Blue Quaker. Open sore

[Liv3laughlov3608]

Hi. I have a blue Quaker that is approximately 7-8 years old. He has a behavioral problem where he constantly plucks, but we just recently noticed this on him. Any advice as to what it is or what we can do for him.

[Chantilly]

I am going to start of by saying, I had never seen anything like this, so i started to do some searching and if i have this right, your parrot is self mutilating its self. My advise would be to take it to a vet and get a bird collar put on it, over time if your parrot continues to do this and you can or do not stop it, it can get badly infected, and eventually he can make himself bleed to death.
Also you need to figure out why he is doing this to himself, and then figure out how you will treat the problem. You may find the below to be helpful.

There are four main methods by which feather picking and/or self-mutilation can be treated and it should be noted that often more than one of these options must be used in conjunction with one another in order for the treatment to be effective in curbing feather picking behavior.
1)The most basic option is to make changes to the bird’s environment by increasing cage size, adding destructible and varied toys, making the bird a more central member of the family (that is, letting it outside of its cage for short periods throughout the day, spending time playing and talking with the bird and so forth), altering the routine or pattern of daily activity, and giving the bird a variety of inactivity foods or foods that require the bird to manipulate an spend time eating them (for example, a cob of corn, nuts in the shell, carrot sticks etc, foods differing in color, texture and taste).
2)In cases of severe feather picking or mutilation, a physical barrier is sometimes required to keep the bird from damaging itself while behavioral modification is undergone.Most often this entails the wearing of an Elizabethan collar while the bird’s feathers grow out, or the wounds from mutilation heal.The problem with simply just putting a collar on the bird is that in many cases, as soon as the collar is removed, the behavior begins all over again.
3)A third option in arresting feather picking is drug treatment.Behavior or mood modifying psychoactive drugs have been reported as an effective treatment. One drug, Clomipramine (an anti-depressant which blocks the re-uptake of norepinephrine and serotonin) has been found to slow feather picking in up to 70% of the birds treated.Another drug, Haloperidol, which is a dopamine antagonist, has also been used with some degree of effectiveness in reducing or curtailing feather picking and self-mutilation behavior.The problem with using drugs to treat such behavior, is that the underlying causes for the feather picking are never addressed in the first place, and the birds are usually required to be on the drugs for the rest of their lives.The proper dosage of the drugs can also be difficult to determine, involving a trial and error approach.
4)A final option in self-mutilation or feather picking treatment is behavioral modification techniques.These techniques can be quite varied and the exact modification required depends on the trigger for the feather picking behavior.For example, feather picking in parrots can often be the result of separation anxiety.When the bird’s owner leaves the household (to travel, or go to work) or in severe cases even leaves the room where the bird is, a parrot can often become so distressed, that picking and mutilation are the result. In cases like this, the bird can periodically be left for short periods of time, gradually desensitizing it to being left alone.It is also helpful to give the bird a favorite toy, or food before the owner leaves.Distractions such as leaving a radio or TV on for the bird can also help.Birds often do respond to videotapes of their owners talking to them in a normal, playful manner.Feather picking can also be the result of some upheaval in the life of either the owner or the bird.Companion birds, especially the psittacine species are highly attuned to the attitudes and moods of their owners.Consequently, owners need to be aware of this, and in the event of such upheavals, possible solutions should be discussed with the owner.

I wish you and your parrot the very best, and that you can fix the problem, I have not experienced this before, mabye there is somebody on here that has, that can assist you in the problem better.

[marie83]

Yes it looks like mutilation which is essentially a step up from plucking.

You do need to make improvements to the birds environment and diet. Also don't rule out medical issues, if you haven't seen a vet yet and had the relevant tests then please do.

As for going through your environment there are tons of useful posts on this forum. Everything from solar schedules, dietary improvements, toys & games company etc.

Now I'm not saying it is diet with yours but I went through 2 years of hell with my cockatiel and my GCC. The thread I made was called "not again"
They were plucking and screaming amongst other things like intermittently losing weight. I changed their diet to a gloop/chop mix with seed or TOPS in the evening and all their problems went away. It's only after I changed their diet that I realised their problems started shortly after changing them from a seed, fruit and veg diet to a pellet fruit and veg diet.
It could of course be purely coincidental, it would be a very big stretch to say diet was definitely the cause from a sample size of 2 birds but it is strange that for the past 2 years everything's been fine again.

