alienlady wrote:Ok she is my first Amazon parrot. Is that better ?
:lol: Don't worry about it, although Brandon is correct in that cockatiels are also parrots, we understood what you meant.
Now, as to your amazon's brown feathers. If the feathers had follicle damage, they would be yellow and not brown and I'll tell you why. Feathers are green from the superposition of yellow and blue. The yellow is a pigment so this is the actual 'base' color of the feather, the blue comes from a special structure that some feathers have that allows them to reflect ONLY blue light. Add the 'blue reflection' to the 'base' yellow color and VOILA, green feathers! The only times when a normal, healthy parrot's green feathers turn brown is when they are saturated by water or when there is liver issues. The water saturation nullifies the blue reflecting structure and makes the yellow color darker - thus: brown.
As to the testing - I do a bile acid test in every older bird or any bird that I know, for a fact, has had a bad diet for some time (and your poor bird had a TERRIBLE diet in its previous life!). Avian vets will tell you that doing the avian chem panel tells them of liver damage and they are correct BUT the values they look at are not liver specific and the test does not tell you how the liver is actually working but whether there is liver cell damage. Only problem is, you only see bad levels on these values when the liver is only working at 25% (and I know this for a fact because it's not only on avian medicine text books but also because I had a parrot that died from liver failure and had good chem panel values until one month before death!). The bile acids test tells you how the liver is actually performing so it catches problems way before they show on the chem panel and, because the liver is the only organ that can heal and regenerate itself, it pays to know where you are standing so you can take measures (special diet, supplements) if needed. I have two amazons and a sun conure with liver damage and they are all doing very well with a special diet and daily herbal supplements.
Going on to the pellets: I don't feed pellets. I have done research on parrots natural diets and their physiology for many years and have reached the conclusion long ago that pellets are not and never will be the best dietary option for them. My issues: dryness (max 10% moisture for an animal that evolved to eat between 85 and 95%), degree of processing (self-explanatory), quality of ingredients (all of them feed quality instead of human grade) and the ingredients themselves (I don't feed any of my animals soy products or dried corn), man-made vitamins (which are not utilized by the body with the same efficiency as food-derived ones), uncertainty of the actual protein level (all of them read: minimum or more than). I feed gloop and raw produce for breakfast and all day picking (the liver-damage birds included) and a seed/nut mix for dinner which I tailor to their individual needs (I start with a low protein, low fat and add to round it up).