Long Luna Update, Behavior Thoughts / Opinions?

[Wolf]

Most birds molt twice a year, in the spring and again in the fall. The source of this is from Clinical Avian Medicine, Chapter 06, page 177.

[flappybird]

If this is a molting thing then it suggests to me that your bird in not on a natural solar light schedule which begins before the bird wakes with the twilight period that becomes the dawn and runs throughout the daylight hours through the twilight period that we call dusk on until full dark when the bird should be fast asleep. This is important as it is the two twilight periods that work together to adjust and tune the birds internal biological clock. This biological clock controls the timing for the bird to cycle into and out of breeding condition as well as when to begin its molting. If the internal clock is not in tune with the seasons then the bird is often hormonal all year long as well as prone to molting at any time of the year. The molt can be just a few feathers here and there all year long or it can be abnormally hard such as you are describing.

Wolf, I meant to add more information in my last post in response to the above, but didn't get a chance to do so. Here we go:

Guilty: I was doing great on the solar schedule situation right up until the time change happened. For a few weeks, Luna was getting uncovered after the sun had already come up, and I was trying to keep her up after I got home until her usual bedtime of 8pm. However, because of the time change, in her head 8pm is now 7pm and she's very strict about it.

I realized there was a really easy way to fix this and I felt stupid for not realizing earlier. In order to account for me waking up at various times each morning, I stopped covering her sleeping cage all the way, just a corner of it for some shelter. Since she sleeps in a separate room with the door closed next to a big window, I don't actually need to cover her cage for her to get darkness. This way, she sees the sunrise through the window, and since I've started doing this (about two weeks), I know she wakes up by herself, and only starts chirping once she hears that we are awake, at which point I go get her. (This bird is so polite!) The time change is still super inconvenient, because this means that on days when I get home after work, it has just gotten dark, and Luna already wants to be in bed. She acts frantic about getting her dinner, and as soon as she's had her fill, immediately demands to be put away.

Since I've moved her main daytime cage to the bright window, she spends a lot of her time on the corner that gives the most sunlight. She LOVES the sun, and I like to think her feathers have gotten a bit brighter...? Maybe it's my imagination.

The real reason I remembered to post is because Luna has been acting different for about a week now. Her diet hasn't changed, except that I added organic beets to the last batch, but I haven't read anything about beets being bad. Suddenly, though, she doesn't seem to really be interested in hanging out, and doesn't seem to prefer me at all. She likes Michael better, and when she's not near him (in the mornings on the windowsill in the bedroom or perched on his chest), she just wants to be in her cage and doesn't want to be picked up, whereas previously, if she was on her cage too long and not sitting with us, she would chirp until we got her.

She doesn't want to get scritches anywhere near as much as before, and her hormonal clucking and squatting behavior has come back (even after over two months of absence). You'd think that having her see sunrise as well as sunset would make sure that she is regulated, but unless she suddenly thinks it's "spring" after a few weeks of not seeing the sun actually rise and having a "shorter, winter" day... I don't understand her behavior change.

98% of the time that she's acting hormonal, it's when she's with Michael. I don't seem to have the same effect on her at all. When he hangs out with her at home and I'm gone, he says she does "the dance" a lot. I didn't increase her protein intake, if anything, I'm only feeding her some pellets every few days in an effort to decrease protein. She's been getting some sprouts everyday along with her batch because she really loves them, but those aren't super high in protein once they've been sprouted.. right? (mung beans, lentils, some black eyed peas, varied grains, sunflower, other stuff). She didn't eat any of those the first two months I had her, because I tried a couple times and she was completely uninterested.

Also, remember, she's 10, so this isn't the normal behavior shift you get with a younger bird. However, maybe this is just an especially hormonal phase that will pass and I'm just not acquainted with it yet? Seems odd, because I read somewhere that Pionus breeding season is somewhere in the realm of July-September.

