Pairing two green cheeks whom both have ownership of me

[Bird woman]

Hi everyone , the dominating behavior I am referring to maybe wrong choice of words. Who backs away from a situation , toy , food dish certain spot on the furniture etc . I think things are probably a little different in my flocks situation . The only thing cages in my household are used for is sleeping at night . The kids have me on a pretty strict schedule , up @ 7:30 am and lights out at7:30 to 8:00. There are bosses, followers and me the leader in our little family. I have foraging trays when I feed in the afternoon , everyone shares, and private special areas that clearly some of the flock will move away from when certain members of the flock decide that is where they want to be. The dominance I am referring to is the pecking order . My birds clearly all have established this and everyone has leaned it's order so we don't have very many arguments. Maybe this is different from what others have going on but works well for all of us. We have our own community with freedom. If it wasn't for the safety factor they never would be caged! Thanks for imput. Bird woman

[Bird woman]

POOR CHOICE OF WORDS AGAIN ::::: Leaders , followers , and me the GRUNT !,,, but a happy one! Bird woman

[Wolf]

Sometimes we have to use the words that we know or can think of at the time to describe what we are saying, words often get in my way.

Dominance is not a bad word to use for what you are saying, protecting the things that you claim from others, establishing a personal space and what you will tolerate in that space as well as many other little things like them are indeed forms of dominance, but sometimes the dominant activities are not done to establish yourself as the boss, but are done in the interests of establishing a certain equality so that no one is picked on. I really can't imagine any intelligent species that does not have, shall we say, standards for interaction. I was not intending to fault you use of the word dominance, I was trying to see more clearly how you were using the word and how your birds were applying it. Just after understanding better.

[seagoatdeb]

Thats why I call it dominance, because I can clearly see how important it is to Gauagan and some other parrots I have known, to feel safe and happy in their envoronments. I have also seen many parrots that I could not use that word for. Cockatiels, seem to already know how to share everything, and anything that looks anything like dominance is only a temporary thing.

[Wolf]

I think that like many other things that there are different types or levels of dominance. I am a member of other parrot forums and I read about the dominance that birds use to ensure the safety of their personal spaces as well as to insure their personal safety during interactions. I read about the interactions between different species of parrots and the apparent dominance that seems to exist when they hang out in smaller flock of their own species in a larger flock of several species. I read and see where any display of dominance in any form is taken to mean that parrots live in a dominance based social structure even though from the majority of scientific evidence most of them do not. I keep soaking up all of the information that I can and I can see, for example that in some species of parrots that the amount of dominance varies as well as the type of dominance expressed with perhaps dominance playing the biggest roll in the interactions of Quaker parrots, who also have a very unique social structure in the world of parrots.

We humans live in a dominance base society and we very often extend our thoughts and ideas about dominance onto other species of animals with varying degrees of success. I have never in my life seen any species of animal that does not express some dominance type traits, so I do not expect that parrots are really any different in this respect. I am just trying to understand more about the dominance that our parrots express when they do and how it relates to their interactions with each other and with us.

[seagoatdeb]

Well, I have been around a lot of Pois, and my Red Belly female is very unlike any of the other Pois I have known. When she was a baby and her toe was amputated, she fought the giant people that had removed a piece of her body. The more afraid she was the more she attacked them, producing as a baby, huge wounds that would leave scars on one employees hands.

She took to me immediately, on first sight and vocalizations, and has never bit me and i have never felt a fear of her. She absolutely makes rules for every person, and every parrot in her vicinity. She prefers not to fight but will certainly use her ways to throw and unexpected large scare into them, if they arent learning where she wants them to fit in. As time goes on she will give them more leeway, if she is comfortable with that, but she can take it away too.

She is absolutely unafraid to go anywhere, as long as i take her, and will chat to anyone, will pepper me with kisses, because i took her. When she is out of sorts, she is so fearless, she will intimdate everyone, but not me. She does not seem to realize how tiny she really is....lol

When she became the last remaining parrot she started to over bond with me. This led to her being unpredictable with my daughter, who she had previously allowed to pet her and my husband and she began to bite them. The worst one was when she basically "conned" my hubby into thinking she wanted to ride on his shoulder by running up to his shoulder. She fooled me too, I didnt see it coming, but when he took her on his shoulder to look out the window, something she previously had loved, she bit him hard on the neck. By this point everyone was afraid of her, except me who she continued to treat very nicely. Thats when i had the epiphany, i realized she was trying to scare everyone away from her and I....and I realized she needed another parrot to take some of the concentration from always being on me. A Meyers popped into my mind, and i found some in Vancouver. There were three babies of 3 months old and one Meyers that was almost 5 months old. The one that was 5 months old was more bonded to parrots than people, but I am good with animals, and parrots are the easiest of all animals for me to understand, and he looked and felt like the right parrot for her. I brought Sunny home.

Now the adjustment was on as soon as Sunny was out of quarantine.....at first Gaugan, tried to limit anyone from going close to Sunny. She would fly down and go after their toes and they would all shufffle backwards to escape. Then came the day she tried it with me, she came running at my toes, but i put my foot on her underbelly and gently lifted her slightly up and away from my toes. She couldnt believe it, since she was being so sucessfull chasing off the other humans, and tried again but i was fast and did the same thing. So she made her peace beak movement and stopped going after toes. Then she bit anyone if they came near her after talking to Sunny, except me of course......Then little by little, I socialized her to Sunny when they were both on me, rewarding with praise when they got along..and sometimes treats..well really when Gaugan got along....lol.....

well a lot more steps to this story, and a lot of reasuring Gaugan that i was always going to be there for her, ..... but Gaugan got nicer with everyone and a lot happier overall, and now she will even preen Sunny.....her first time preening a parrot in 17 years, she had remained aloof from parrots all that time. She has shown Sunny what she will and wont allow, and will enforce it....he wants to flock so bad and is so good natured he just kept trying to be friends with her. So they work together well.....

