Pajarita wrote:Yes, she is barbering AND plucking. Now, let's see if we can find out what is making her do this terrible thing to herself.
First thing to tell you is that birds from stores all come from bad breeders (these are the babies that are bought cheap enough by the store to make good money when they resell it, good breeder babies are very expensive) and are not weaned properly (stores don't provide two different kinds of soft food served warm and fresh twice a day) so it is entirely possible that she suffered some type of trauma when young that is only now beginning to come out. There are studies that show that baby birds under stress grow up to be high-strung the rest of their lives and, taking into consideration that grays are naturally high-strung... well, you do the math. I am telling you this because you say you feel like a failure when, in reality, this might be not entirely your fault.
Now, even birds that have been traumatized can be prevented from acting out so let's see if we can make things better for yours.
Diet: hers is not good, my dear. Please don't take this the wrong way but, to me, the proper diet is 75% of good bird husbandry so I tend to be a pain in the neck about this subject. Eggs are a complete no-no for parrots. There isn't a single species of parrots that eats eggs in the wild - not a single one! People think they do their birds a favor by feeding them eggs but this cannot be further from the truth. Eggs are animal protein, parrots are herbivores and, as such, lack the necessary enzymes to properly digest it PLUS they are very high in protein and fat (not good for their kidneys and liver) and, to put the icing on the cake, have lots of bad cholesterol, something parrots, been herbivores and not consuming any bad cholesterol in their natural diets, cannot get rid of the way carnivores and omnivores do.
I don't feed pellets. I've been doing research on parrots natural diets for over 20 years and have reached the conclusion long ago that pellets are not and never will be the best dietary option for parrots (too processed, too dry, inferior ingredients including soy -a known allergen with estrogenic and goitrogenic side effects- man-made vitamins which are not absorbed or utilized as well as food-derived ones, etc). The other problem with pellets is that you don't know how much protein you are feeding because they never tell you exactly what the protein content is (if you look at the nutritional label, you will see it reads: Minimum, Higher than or Not less than). I feed gloop and raw produce for breakfast and a nut/seed mix for dinner with a multivitamin/mineral supplement once or twice a week (mostly for the D3).
You need to get her to eat produce but she never will if you free-feed protein food (pellets). Grays are real picky eaters and the ones that always take the longest in transitioning to a better diet but you need to persist and persist and persist and that means throwing away a lot of good food but it's the only way to get them to eat a good diet. My grays love juicy fruits - things like oranges, cantaloupe, blackberries, blueberries, etc. They love to 'suck' the juice out of them (they hold the fruit in their beak and move their head and tongue so as to extract and swallow the juice).
Now, as to the solar schedule Birdwoman mentioned. She needs to wake up with dawn (from beginning to end with no artificial lights on until the sun is completely out and you see sunrays coming in through the windows), then, about an hour after dawn (there can be no food in her cage) you feed the raw produce and eat it with her (it's the best way to make them eat any new food) and then and only then you give her the rest of her breakfast (gloop, chop, mash, whatever). When the sun is halfway down to the horizon (this happens very early this time of the year because we are going into the winter equinox in a few days), you turn off all the artificial lights and give her dinner (this should be her protein food: pellets, if you so decide - I feed nuts and a bit of seeds) and allow her to fall asleep as night falls naturally. Keeping birds to a solar schedule is the ONLY way to keep their endocrine system healthy and in tune with the seasons because, when you keep birds to a human light schedule (artificial lights on before sunrise and after sunset), they produce sexual hormones all year round (which doesn't happen in nature in any species of bird) which, in time, causes them physical discomfort and pain (their gonads grow overly large and displace other organs).
You mention a full spectrum light but you did not mention the specs (CRI and KTemp) or the distance it's placed above her cage, can you give us those details? Because, as the light industry is completely unregulated, manufacturers can claim anything they want on the label even if it's not true -they even re-labeled reptile light bulbs as avian even though these bulbs are actually dangerous to the birds- so it falls to us to do our due research and make sure that the light is, indeed, adequate for the bird.
Gosh. It's so brain-wrecking when you do a ton of research and find different "facts" everywhere you look. From my reading I'd taken that eggs were fine in moderation (she'd get no more than half of an egg [boiled or scrambled] a day.) so I never thought it was bad for her. I will cut that out of her diet. Do you have any favorite gloop recipes that you could recommend for a bird who's never tried any before?
So basically keep no food in her cage on a continuous basis, right? Just offer fresh produce in the morning when they're in foraging mode and provide protein for dinner. Throughout the day what should be available for her? Just more fresh food? Should I periodically offer her gloop throughout the day? I'm hopeful that, without the pellets around to feast on, she'll be more prone to try fresh foods. I've tried them raw, cooked, mashed, chopped, full-pieces, eating them in front of her, hiding them with pellets, all sorts of stuff to get her to eat some but she just slings them on the floor. I was so scared of her eating nothing that I never took the pellets away for extended periods.
She has one of the Zoo Med AvianSun Deluxe Floor Pet Lamps that uses a Zoo Med 24975 Avian Sun 5.0 Uvb Compact Fluorescent Lamp, 26W bulb. I have switched it from hovering over her cage to hovering over her play stand that she sits on with me throughout the day. I'd say it's about 2.5'-3' above her stand.
I have an appointment to take her to an avian vet tomorrow morning. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to afford all the test required in order to make sure that nothing is physically wrong with her.