This is Paulie

[Wolf]

As far as mental/ emotional maturity I think that it makes sense to me as well, but am not so sure about the feather destructive issue.

Sometimes, at least I have read on other forums that in a bird this young that their barbering or plucking is actually a continuation of what their parent bird did to them. Which is probably cause by the current breeding practices that we have of removing them from their own parents far to young, before their parent got to teach them about how to raise their young which appears to be done during the time between hatching and fledging.

but I think that the most prevalent reason is stress and often that stress is lack of enough attention but from that point the causes vary so much that it is really hard to understand without enough observation to determine what sets it off or decreases it and still we don't really know what is going on in their little heads, it is a difficult one to figure out.

I have three birds that came to me plucking all of them adults, and so far nothing that I have read or talked about with other that have experience with plucking birds has done much to help me to understand why they do it, or how to remedy it as of yet. I have had limited success with interrupting it in my Grey for three years but she has recently started to pluck again. I think that I may have it back under control again, but it is too soon to be sure.

[Pajarita]

Hmmm, well, I don't know if one can actually generalize that way with parrots... I have often noticed that FDB doesn't really start when they are very young unless there is a medical condition behind it but I would not say that conures become emotionally mature at 7 years of age. I agree with you that humans begin to mature psychologically around their mid 20s but that's because their brain finishes developing at that age. Animals don't mature the same way that people do -at least, not in the sense of making the right decision or not. I have what I call an 'off-the-wall' theory(meaning I have no scientific back up for it) on that and it is that most of them are actually very patient about things and they wait and wait and wait for things (diet, light schedule, attention, housing, etc) to get better and, once they realize that it's not going to happen, that's when things start to go south quickly.

As to what works to stop FDB... I don't think there is a magic bullet for it because once they get into the habit, it's real hard to break them out of it completely and for good but, if there is a chance, it is through impeccable husbandry. I also believe that some species (like grays and cockatoos) as well as some individual birds are more prone than others and that what care they received at the breeder's has much more to do with this than we realize.

[patti]

I have an update on Paulie. I went to the vet a couple weeks ago, then the next week went back again and have not had time to post until now.

Good news is that paulie's foot sores are now healed.

Bad news, Paulie is obese. Those foot sores will come back if he doesn't lose weight! I would have described him as "thick" and if you scroll up and look at the pictures he doesn't really look that fat, right? But he needs to lose more than 30% of his body weight. Who knew! His weights vary, but he was 216 when I bought him, 220 when I took him home, and 226 at his highest. Those are all afternoon/evening weights, when he is heaviest. Normal weight for his species appears to be about 165g. So that is definitely obese.

For the first few weeks I had him at home I let him do whatever he wanted... to get to know him and let him adjust on his own time and in his own way. And all he wanted to do was sit on the same perch all day and eat constantly! Or sit on my shoulder. Sit, eat, sit, eat, bed. No grooming, no playing, no bathing...only occasional singing and responding to me when I try to interact with him (by biting me... but in a cute way). Not right. And when I compared his anatomy to my adolescent Jenday, he had what I thought was some swelling under his wing. He had a squishy round white blob in the space in between a his knee and shoulder on both sides. Could be nothing or could be some sort of tumor, i thought. Turns out it was FAT! Now that it has been pointed out to me I can easily see what it is... but I don't know enough about bird anatomy yet to figure it out on my own. So fat Paulie is now on a diet. Right now the prescription is to lose weight, give him stuff to do via training and foraging, and supplement with fish oil, and see how he improves.

So when it had been 3 weeks I took him back to the vet because he just didn't seem right and I wanted a closer look. Boy am I glad I did! People aren't kidding when they say you have to watch parrots like hawks (ha ha...).

As I mentioned in my previous post, he is about 20 years old and I don't know his diet all those years but suspect he has eaten too much human food and too much seed in the past. That is a long time to build up problems and I fear his organ function is threatened. The hope is that I will have him happy, healthy, and freshly feathered in about a year. My 6 mo goal is to get him to a healthy weight and then check his numbers. I don't know how serious his condition is, but I have my fingers crossed because my suspicion is that I am on a race to prevent irreparable damage.