There may and likely will be some times there will be problems in the future, but I have known Gaugan since she was a baby, and we are so close and understand each other so well, I am certainly up for it, and Sunny is so good natured and he is so easy to forgive anything.

There was a time that I had to temporarily house Gaugan, and even though it was with my oldest daughter and her boyfriend who was an experienced parrot person, and they knew Gaugan well, and had relationships with her, they could not handle her well when I was gone, and she ran the household, and would not listen to them, and so they became afraid to take her out of the cage. When I went too pick her up, she was happy to see me and listened to me like she always has done.

This is why i say Gaugan is a dominant parrot. She has been able to dominate everyone, but me, so far. Now this is the way I see it....lol...sorry for the novel.....but this is the best way I can show an example of dominance in a parrot.

[liz]

Each of my cockatiels have their own personalities. Each one contributes to the flock. Each one has his own strong and weak points. There is no dominance but I can see when one is teaching the others.

I used to call my Sweetie girl the matriarch. Not that she was in control of the four but that she was the most adventurous and the flock followed what she was doing. She was the first one to play with a new toy, try a different food and decide what she would allow in the cage. (She through out the things she did not want.)

The only time I see what might be called dominance is when a single male gets to close to a mated female. The mated male will protect his wife from the temptation of others.

[Pajarita]

Yes, dominance, as a word, is a bit ambiguous when we want to describe social interactions in parrots. It's commonly used to describe a social structure where an animal or a pair of animals are dominant over all the others in the group and it's, basically, used by them for successful procreation. The fact that they are the 'dominant' male or pair gives them access to the best resources, thus ensuring successful progeny - and so we have wolves where only the 'alpha pair' breed and groups with a harem social structure (like roosters and their hens, stallions and their mares, lions and their prides, in goats, it's the ram and an older female which helps in foraging, etc). It's nothing but the old survival of the fittest strategy and natural selection theory. The stronger animal gets to eat better and procreate and the weaker doesn't. And that's why it's not used for parrots flocks - because, in a parrot flock, everybody which has access to a nesting spot will procreate and everybody forages together with pretty much the same access to the food sources.

In my personal opinion, the 'dominance' actions we see in parrots are more a captivity thing that anything else. Because, given the fact that there is no large pool to choose a mate from, that they often choose humans as their mates (which opens up another can of worms when it comes to behaviors and interactions) or that the space is limited (as well as the foraging sources), the normally peaceful interactions that occur in a wild flock tend to get an aggressive edge to them - again, nothing but the desire to breed successfully behind it. I don't see the 'defending' or 'becoming possessive' of their chosen one as a dominance example because it's not as if they are trying to actually dominate the other humans in the household, it's simply that, in their minds, nobody should have any close interaction with their chosen one but themselves and so they bite them because the other humans are not 'respecting' their sole right to this person (something that is not actually decided by them but by Nature in the form of a survival trait). It's not the parrot that is doing something wrong or unnatural, it's the other humans - and so, they are punished.

Having said that, parrots do have their favorite spots, favorite foods, favorite perches, etc and, of course, the stronger or more self-assured one will make it clear that those are HIS/HER and nobirdy else. But I also don't see that as a form of dominance (although one could say that it is because, again, we have no other word to describe it). It's simply that, in nature and regardless of the actual social structure of the species, the stronger (younger? smarter? better adapted?) will always have a better chance of getting what he/she wants. And this is always increased tenfold when we are talking about a hormonal bird because we all know that hormones mean aggression. I am seeing that right now in my birdroom (Bird woman, I also have a birdroom where the birds don't live in cages). Sophie CAG is, usually, the sweetest thing but she has been nesting and has turned into a regular virago going after any bird that gets anywhere close to her nest (a box in a corner of the room). Same thing with Freddy too which has a couple of boxes (one inside the other) in a cage. If he sees poor Linus Too approaching, he immediately scares him off (and the poor baby goes running and stands in front of a corner facing it, just like a little boy that has been punished ). But this is just a temporary situation, it will go back to been peaceful once they stop producing sexual hormones in a month or so when the days get real long...

[Wolf]

As I said there are different types or levels of dominance or aggression as to some degree they would doth be able to describe what is happening. But what originally started me looking into this more closely was that on a couple of the forums these were being used to suggest that there was a dominance based hierarchy as pertains to a flock of parrots. Which with what I was reading about parrots in their natural environments did not fit.

As I paid closer attention the first two things that struck me were that the parrots being discussed as evidence for a dominance based hierarchy were all captives and they were also flocks consisting of several different species of parrots. I was just about to laugh it all off as just so much misinformation of the type that we normally just have to wade through and shrug off, but then something about it clicked in my brain although I don't at this minute recall what it was, but it caused me to adopt a more wait and see type of thought concerning these behaviors.

It has kind of stuck with me since that time and it seems that there is a higher incidence of aggressive and/ or dominant type of behaviors developing in out captive bred and raised parrots than there is in even the wild caught parrots after having been captive for many years. So every now and then someone says something pertaining to this subject that hang up in my mind and so I start asking a few question about it. So I guess that I am just in the process of gathering information concerning these behaviors and right now I have no idea as to where this line of questioning will take me or exactly what I am going to learn from it.

[Pajarita]

Well, that's the thing. I think that it's captivity that does it... It's undeniable that captivity has skewed lots of natural behaviors in parrots. I mean, just the fact that they want to have sex with a human or that they bond with species that are not even remotely similar is super telling, isn't it?