[Wolf]

The very first thing to do is to rule out any medical reason for the plucking and self mutilation. I would follow your avian vets recommendation in the use of antibiotics and collar to prevent further damage and to treat and/ or prevent any infection. Drug therapy is rather a touchy thing, at least in my mind in treating this type od issue, as in most cases it may be effective in the short term but in most cases the root or cause of the problem never gets addressed as it should be. While all of this is also brought up in the article that was posted, I also try to bear in mind that the short and long term side effects of drug therapy were not and these side effects can be just as dangerous as the reason for the drugs in the first place.

Now I don't have a tremendous amount of experience with feather plucking and self mutilation, but since most of my birds came to me from, lets just say less than ideal circumstances, I have three of them that arrived with plucking issues. One is a budgie female that has damaged the follicles to the extent that she will never regrow her feathers, such a shame, her mate has liver problems and will be treated for that for as long as he lives. There is also a sweet little parrotlet hen that was responding to me and regrowing her feathers and she has recently been provided with a mate of her very own and she is continuing to do well and not plucking at this time. The saddest and most difficult case has been my Grey parrot who came to me on drug therapy for her plucking and self mutilation issues. In addition to being nearly naked except for the outside of her wings she had three large holes in her body from mutilating herself.
I now have to feed all of my birds and still have a lot that I want to say. So I will take care of a few things and come back and continue with this shortly.

[liz]

I have seen pictures of sock birds. There was also a women who crochet a sweater for her bird. The whole body was covered but the wings were out.

[Wolf]

Alright, my birds are happily eating their breakfast, and I am ready to continue with this.

Kookooloo is my Congo African Grey parrot and she is now about 15 years old, I have now had her for close to 3 years, well this is the third year, I think, as keeping up on dates is not my forte. Any way She came up from Florida about 3 to 4 months before I got her although I planted the seeds of her coming to live with me when I learned that she was coming up here. Although the people that she was delivered to. undoubtedly care about birds they should never be allowed to do more than caring for a bird for more than short periods of time, but that is a whole other story. I had learned that Kookooloo was a plucker before she arrived from Florida, but when the time finally came where I was asked to come and get her I was not prepared for what I found. As stated earlier she was nearly completely naked and if that were not enough she had these three large gaping wounds in her body, the largest was about the size of a half dollar coin and the smallest was close to the size of a quarter. They had her on a powdered drug to reduce her anxiety . I brought her home with me, which is the beginning of our story and you can read about it in the Parrot Tales section of the forum. She was my second parrot and I was still just in the process of learning about these amazing birds. I watched her very closely and in the first 24 hour period I learned that she was having a hard time keeping her balance. I got very lucky in that the first thing that I did was to stop the drug and then over a period of time, I believe about 48 hours her balance began to improve and actually she was also calmer. The next thing that I did, well it could be argued that it was the very first thing, was I put her on a solar light schedule, which is exactly like what the outside wild birds live with. She was allowed full exposure to the twilight period at dawn, without any interference from artificial lights of any kind and she woke up just before sunrise, she was near a window so she had the light from outside all day and was then exposed to the next twilight period called dusk, again with no artificial lights and then she went to sleep as the twilight faded to full dark. Now I chose to do this as it is what is required to reset the birds internal biological clock so that they don't produce hormones (sexual) all year long. I had learned that birds sexual organs which are all inside of their body, grow when they produce hormones and if they keep producing these hormones they will grow to more than 100 times their normal size and keep growing putting increasing pressure on these reproductive organs as well as increasing the pressure on the heart and liver and any other internal organ near them resulting in a tremendous amount of pain. This pain is one of the primary causes of feather plucking and more importantly self mutilation. This is because the pain of tearing open their own body is less than the pain caused by the overly enlarged gonads and helped to mask the pain of this. I know how horrible this sounds and the reality of it is far worse than just the sound and thought of it. The beneficial effect of this change in lighting is slow and takes a longtime to prove its effectiveness.

During all of this time I am spending as much time with her as I can as well as looking into her diet. Greys and other species of parrots are very sensitive to the amount of time that they spend with their chosen humans, some more than others but they all need a lot of time and physical contact with their human. This was generally very easy to do as Kookooloo fell in love with me as soon as she saw me. This relieved her anxiety and reduced the amount of mutilation and feather plucking and helped give the change in lighting the chance to do its own magic in healing her. This spending time with Kookooloo along with the next thing, diet, were the things that provided the most short term help for her issues than any other thing except perhaps taking her off the drugs.

