by Pajarita » Sun Sep 15, 2019 9:03 am
It makes no difference which gender the bird is... Well, it does in the sense that female sennies tend to be super sweet while males are a bit more... how can I put it? assertive? not so patient? when things don't go exactly their way. Birds don't have, like mammals, external sexual organs, both males and females have them internally so whether it's a boy or a girl, sexual organs that are chronically super swollen are, at the very least, very uncomfortable and, at most, painful.
Birds are photoperiodic and if you research avian photoperiodism, avian endocrine system and avian reproductive system you will see that birds bodies know which season it is (the period part of the long word) by the length of daylight (the photo part of the word - which means light in greek). Different species have different point of photorefractoriness (the exact number of daylight hours that their endocrine system reacts to by starting or stopping sexual hormone production) which have been all fine-tuned through evolution so the bird breeds only during the time that is the most favorable for reproduction. There are three triggers to it: length of daylight, food availability and weather. These work perfectly in the wild so they only produce sexual hormones during their breeding season (birds are not like mammals which produce sexual hormones all the time, only at different levels) but, in captivity, every day is perfect weather and food is rich and abundant every day so the ONLY thing we have to make them start and stop producing sexual hormones is light. BUT, the thing about light is that it's not just a matter of turning on or off artificial lights, they need exposure to dawn and dusk because it is the different light that happens at these two daily events that sets the internal clock. Think of it as a stop watch and you are trying to measure the number of hours of sunlight during the day - dawn starts the clock and dusk stops it and the number of hours in between is what tells their bodies if it's time for breeding, molting, migrating, resting, etc. When you eliminate the internal clock, their endocrine system has no guidelines and gets all screwed up so they produce sexual hormones all the time non-stop which makes their gonads become huge (their sexual organs are tiny and dormant until the breeding season starts when they become active and start growing, preparing for reproduction). I keep my birds not only at a super strict solar schedule, I actually reduce the temperature in the winter and change their diet so as to mark the seasons as best as possible inside a human home. You need to remember that parrots, with the exception of the English Budgie, are undomesticated animals and need to live under the same environmental conditions as they would if they were in their natural habitat so the same way we would not expose a tropical bird to cold or feed them animal protein, we need to keep them at a solar schedule so their endocrine system stays healthy - don't forget that the endocrine system affects the immune system as well as mood, appetite, sleep, cell regeneration, etc. A bird that has a screwed up endocrine system is not a healthy bird even if all the blood values come back within a normal range...