by Pajarita » Wed Jul 08, 2020 8:12 am
Ahhhh, Lalibela - what a beautiful name! Don't be too hard on your father - every single one of us has made and continues to make mistakes with them. I am afraid that as defeatist as this sounds, it's the truth because we, humans, as mammals, are not really mentally prepared to deal with a highly intelligent avian species. We all default to what we are used to and, as you pointed out, it's dogs which are not only domesticated and have been bred for thousands of generations to be people-oriented but also have completely different needs and psychological make-up.
OUCH on the diet she is getting! Mostly protein and free-fed, at that. That's soooo not good for her... And for several reasons - one of them being why she gives you so much trouble when you want to put her in her cage. People often don't realize that, when it comes to parrots, more is not better. I would strongly suggest you change her diet ASAP because, at her age and being clipped, you have no time to waste. Has she had a bile acids test done recently? Or even a regular blood chem panel? Because I bet that she shows high uric acid and bile acids levels and, possibly, also high cholesterol so, if this hasn't been done, I suggest you do it just so you have an idea what your are dealing with and take steps (like given her liver and kidney cleansers and tonics ). I have a 20 year old gray, also a female, and she eats gloop with raw produce for breakfast and a mix of seeds and nuts for dinner (but it's mostly nuts - walnuts, almonds, filberts, pistachios, cashews, pecans, brazil but not all at once, of course). This, plus a good multivitamin/mineral supplement twice a week does the trick. She is a healthy, happy, well-adjusted bird with absolutely no issues whatsoever.
Yes, the 'towel of doom' is not a good idea... especially since she is clipped and cannot fly away from it as her natural instinct would be so the whole thing must be terribly stressful to her, poor thing! But if she was given the right diet with protein only for dinner and for rewards/treats, and exposed to a strict solar schedule, she would be more than willing to go into her cage -as long as she spends enough time out of it on a regular basis. I don't have a single bird that gives me any trouble going back into their cages, they all know what 'Go home' means and some of them even go in on their own - all I have to do is say: "Epuish! Go home! Que rica papa!" and he flies from wherever he is to the top of his cage and climbs down swinging inside the cage on its own. They are so willing that I have even trained the ones that do not step up at all (not to a hand or to a stick) to do it on their own. Mind you, this is not to my personal credit! It's nature at work - all I do is follow Mother Nature's guidelines and the premises are very simple: if you do not free-feed protein, the bird will be more than happy to go into its cage to get it AND if you keep it at a strict solar schedule, once it gets dark enough for it to start producing melatonin, it will get drowsy and will look for its roosting perch. Nature took hundreds of thousands of years to finetune their bodies so they are hard-wired for this and all you are doing is giving them the stimuli at the right time of the day. The truth of the matter is that emulating the conditions that they evolved to live under is not only best for the bird because it keeps it healthy and happy but also much, much easier for the human!
The solar schedule is just that: a schedule that follows the sun so the days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. The first trick is to expose them to twilight because it is the different spectrum that only happens during these two events that turns on or off their internal clock - and the number of hours in between is what tells their bodies what should happen at that time during the year: breeding, molting, migrating, etc. Birds are governed by a single internal clock that works both for the daily routine (circadian cycle) and the annual seasons (circannual cycle) and it all has to do with light. They are the most visually and light dependent species of ALL the vertebrates. And so, the light of dawn (first greyish turning into golden/orangey) wakes them up and makes them want to eat their breakfast and drink water (parrots, like most prey animals, are crepuscular feeders because twilight reduces the predators vision by 10%), once satiated, they bathe, interact, preen, etc - then they rest at noon - once they are active again, they preen, interact, etc until the sun begins to go down (light turning orangey/reddish until it turns bluish/greyish again once the sun is completely out) which tells them it's time to eat dinner and, as the day wanes more and more, the darkening activates the production of melatonin which makes them go looking for their roosting perch so they can sleep. Think of chickens or the birds out on the trees... And the second trick is to make sure the bird is not receiving ANY artificial light during the night so you need to make sure there is no light sneaking into her cage (no light from a street or garden light, no light from another room, no TV light, etc). People talk about night frights but, in my personal opinion and experience, the only birds that suffer them are birds that are not being kept correctly because none of my birds ever had them (and I cared for, literally, hundreds of them when I had my rescue). Well, actually, when I first moved back to NJ, my tiels were having them and I couldn't figure out why until I spent a night in the birdroom to see what was going on in there and realized that they were getting a sliver of light from a corner street lamp. Once I put black out drapes in that window, no more night frights.