The last change was in her diet and probably took the longest amount of time to decide what to do and a tremendous amount of research, as well as the most thought about what I was learning. As an end result, although I am still researching all of the things that I have talked about, I changed her diet slowly to giving her and all of my other birds a fresh, raw fruit, vegetable and leafy green as the first food of the morning, followed by gloop and both of these are provided in quantities that last from early morning until I remove them to give them their dinner which in my home is a quality seed mix with a little tree nut added to it.
I thought about pellets for a fairly long period of time, many months and almost went with them instead of the seed mix, but ended up remaining with seeds. I read all of the hype about how pellets were a complete food and that with all of the added vitamins and minerals that my birds would not require any other food except a little fresh produce now and then. But this was primarily from the food manufacturers and the vets that were selling their products. The remainder of any scientific studies that I was reading kept talking about soy and soy products and how it was not all that it was cracked up to be and that they in fact were the cause of plucking and self mutilation in some bird because a an allergy to soy that some birds developed while on foods containing them in it and most of the seeds appeared to have soy in them and pellets it seemed had the most soy and soy by products than any seed mix. I went on to learn that the pellets were not using natural vitamins and minerals, they were using artificial vitamins and minerals in their pellets and not only did some parrots have a reaction to them that the majority of parrots could not utilize these artificial vitamins and minerals properly in their bodies. The final kicker for me was that the pellets were so dry that they were causing a sub clinical level of dehydration in many parrots. I still do a lot of research on nutrition in parrots and this research covers all of the foods that I feed to my birds and a lot that I do not use at this time including pellets which with what I have learned I will probably never feed. One last thing about diet is that diet is one of the primary factors in birds being overly hormonal and this is due to the levels of protein in the diet as the hormones are manufactured in the birds body from the protein.

These are the changes that I made for everyone of my birds and I maintain all of them year round and not just when I begin to see symptoms of these conditions returning. They are and will remain a part of their ongoing, long term program of physical, mental and emotional health and well being program. I have also provided a breakdown of my reasons for the changes that I made for your and your birds convenience. I truly hope that you and your bird can benefit as much as my birds and myself have from these practices.

[Pajarita]

I have taken in several pluckers and a couple of self-mutilators and they all got better on a fresh food diet (gloop and raw produce for breakfast and a good quality seed/nut mix for dinner), a strict solar schedule and lots of freedom from the cage (flying).

Quakers are known for their plucking issues but, in my personal opinion (I was born and raised in a country where quakers come from in South America), the biggest problem is that people think they are tropical or semi-tropical birds (the sites dedicated to them often gives this incorrect information) when, in reality, they come from the temperate zone. This makes them super sensitivity to photoperiodism and keeping them at a human light schedule makes them overly hormonal (free-feeding pellets or seeds makes it worse) which gives them such sexual frustration as well as pain that makes them pluck and self-mutilate (yes, what your parrot has is not a sore, my dear, it's a hole he opened up himself).

I absolutely adore quakers. The very first bird I hand-raised was a quaker baby when I was ten years old (under my grandmother's supervision). They are considered agricultural pests back home and anybody can kill them or destroy their nests with impunity so you can buy babies stolen from their nests in any farmer market for a few dollars in the month of December. My grandmother loved birds and we used to buy one or two every summer, handraise them and release them into the wild when they wanted to go (they were never caged and were allowed to fly in and out of the house at their pleasure so they had learned to forage from the wild flocks that flew over our house twice a day). The one I hand-raised (her name was Pelusa - it means 'lint' in English) ended up living with us for years and had learned to talk very well. I am telling you all this so you understand the degree of my concern for your bird... it really hurts me to see it like that . Please, please, make a sincere and honest re-evaluation of your husbandry because, although people usually say (and I agree) that you should take it to an avian vet first to eliminate any possible medical cause for it, 99.99% of the time, it's due to the way the bird is cared for. They NEED a fresh food diet with low protein, low fat, high fiber and very high moisture and they absolutely NEED to be kept at a strict solar schedule with full exposure to dawn and dusk. If, on top of this, you allow 4 to 5 hours of out of cage time, 2 hours of one-on-one and daily flying (it's the only fast way of dissipating both stress and sexual hormones from their bloodstream) and all activities and interactions on a strict routine and schedule, he WILL get better. I promise you!

[Liv3laughlov3608]

I will be taking him to the vet tomorrow afternoon after I get off work.

[Wolf]

Has the bird gotten any better? Worse? About the same? Thank you on letting us know that you are taking him in to see the vet. He will probably give you some meds to give the bird for the open wound and probably also put a collar on him to stop or at least reduce the plucking and mutilation. He may do a blood panel that could help to eliminate a medical reason for the behavior. I don't know, however, why he took so long in giving am appointment, perhaps because of the holidays.
Am waiting, on pins and needles to find out what you learn from the vet and maybe a new picture or two of the bird. Please keep us up to date and informed.

[ParrotsForLife]

You can order a feather protector for him its for pluckers from Avian fashions.com and if they dont have his size you can order him a hoodie it will also prevent him from plucking.They cover the body but the wings are out.