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[Erithacus]

Most greys hate water. My previous grey hated water too. I forced bath my previous grey 2X a week. It had became a routine and she understood that. She accepted her bath without resisting.

I am using the same method to bathe Kilaya. He hates water more than Cocoa did. I know it will stress him initially by forced bathing. I need to let him know that he needs his bath. He is fine when I run the shower on him but he dislikes it when I spray the under wings. After his bath, he seems happy by flying from one spot to another and vocalizing happily. I don't think that 5 minutes of stress once a week would do any harm to him. Every bird is different. Had he shown sign of stress, I would use a different approach.

A friend of mine clipped his grey because he followed a bad advice in facebook. His grey was so upset that he could not fly anymore and he started plucking and he hated my friend. My friend regretted his action. This is more stressful for the bird.

[Pajarita]

Well, no, actually, they don't need that kind of bath twice a week (actually, they don't need it even once a month and that's why they don't like water that way, because they don't need it - if they did, nature would have provided the desire to bathe like that). Flooding the bird doesn't inure the bird ('teach' it to get used to something), it only teaches it that you will impose your will regardless and leave it no recourse which is HIGHLY stressful to them. And no, stressing a bird twice a week is real bad for the simple reason that parrots in captivity live under constant stress -and that means 24/7/365- so any 'created' stress is always to be avoided. And you can't tell if a bird is stressed out. Nobody can. The only way is to measure stress hormones in their blood which, of course, nobody does on a regular basis.

But these are all things you should have learned when you lost your other bird to stress... so the question in my mind is why risk this one for the sake of doing something that is absolutely unnecessary?

[Erithacus]

All birds love to bath in the rain. My friends' greys bathe themselves in the rain. It is not the case for a grey to bath itself in the house. Only a minority do that. For me bath is important for birds. When I go out after a heavy rain, I see mynahs enjoying their bath in the street and in the field. I believe bath is important. I have a friend who have been keeping parrots since childhood and his oldest parrots are more than 30 years old. He baths all his parrots regular regardless whether they love water or not.

My previous grey did not die of stress. I suspected she picked up something when I let her to forage on the ground. I have stopped my birds from foraging on the ground when I take them out since then.

I don't agree with you that captive birds are living under stress for 24/7 unless the bird was just caught in the wild. I went to a parrot sanctuary lately. They have a rescued grey that is 48 years old. The grey is with them for 3 years. Another friend of mine has been keeping his clipped grey for 30 years.

If these captive birds are under stress 24/7, they wouldn't have live so long. And I don't believe that they are so fragile that they will die when they are under stress for a minute. There are some parrots kept in small cages for tenth of years and amazingly having lived in such a stressful condition, they survived.

[Pajarita]

According to a previous post, your previous bird died of a fungal infection and the ONLY way they can get them is if their immune system is depressed (nothing they could eat from the ground would cause it). And, aside from having a congenital immuno-suppressant disease (which, as far as I know, doesn't exist in parrots and, if it did and yours had it, she would have died way before she did), the ONLY cause of a depressed immune system is stress. So, although stress did not directly kill your parrot, it was stress that created the fertile ground for the fatal infection to take hold. This, to me, translates into 'Stress is to be avoided at all costs'.

And I am afraid you are wrong in that only wild-caught suffer stress in captivity. It would be great if this was true because then we could all relax with our parrots. But, unfortunately, ALL undomesticated species in captivity do. Without exception (ask zoo curators and they will tell you). Their life in captivity is too dissimilar to the life that nature evolved them to have but, because they are undomesticated, their needs are identical to the ones in the wild. This, added to the fact that all captive-bred parrots are physically and emotionally weaker (no natural selection, hand-feeding by humans, early weaning, etc) than their wild counterparts ends up giving us chronically stressed out birds to the point that years and years ago I read a paper written by an avian vet who specialized in necropsies which stated that, regardless of the cause of death, their internal organs looked as if the birds had lived their entire lives 'besieged' by stress. This was something that astonished me and stuck in my brain... imagine that! 'besieged' as in attacked from all sides!!

As to old age in captive parrots... yes, there are exceptions but, in my personal experience and knowledge, the VERY few (and we are talking about a very, very, very small percentage of them) that do make it anywhere near their full life expectancy (60 for grays) are either wild-caught or first generation from wild-caught parents. Exceptions exist to any rule but, in order to achieve success in any endeavor, one cannot go by the exception but with the rule, right?

All I am saying is: think about it. Nature did not make bathing often and well important to grays (I am not talking about other species, they are all different). It might be important to you but, personally, I would not risk my parrots undergoing stress regularly because I think something should be one way or the other. I've been doing this for a long time and if there is one thing I've learned is that Nature ALWAYS knows more than I do so I follow her lead. Again, think about it. Is your idea of how often or how thoroughly a bird should bathe worth causing your bird extra stress?

[Erithacus]

I may not agree with you 100% but I will look into that.

[Erithacus]

Green cheek conures.

[Erithacus]

[Pajarita]

I have to admit that I find the cinnamons too pale for my taste but both are very pretty birds! Has your gray been DNA'd a male?

[Erithacus]

I asked a grey breeder from the States. She told me Kilaya is a male, very very positive. She has never failed in visual sexing her baby greys. They matched the dna test as per requested by her customers. So far over the years I have visual sexed my friends' greys correctly too. But I couldn't tell Kilaya's. So I took her words to be correct. But anyway I am not interested to dna my grey. It doesn't make any difference to me whether Kilaya is a he or she. I am not going to get another grey. Probably I would stop here. No more new parrot/s.

At waterfall this morning.

[Pajarita]

Well, it's always useful to know the gender because females require more calcium during breeding season than males and have medical concerns of their own (like cloacal prolapse, for example). Have you looked at the tail undercoverts? If it's a male, they would be completely red but, if it's a female, they should have a very thin grey edge to them (but you need to look when the feathers are new because, if they are just the tiniest bit frayed, they lose the grey edge). Personally, I don't believe anything a breeder tells me... it's like believing everything a car salesman tells you. They are both in sales and they are both promoting themselves as well as their own product.