Hello from the Netherlands :)

[Nennootje]

Hello everybody,
I'm Nancy and i'm living in the Netherlands with my husband en 3 cats and 3 birds.
My english is sometimes not so good but i try
Almost every morning my 2 budgie's are free from 9 till 11 o'clock then they go in their cage by themselves and i only have to close the cage.
This summer an acquaintance of mine had a senegal parrot for the hollidays. After the holliday the owner didn't want him back. So she kept him, but he didn't like her and attact her.
I walked up to his cage and he put his head down for a scratch. Same with my husband. So i asked if i could have him. She said no then yes then the old owner wanted him back. So i gave up. Told her how sorry i feld for the bird because he never came out of his cage. And he was only 5 years old and had to look forwards to 25 years in a cage. She couldn't clean the cage from the inside wasn't cleaned in at least 2 years.
And the last owner was terrible aswell. Forgot to feed him when she went away for the weekend, hit the cage when he made a noise and feed him strange foods like beer, licorice, nougat, french fries and for normal food he only got sunflower seeds.
So last saturday i got a phonecall that i could have the bird. So i ran to the store to buy some good parrotfood and arranged transport.
Sunday i went to get him. I captured him with a glove and put him in a box. Home i cleaned his cage, it took me 2 hours to get it clean. I put him in the cage and het went straight for the food en sat on one leg. (Good sign)
Monday he was screaming so i ignored that and when he was talking i talked back. Tuesday i had to go away and in the evening he had fun trying apple. Wednesday he was talking all day long. But today he is sleeping most of the time.
I figured maybe he's finnaly getting some rest from the last days of the stress of moving and a new environment ??
He is so sweet to us. No biting. I think het is trying to seduce me, siting low with his wings hanging and sometimes dancing for me. Wiggeling from side to side and turning round.
I haven't had him out of the cage yet, because i wanted to give him some time.
And if i open the cagedoor he goes to the back of the cage. Yesterday i found out that the previous owner got him out of his cage and when he bit him had thrown him hard back in to it.
So the plan is to take things very slow. I haven't had a parrot ever so i hoping to learn a lot from this forum and get a lot of answers to my questions.

[Wolf]

That was a very hard life for any bird to have to endure and the stress and trauma from that treatment very often leaves the bird with emotional scars the same as it would if it had been a human child. To top it off Senegals are not always the most forgiving of parrots, so I expect that you may have your work cut out for you, but given time he will respond favorably to a good diet and good treatment and a lot of patient love. Thank you for taking him in, he deserves a good home and someone to love and care about him.
You say that you have never had a parrot before but your profile says that you have two budgies and budgies are true parrots, just so you know. They also hold the worlds record for learning the most human words, somewhere around a thousand, I believe.
I am assuming that you have just gotten him and if you have had him for less than 30 days you really need to quarantine him to prevent the possibility of him having any disease that he could pass on to you budgies, you should also get him examined by an avian vet and have blood work done to ensure that he is indeed healthy.
It sounds like he might be a bit hormonal which might help you as he might bond with you quicker but it is also when he would be the most aggressive so learn his body language as it will help you to avoid many bites, but not all as they sometimes will bite without warning especially when they have been treated badly.
You might want to look into keeping him to a solar light schedule, although you may be a little far north for that to be entirely effective. You might also want to look into feeding him a low protein diet such as Gloop ( more on gloop in the diet, nutrition and health section), or chop or even mash as these are fresh foods. I currently feed all of my birds fresh raw produce and gloop for breakfast and for all day munching and then feed a nut and seed mix for their dinner.
Please feel free to ask us anything about parrots and if we don't know the answer we will try to find it for you.

[Pajarita]

Welcome and thank you so much for taking this poor bird into your home! It must have suffered terribly in his previous home so, although it is sweet now, please take into consideration that it is in what we call the 'honeymoon' stage when even the 'bad' ones behave nicely. So, if it changes and starts biting, don't think it's anything you have done, it's just that he is feeling more comfortable in its new house and reacting to the bad treatment he got before.

Do you know if it's a boy or a girl? If you don't and show us a picture taken from the front (the camera should be at the same level of his chest), we can tell you.

Aside from that, good food and a 'modified' solar schedule will be to his and your benefit. We have a couple of members that also live in Northern countries and have come up with an artificial solution for the dawn and dusk they need to set their internal clocks. I can explain it, if you wish.

[Nennootje]

Hello
And thanks for the quick responds.
My budgie male can say many words, he love to talk. My female doesn't talk at all. I never really thought of them as real parrots.
With what i have read about my senegal it's a boy (but i have included some pictures of him anyway )
He is is the same room as the budgie's but i plan to take him to a bird vet next week. I wanted to give him some time to relax and i coudn't go to the vet on sunday. I haven't had any choice into taking him home it was that day or he would go back to previous owner or maybe worse.
So i took him home. I want to get him a microchiped aswell.

I read your tips about gloop and solar scheduale and i know i have much reading still to do. So tomorrow morning i will start reading about them

[liz]

If you think he is too scared to leave his cage, open the door, stay near by but ignore him.