Oh, btw, I have figured out that he is biting because his beak itches. Or he gets tingles from anxiety and the biting alleviates that somehow. But he is definitely scratching some sort of proverbial itch. Distracting himself from some sort of constant physical sensation he does not like and cant do anything about. My guess is anxiety and/or dry skin. Fish oil will help with that, hopefully.

[liz]

I have, over the years, learned that the best diet does not take foods away that are favorites but reduces them. The best diet that I have found is to increase variety of vegetables. Healthy vegetables seem to burn more calories than they have. (My mother lost 80 pounds by munching raw vegetables all day and filling up on them to the point that she ate very small regular meals.)

All of mine came to me on seed or pellet diets. I felt bad to be taking away the things they loved so much. Instead of seed I feed softened and rinsed grain with a variety of vegitable. I no longer give them half a walnut with their breakfast. I save it for a bribe to shut them up later in the day when they are screaming to drown me out.

Gimpy came to me so overweight that he was a blob. He adjusted to the new diet and seemed to really enjoy it. His biggest progress is when his feathers grew back and he was able to fly. Flying is not only fun for him but exersizes him to trim down while doing what they were meant to do.

I am working with my Aunt Betty trying to teach her that calories are not equal. She is stubborn and hard to teach at her age. She refuses to accept that a healthy meal can be the same calories as junk food but not have the same nutrition and are digested different. I have to feed her healthy things during the day so she will not get hungry and demand a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch.

Teaching a bird good nutrition is easier than teaching a human. Sometimes my birds will back talk but not as much as an Aunt Betty who "wants what she wants when she wants it and wants as much as she wants". (one of my hospital roommates used that line a lot.)

[Pajarita]

Don't feel bad about not noticing he was fat. It's not easy with birds... for one thing, nobody can tell by just looking and, for another, you need A LOT of experience to be able to tell by just feeling. People say 'feel the keel bone' but birds that have a lot of muscle from flying would feel quite plump on the chest while birds that don't fly can have a keel bone that sticks out and still be overweight!

Now, I don't know if your vet did a bile acids test on him but, if he/she didn't, I STRONGLY suggest you request one because when birds have globs of fat under the skin, they always have fatty nodules in their liver -and that means fatty liver disease (hepatic lipidosis). The thing with the usual avian biochemistry panel is that it doesn't have a single value that is liver specific and, the ones that 'cover' liver as well as other organs only measure liver disease when the liver is beginning to fail so you can have a bird with a liver working only at 25% and still show normal values. The ONLY test that measures liver function is the bile acids one and it's highly recommended it's done on any bird that has been on a bad diet for years because, and these are the great news, the liver is the only organ in the body that actually regenerates so, if you catch it in time, you can not only stop the damage but also reverse part of it. (If he is found to have liver malfunction, I can point you in the right direction for the natural supplements you can use to fix it).

Now, I assume that your vet told you to feed a measured amount of pellets as part of his diet -please correct me if I am wrong because the following is based on this assumption. The problem with feeding pellets to a bird that has an eating disorder (that constant eating and eating is a clear symptom of it -it usually happens to birds that were not weaned the right way) is that you will end up with a very unhappy bird. Pellets are grains that were ground up into a paste, dried and compressed so they not only have a long shelf life. But the 'side effect' is that you end up with a food that occupies a small space (think of dry sawdust versus wet sawdust) and this is the same small space it will occupy in the bird's crop because parrots don't have saliva in their beaks or in their crops (the moisture part comes later in their digestion process and that's also why I think that pellets are not the best dietary option -I can explain this further if you wish, just let me know). Because birds fill 'full' in their crop, feeding them a small amount of pellets would make them feel not sated.

I would recommend you consider gloop as the staple. Gloop is, same as pellets, whole grains but, unlike the ones in pellets, they are not dried and compressed, they are actually made plumper by infusing them with water as you cook them which is ideal for overweight birds (the higher the moisture, the bigger the volume, the smaller amount of carbs you need to ingest in order to feel full). I have taken in several overweight birds as well as ones with liver malfunction (I actually have three of them right now) and all of them have done wonderfully on gloop because it has all the necessary elements: low protein, almost no fat, high fiber, low complex carbs and no simple ones. And it's also a wonderful medium for supplements.

