Parrots, apartments, and dogs

[liz]

One of the things I hate is that my parrot screams at the birds he sees through the window when they pass by. Its very loud!!!

When the bottom fell out of a cage and Bubba flew away he stayed in the yard for three days trying to call Sweetie out. He had been sleeping in the red tips with the wild birds. He finally followed the wild birds and flew away. Sweetie kept calling and called in a Cardinal. He would come and sit in the window and they would have conversations. She even started speaking Cardinal.
Your kid might be trying to call the wild birds in.

[Chantilly]

As for quiet, Alexandrines are quietish birds, they are an Indoneasoan if i remember correctly they can and do speak, but they dont seem to learn to many words. Any bird however will be threatened by your dogs unless you can keep them in another room or train them to leave the bird alone. I highly doubt the dog would be threatened by the bird. What type of dog is it?

[Wolf]

I do not separate my cats and dogs from my birds for the most part, but neither do I allow my birds out with the dogs and cats unless I can be right there to supervise them all. Dogs and cats are predators and if we hope to have our birds safe when they are nearby they must become familiar enough with the normal actions of the bird to become disinterested in them. This allows training to stop them when they become interested with often just a single word allowing the owner or care giver the time to make what ever adjustments are needed to insure the safety of the bird. This also serves to keep my dogs and cats from bothering my birds when they are in their cages. I always put the dogs out when I leave the house and most of the cats as well, but I do have a couple of cats that don't go outside. These cats don't ever bother the birds. I do not ever recommend that any dog or cat be allowed anywhere near a bird free or caged without constant supervision. For this reason alone, my birds never know when I place them in their cage if I am going to close the door or not as this keeps me from being bitten by a bird that is resentful of being put in its cage and they always get a treat for being in their cage whether I leave it open or close it.
I must admit, however, that this is just for my three larger birds, my Senegal, CAG and Amazon, the four smaller birds which are the Parrotlets and the Budgies I never allow them out with the majority of the cats inside or when the dogs are inside. This is due to the difference in the way that they fly. A little birds wing flaps are so fast that it is extremely attractive to dogs and cats, I call it fluttering. The larger birds wings flaps are slower and they do not flutter and so do not attract the same attention from the dogs and cats. I think that the fluttering sound of the small birds cause the dogs and cats to think that it might be a larger bird who is injured and that instinctively means an easy meal.
Just my thoughts on birds and dogs and cats together for your consideration.

[DanaandPod]

Liz, do you think that is what he's doing? Once I took him in his travel cage to a landscaping gig... He spent the whole several hours screaming at the birds in these peoples yard. They were even gathering around and dive bombing above his cage. It took two days for him and his hormones I guess to calm down after that. He's been to parks with no problem so I didn't expect it. I have no idea what he's doing by screaming at them.

[Pajarita]

Hormones don't increase or decrease because of an outing, Dana. It takes many days (weeks, actually) for them to reach a critical level or to decrease enough to affect behavior.

[marie83]

Adrenaline is a none sex related hormone yes?
There are loads of different types of hormones so Dana could well be right.

[Wolf]

True enough, not all hormones are sex hormones, thankfully.

[Pajarita]

I did assume she was talking about sexual hormones, maybe she wasn't... sometimes, my mind makes leaps and, in this case and in retrospect, I think that my reasoning was that, normally, when you talk about parrots behaviors (screaming, in this case) and hormones, you are referring to sexual hormones but, in any case, there are no hormones I know of (and, of course, I could be wrong on this) that act in response to an event and stop two days later. Because, yes, adrenaline is a hormone, it's not sexual and it is a behavioral one but it's very short term. It's produced within two or three minutes into the stressful situation and stops as soon as the high stress is over and, as it starts been metabolized as the event is happening, it dissipates very quickly. What the body produces and people call 'adrenaline' are actually two different hormones: epinephrine and norepinephrine and their half-life are 1.2 and 2.5 minutes, so as you can see, when we are talking about a trip outdoors and even if it was stressful enough to give the parrot an adrenaline rush, we are talking about a couple of hours from beginning to end.

Now, cortisol, the stress hormone, is a different story because it can be produced almost constantly but it doesn't affect the body behaviorally in the short term, only in the long term. As a matter of fact, I was reading an article about this new study on children. They take samples of their hair and measure the cortisol levels because they believe that individuals that are under stress growing up (children and teenagers and things like divorce, loss of a parent, abuse, etc) are more prone to behavioral and psychosocial disorders when adults (as well as obesity, diabetes, cholesterol, blood pressure and even immune system problems) so they figure that, if they could identify the ones at risk in an easy way (thus the hair), they could start treating them while still young to help them cope better as adults.

[marie83]

Well I don't know about parrots but I know with dogs the effects of cortisol they can remain over threshold for days. For example its commonly recommend in dogs that gets stressed/aggressive with other dogs that it is left several days after a bad experience before you attempt any further training involving other dogs.

[Wolf]

I don't really know enough about how all of these hormones actually work or how long they all last and in what circumstances. But I do know that in horses and dogs and humans that remembering and event can also cause the body to reproduce the same hormones that were produced during the actual event in which they were first produced. Not only do we have a mental memory of things, especially ones that are traumatic or stressful, but we also have a bodily memory of these types of events. I would not be surprised if this were also true with our birds.