She barely has any new pin feathers these days, so it seems she is mostly done with that molt too. (was it a molt? or was it her just growing new feathers from having a better diet? I don't know...)

Anyways, I'm just slightly taken aback, and wish I could better understand what's going on.
Any suggestions / opinions welcome.

[Pajarita]

Well, the thing with sprouts is that the only parrots that eat them in the wild are the partial ground foragers which are, if I am not mistaken, all classified as granivores (cockatiels, budgies, grass parakeets, etc). The larger species are all what is called canope feeders meaning they eat stuff that is found in the top of the trees and, as sprouts grow on the soil, they don't constitute part of their natural diet. Sprouts are VERY nutritious and I do give mine some during the breeding season but not all year round and the reason I don't is precisely because they are so rich! And yes, they are high in protein (some of them as high as 36%!) - see this:http://www.healthyeatingadvisor.com/sprouts.html

So, if you are trying to reduce the amount of protein, sprouts is not the way to go and, most likely, the reason why she is getting so broody.

[Wolf]

I really don't know very much when it comes to sprouts, although I am trying to learn more about this food source. I do know that the process of sprouting reduces the amount of fat in the seeds which are sprouted, but I think that it increases the available proteins and other nutrients. So I would think that if you wish to use sprouts, that you would need to decrease other sources of protein.

[flappybird]

Noted. I will quit feeding sprouts for a while and see how that goes.
Thanks

[Pajarita]

Mind you, birds don't stop producing sexual hormones from one day to the next (well, unless you give them Lupron, then they produce too much and suddenly stop), it's a gradual thing and, even when they stop, they still have sexual hormones in their blood stream so it takes quite a while to notice a difference.

[flappybird]

Yeah, I figured changes of any kind probably take weeks and months to show up. As with anything that takes time with Luna, I remind myself that we have a lot of it together.

[Wolf]

It occurs to me that you may be able to use molting as an indicator of your birds biological clock being in tune with the seasons or not. This is because molting only occurs at certain times of the year, usually just before and after their breeding season.
A bird that is kept to a human light schedule is one whose biological clock is not in tune with the seasons and very often molt all year long. These molts are very often very light molts and many times are just a few feathers at a time or are only partial molts although sometimes they will go through a very hard molt. None of these are normal molts, so I think that if these are occurring that you could use them as an indicator of their system being out of tune. This is just a thought that I have been having since you first made this topic. I think that there is scientific evidence to support my theory, but I have not actually researched it in depth.

[Pajarita]

Yes, you are correct, Wolf. In reality, it depends on the species of parrot when and how many times in the year they molt. It's thought that tropical large birds (like macaws, for example) do molt primaries throughout the entire year because they theorize that given their size, the place where they live (lots of trees and not that many open spaces) and the fact that they need to fly miles and miles to forage every day, their primaries would get worn out sooner than other species and replacing them with new ones would be necessary to maintain perfect integrity in the plumage. It has also been noted that birds that have short day breeding cycles often go through a very short and partial molt prior breeding... But this are all theories based on visual observations of wild birds flocks and, as far as we know, they might not be applicable to captivity as we cannot really reproduce wild environmental conditions that well even when we try real hard. We do know that, often, pet parrots go through a partial molt around mid to late January and a full one after the breeding season so yes, when and how the bird molts is, indeed, an indication of how their endocrine system is working. There is one species of bird that, because we have kept them in captivity in large numbers for hundreds of years, we have been able to observe and note exact conditions required for different functions - and that is the canary. We know for a fact that canaries molt when there are 15 hours of daylight or when they are exposed to constant temperatures of 85 degrees or higher. Let's hope that, one day, we know as much about parrot species as we do about them.

[Pajarita]

Yeah, I figured changes of any kind probably take weeks and months to show up. As with anything that takes time with Luna, I remind myself that we have a lot of it together.

And that is the perfect attitude! Kudos to you for not been impatient! I, myself, sometimes have to talk myself out of funk when things don't go as fast as I would like them to