[galeriagila]

I actually BOUGHT the movie Paulie" a while back.
Several parts always make me cry... especially when Marie sings that song to Paulie to prove she is the same girl.
Good to have you here!

[patti]

I rented the movie after I got Paulie, and now I know why everyone kept asking me if he found Marie!! Paulie wasn't into the movie, though.

As for his fatness, he is indeed on a measured pellet diet. And I did take all the seeds away, giving one or two as treats only. I give him a little under half his pellet allotment for breakfast and a little under half for dinner, and he usually finishes them both fairly quickly. I reserve a few pellets to put in a foraging toy, but so far he is just afraid of those toys and so despite his hunger he leaves those alone. He is allowed a few fresh foods, so he has a HUGE bowl of fresh broccoli, jalepenos, and berries and I am happy to report that he is munching all day long on those. But he still paces around looking for something else (like anything made out of wood). It gets him to climb off the perch every now and then too, which is another benefit.

He has one supplement that he takes, a fortified omega supplement. I don't know specifically what is in it other than lots of B vitamins.

I know that the liver regenerates, and I am figuring that liver disease progresses slowly for a long while and then, at some point, passes the point of no return. I would be surprised if Paulie is past that point, and I am working under the assumption that everything can be reversed. But losing weight releases stored toxins into the body... and I am real worried about him.

[Wolf]

Based on what you have said in your posts I assume that you have a scale to weigh Paulie with, but I don't know what your schedule is like. Although weighing Paulie in the evening is probably the most convenient time, most of what I have read suggests that you will have a more accurate reading of his weight is it is done in the mornings after he does his big poop and before he receives anything to eat. But I suppose that it could just be my own understanding of it and in the overall picture it may not matter all that much.

But as far as losing weight goes I think that you would probably fare much better if the foods that he was offered during the day were fruits and vegetables and whole grains either sprouted or partly cooked and then a measured amount of seeds or even pellets for his evening meal. Pellets are like seeds in that they are usually high in both fat and protein and pellets, or at least most of them contain soybeans and/ or soy products as the source of protein. Soy is bad enough for birds that if I remember correctly that Australia is considering banning soy as an ingredient in the commercial bird foods sold their. One of the things that has been associated with soy in birds is that some of them develop an allergic reaction to it which has been tied to Feather destructive behaviors. Also do you think that his biting might be because he just doesn't feel good, possibly due to being overweight?

If Paulie is 20 yrs old and may have been on a high fat diet for most of that time then there is a very good chance of his liver already being compromised in which case 100% alcohol free, organic milk thistle could be something worth considering as a liver tonic and even if his liver is fine it would not hurt. It only takes a few drops of it once a day to clean his liver and to aid in its healing.

These are my thoughts on this and I am hoping that you might find some of them to be beneficial. Please keep us informed of Paulie's progress.

[liz]

Gimpy came to me as a fat lump of feathers. Eating was his only joy. Now that he flies he has started loosing weight and has found joy being in the flock. He feels better with the foods I serve and is starting to show me his personality.

[Pajarita]

Yes, I would also go with a low carb/low protein gloop in the morning and a measured amount of seeds in the evening. Pellets are really not good for birds that need to go on a diet because the small amount they need to lose weight leaves them constantly hungry and, as nobody really knows how much protein pellets have (they never give you an exact value but a minimum), they can be quite dangerous with birds that are obese -obese birds almost always having fatty liver which requires low and exact values of protein intake.

Please, please, please, be careful with omega supplements! Unless it's nothing but omega 3, you can create a terrible unbalance in birds as they NEVER need any omega 6 or 9 (they also don't need any vit B12 because birds produce enough of it themselves -not like people who don't). Dr. Harrison actually made a point of mentioning this in his newest avian medicine text because he had found several birds that were made very sick due to people using mammal omega supplements on them. I supplement omega 3 in the form of sesame and flax seeds added to their gloop as they provide the perfect balance of omegas.