Pepper's surprise clutch

[roemeosmom]

Woke up to my CAG on the bottom of her cage with at least 4 eggs. She's never laid eggs before. Disclaimer... I'm not a breeder. Years ago the bird store I got her from tried to mate her but nope. They are not fertilized eggs.

So while I try to figure out how to get them out without losing fingers, I need to talk about her diet. She gets TOPS pellets and Marlene McMahon's pellets, pistachios, peanuts, cashews, flax seed, veggies and fruits. Am I missing anything? Should I put her food and water by her? (Using welding gloves of course).

[Pajarita]

Hi, roemeosmom, welcome to the forum. Now, I am a bit confused so, please, bear with me. Do you have a male/female CAG pair or is she alone? Because, although whether the eggs are fertilized or not depends on what she wants at this point in her life (birds are the only animals where the female makes all the reproductive decisions), the fact that she did not want to breed before does not mean she does not want to do it now so if there is a male, they might fertilized. If there is no male, I suggest you get fake eggs and exchange the real ones for the fake ones (mostly because they make a real mess when they break). BUT I am completely puzzled as to how she ended with four eggs without you noticing. For one thing, although they say that CAGs average clutch is 3 eggs, at least my gray (who lays every year) only lays two. This, of course, does not mean that your bird could not have laid all four of them but they also don't lay every day but every other day so four eggs took 8 days to lay. To add more mystery to the whole thing, grays start incubating on the first or second egg so she should have been 'setting' for four days now... And they do need A LOT of privacy or they simply do not lay at all (which is, most likely, what happened at the pet store). Mine does it in a corner of a birdroom where nobody goes but me and where she lives cage-free, inside two boxes (one box inside another) that go completely untouched and unmoved throughout the whole thing.

As to her food and water, just put her where you always put it or nearer her, if it would make you feel better. It doesn't really matter because if she has a mate, he will feed her in the her beak - and, if she doesn't, she will get up twice a day (dawn and dusk) to eat (they all do, even when they have a mate that feeds them). I doubt you will need gloves, though... unless she is not people-friendly. The ones that love their owners never turn aggressive during breeding season. Quite the contrary! They are at their most loving during this time often asking for petting (something grays do seldom during the resting season as grays are not really touchy-feely birds) and, when you look at videos of 'very affectionate grays' you can tell they are females that are actually super hormonal (they make a special sound).

As to her diet, specifically, well, I don't feed pellets because after more than 25 years of doing research on their natural diets, I have concluded that they are not and never will be the best dietary option for parrots (I can elaborate on the several reasons why) but they are the easiest option so, if you want to continue, I would strongly suggest you do not free-feed them because all birds that are free-fed protein food end up with a bad diet (they simply do not eat enough raw produce, which is what nature evolved them to eat). What I would do is give her a few dosages of calciboost or calcivet to replenish the calcium lost in the eggs.