I have had Paulie a year now and I am so excited to tell you about our feather-picking breakthrough.
He is a blue crown about 21 or 22. Don’t know anything about his past for sure, but from his behavior with me I suspect it goes something like this: young girl gets bird and loves it for about 15 years but thinks of it more as a pet – tacitly accepting the fiction that humans are superior to other creatures and only humans have a sense of self and the ability of symbolic/abstract thinking. Paulie accepts his boring cage-bound life because he knows he is loved and gets to eat yummy seeds all the time. He starts chewing on his feathers. She gets married. For five years she progressively isolates Paulie (who starts to become very depressed) but fights with the husband about keeping him. Husband wears glasses and doesn’t like the bird and sometimes kicks him. Paulie tries to bite him regularly. Then the couple has a baby. The girl totally forgets Paulie, whose depression and behavior problems worsen. Paulie bites the baby and the girl loses her standing in the fight to keep him. They give him up right after his yearly molt, when his feathers look the best, hoping he will find a good home that way. The girl feels terrible, but accepts the logic that because Paulie bit the baby the “pet” must go and submits to her husband. After 20 years, Paulie finds himself abandoned, when he did nothing wrong, in totally new surroundings, with overwhelming loss and grief – and he is an old old bird and very set in his ways which makes it that much worse. Then I take him home.
From the moment I got him he picked constantly, but my efforts were initially concentrated on solving the problem by providing good environment and alleviating stress. His obesity, foot sores, lack of foraging, adjustment to sharing his human with another bird, and alleviating the stress caused by changing homes (and then moving immediately after when I moved for a new job), were pressing issues. The seasons are completely different here in Northern California, and it shocked his system and ultimately changed his molting patterns. His first molt in October was only a few chest feathers, tail feathers, and wing feathers. He molted four feathers from one wing, then four or five from the other wing… not alternating like they are supposed to. Same with his tail. Lost them all progressively on one side only. No bird could fly like that. And some flight/tail feathers molted out but then did not grow back till the next molt six months later (now). His molt programming got completely scrambled. He is a conure that refuses to bathe – so obviously something is wrong with him! Plus, with all my efforts his feather condition has not gotten much better.
The breakthrough came one day recently when he made himself bleed by chewing too much on a still-growing downie feather on his rump. He was molting - his first real molt with me - and itchy. It was driving him crazy and he was extra grumpy. I dabbed the blood away with a cotton ball soaked in warm water (he will only accept it warm) then dabbed the spot with a teenie bit of muprocin to keep it moist. He was shocked when he looked back and saw the sore was completely gone, and it felt better too. And I think it was that moment that he trusted me more, because he realized that I really *was* trying to help him and that I knew what I was doing. I had to capitalize on this.
I made him a collar a month or two prior when the molt started. Watching him, it was clear that his picking is compulsive in nature. So I wanted to redirect his gnawing behaviors away from his body. He accepted it immediately and chewed on the collar (mostly) instead of himself. He is skilled and can still reach almost every place on his body with the collar on, but it distracts him and he hates it so he chews on it instead most of the time. He really does try not to pick, but he can’t always seem to stop even though he wants to. And he gets frustrated with himself. I started reinforcement training with the collar when we had our breakthrough. The command is “no picking” and if he refrains from touching his feathers I take the collar off. He tried very hard, but sometimes he refused to “play along” because he just had to pick at himself or he was going to die. You know its bad when the urge to pick is stronger than the hatred for the collar.
I bit the bullet and took him in for the follicle test even though I couldn’t afford it. As I put it to the vet “Paulie is an old man and he does not have time to wait for me to be able to afford it.” The results showed he has some sort of allergy. Also, he has a lot of scarring in the follicles from digging at them constantly. For two weeks now I have been giving him Benadryl and it is a cherry-flavored miracle cure. He still picks constantly – but he is able to stop himself now when I ask him to. Within two days he had earned the right to go to bed without his collar on!
The problem of his compulsive behavior is going to be hard to break, but with allergy medication I feel like it is no longer impossible.