[Nennootje]

I'm reading about the solar schedule. And i'm trying to figure how it works. Some things i read are to technical for me to understand.
Now my schedule is: I open the luxaflex at 09.00 (it's when i get up ) in the morning and then he gets his food the budgie are free until 11 and then they get their food. I have big windows so plenty of daylight. Every day at 16.00 o'clock my lights go on. (They are on a timer). And in the evening the lights go out at 21.00. And in weekends at 22.00.
What should i change to get a good schedule?
Or is this alright?

[Pajarita]

No, unfortunately, it's not. In simple words, avian photoperiodism means that birds bodies know when it's time to start or stop producing certain hormones by the number of hours of light they are exposed to. So, when you have your lights on from 9 am to 9 pm, you are not only providing 12 hours of bright light but also not exposing them to dawn and dusk and that is as important as the number of hours because it's the different light (you know, that pink and red light that colors the sky and everything when the sun is rising or setting) that happens at these times that allows them to mark the number of hours. Think of it like a stop watch, when their photoreceptors (cells that react to light) register the dawn light, it's like somebody starts the stop watch and, when their photoreceptors register the dusk light, the stop watch stops - and the number of hours that is in between is what the body takes into consideration to decide if it's the resting season (winter), breeding season (spring), molt (summer), etc. The body also takes into consideration the richness of the diet and, in a lesser degree, the weather because birds only breed when they have lots of good food and good weather so the babies don't die in a storm or from cold.

In captivity, there is always good weather so we can't use that as a trigger (environmental event that starts or stops an activity or behavior), we can reduce the amount of protein and we should do this during the resting season but the one thing we can control (up to a point in the Northern countries such as yours) is the number of hours of light they get -and that's what the solar schedule is all about: reproducing the conditions they would be exposed to in the wild so their endocrine system stays tune to the seasons and doesn't get out of whack. And it's very important that their glands are working as and when they should because they don't only regulate sexual functions but also sleep, appetite, mood, etc. all the way to the immune system!

Now, because you live in a place where the nights and days are way too long for parrots, you need to artificially create seasons that their body can recognize so, in the summer, you would have to do the days shorter than they really are and, in the winter, you will have to make them longer but never as long as 12 hours because birds produce sexual hormones with this number of hours and it's bad for them to produce them all year round. Nature made it that their sexual organs are dormant during the resting season and, when the hours of daylight get to a certain number, the sexual organs are 'turned on' and become active. This means they will start growing and preparing for reproduction. In the wild, when the number of hours reaches another certain number, the gonads (sexual organs) are 'turned off' and stop producing sexual hormones and gradually become tiny again. So, when you keep a parrot at a light schedule the reproduces breeding season all year round, the organs never stop producing sexual hormones or growing and can get so large that they actually end up pushing the other internal organs out of the way, causing them constant pain. Not to mention the aggressiveness that been sexually ready to procreate but not been able to would bring!

So, what you need to do is make a 'fake' sunrise and sunset so you can control the number of hours he is exposed to light. To do this, you need to get yourself a table lamp and put a red bulb in it and you start by putting the lamp under a table in the east corner of the room and turn it on, wait 20 minutes and then put it on the table, wait 20 minutes and turn on the overhead light and off the lamp. In the evening, you do the opposite, put the lamp on a table in the west corner of the room, turn on the lamp and off the overhead lights, wait 20 minutes, put it under a table, wait 20 minutes and turn it off -by then, the parrot will be ready to go to sleep - which he should do in complete darkness so, if you have his cage in a human area where there is traffic, you will have to get some kind of a black-out material to drape his entire cage (and make sure no light filters in from the bottom) and keep very quiet so he can go to sleep. Also, the overhead light should be a good quality full spectrum (CRI 94+ and Ktemp 5000-5500) - this is important for his production and release of the 'good mood' hormones.

[Nennootje]

Okay so that is why my budgie is alway so much in love with his usb-cable (yeah he is a nerd and he doesn't look to his female for love ) It's the first time i had heard of this. I try to look on dutch sites, but they all say 12 light, 12 dark. Notting else
Okay I need to buy lights and red bulbs and the overhead light.
Is there an "easy" schedule for how many hours the should get light in spring, summer, autum and winter (approximately)? Or how can i calculate how many hours he needs?

[Pajarita]

The schedule you mention is called 12D/12L and it's what people used to do years ago -which was better than what we did before! But, thankfully, we have learned more and more about what is best for parrots and we now know that parrots will produce sexual hormones all the time if kept at 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark because, after all, that is exactly the number of hours of light in the tropics.

I would do 9 hours of light in the winter and up to 14 in the summer, reducing and increasing as the seasons change with no more than 20 minutes every time I adjust it. It's a pain in the neck, no doubt about it! but parrots are not found anywhere as far North as you are and this is the only way to keep them healthy.

[Nennootje]

Thank you so much that is something i can work with!
I never thought a parrot would be easy to keep that why i always wanted one but never got one. This one was probebly ment to be in my life. So i'm going to do what ever i need to do to make him happy and healthy.
Tomorrow i'm going to tackle the gloop recipe's.
Crossing my fingers that i'm going to understand them more than i did the solar schedule . (You're explanation was very clear btw thank you for that )