coming out to play with me and I wanted to help them avoid the tiff that it causes. I didn't want them to start fighting. I thought that it might help her to bond with Rajah if I backed off and let her bond with me lighten up, but now I am not so sure that it was a good idea to do this.

[Pajarita]

You are 'not so sure'? Well, I can tell you that, as far as Paquita is concerned, there is no doubt in her mind that it was a real BAD idea Personally, I have learned not to interfere in any way or change my routine at all. It doesn't really work out... I leave it up to them to figure things out and decide what course of action they prefer to follow. In many cases, when you have a bird that is not bonded to a human and the object of this bird's affections shows a marked preference for the human's company, they do get jealous - it's pretty much unavoidable. But parrots are very smart and even if it takes them a while to figure out that, in reality, you cannot possibly be any kind of real threat to their relationship, it does happen. So, if I were you, I would keep on doing what I've been doing with Paquita all along and just give Rajah some time to come to terms with the situation.

[Wolf]

And that is exactly what I did this morning. I kept running yesterdays behaviors through my mind trying to look at it from Keeta's perspective and decided to just keep on giving her the times that she is accustomed to when she is accustomed to them and run interference a little if they start to actually fight and to otherwise stay out of it.
This is usually how I figure out what to do, I try to look at it from the birds point of view using their body language and behaviors to point me in the right direction. I try very hard to be aware of them and what they try to tell me. From my point of reference there is no one more qualified to instruct me in bird behaviors than the birds themselves. More people would have fewer problems if they would learn to listen to their birds as there is not a more knowledgeable expert on birds than the bird itself and our birds try so hard to communicate with us. It does help to do this and then post on here and see what responses I get.

[Wolf]

It was very interesting and amusing to watch Rajah and Keeta on different sides of the cage, when out of the blue Keeta starts chittering loudly and Rajah coming to attention then he ran to one of the food bowls and started eating as fast as he could, then he ran over to Keeta to feed her. Talk about training.

[Pajarita]

Keeta, the dominatrix! "You, slave, what are you doing over there? Come over here and feed me! NOW!!!"