Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[RosieDuff]

Hi guys,
I need some serious advice please, our Bald Eyed Cockatoo has "chosen" our 13 year old daughter. He will not interact with myself or my husband at all even though I'm at home with him all day everyday and talk to him constantly and try to play with his toys with him, so when he started responding to our daughter we were quite pleased but now whenever he's out the cage he persists in trying to "hump" her arm, the first few times we managed to stop him but tonight when she tried to stop him he nipped her and left her bruised ( I know it could have been a whole lot worse), this has left her a bit wary of playing with him. So my question is, is there anyway we can stop him from "humping" her arm to save her a bit of embarrassment and being bitten???? Or is it a short phase that he'll go through every once in a while????
Thanks in advance guys x x

[Pajarita]

Well, for one thing, you did not say how old he is or, if he is older, how long you have had him. Now, they always go through a 'phase' when they become sexually mature but they hardly ever try to actually masturbate on a human during this stage. That behavior is usually one found in adult birds that have become sexually frustrated because of the light schedule and/or diet and/or inadequate caresses. Cockatoos are naturally hormonal birds because, in the wild, they have two breeding seasons, one in the spring and one in the fall so their bodies are meant to produce sexual hormones for a longer period of time than a bird that has only one breeding season (except for eclectus which have a breeding season of nine continuous months) so people need to be more careful about breeding triggers with them. Birds have three breeding triggers (birds are not like mammals that have a set number of periods when they go into heat): photoperiodism (the number of hours of light the bird is exposed to), food availability (birds breed only when food is plentiful and rich) and weather (birds don't breed in the winter or in the middle of, say, the typhoon season). But, inside a human home it's always spring when it comes to weather and the food is always rich and plentiful so the only trigger left for us to control completely (you should also reduce protein intake during the winter) is the number of hours of light they are exposed to. That's why keeping them to a solar or bird light schedule versus a human light schedule is so important. So, when you turn on the artificial lights before the sun is up or after the sun begins to set, the bird's endocrine system reacts as if it was spring and produces sexual hormones all the time - something that is not supposed to happen as, in the wild, birds start producing sexual hormones (which, in turn, 'wakes' up their sexual organs to make them grow and become active- at the beginning of the breeding season and stop right before molt -making the sexual organs shrink and become dormant and remain this way throughout the entire resting season -winter).

So, although I don't have any pertinent information on your bird, I would say he is an adult male that has been exposed to long days and short nights during the winter and which has been fed possibly too much protein (I don't free-feed the protein food -seeds, nuts, pellets, sprouts, animal protein).

Now, what you can do is keep him to a strict solar schedule with full exposure to dawn and dusk but as we are already more than a month after the winter solstice and the days are getting longer every day, he will, most likely, not show any improvement until after the summer solstice which will happen in June so, although you still need to start getting his endocrine system back where it's supposed to be, you will need to distract him until he 'calms down'. For that, I recommend baths, flying, target training and been VERY careful how you touch him (only in the head, cheeks and neck and nowhere else, especially the back and abdomen).