Itchy itchy itchy ITCHY litte birds!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have two cockatiels and a green cheeked conure.

They are all going through a molt at the same time.

This means a small drifts of feathers piling up in the room on a daily basis - at first glance enough for a whole flock of small birds.

When the new feathers grow in they first appear as spikey things with a strong resemblance to aglets (those are the bits on the end of shoelaces). After they grow in the birds unpeel the outer wrapper revealing a bright, new feather. Apparently, the feather-aglets itch.

Itch itch itchy ITCH itch itch!

Little birdy feet blurring into invisibility as the darlings scratch at everything they can reach. Hours-long sessions of unwrapping new feathers with beaks. Sometimes they’ll help each other out, only to eventually tug too hard or pull something out prompting LOUD squawks of outrage and birdy squabbles and wrestling matches resulting in still more loose feathers flying through the air.

They’re grumping about, looking frowsy and ragged. And they’re even hungrier than usual (growing feathers requires energy). And grumpy. Did I mention grumpy? And itchy. They ask the humans to help out, too, although our giant clumsy fingers are just not as adroit as parrot beaks. Of course, then you have aglet-wrappers all over the place on top of the feathers and usual dust-bunnies.

We got a heat lamp for them yesterday. Of course, they don’t sell heat lamps in the bird aisle at the pet store, they sell them in the reptile/amphibian aisle. At first the gal kept asking me “You want a light for your bird?” No, I want a heat lamp. I can not crank the heat in the entire apartment to 85 degrees for their personal comfort so I desire to heat a small area, such as a corner of a cage or an end of a perch.

Sydney, our poor, nervous, bottom-of-pecking-order, high-strung cockatiel who spontaneously dropped about half his feathers after my husband yelled due to getting bit HARD by normally sweet and passive Sydney, is especially appreciative. Since all those feathers are now growing back simultaneously he is even more itchy and aggravated than ever. Poor little guy.

I’ll be glad when the molting season is over. So will they.

2

Poor babies. I bet it feels like the fleas of a thousand camels have found them.

And poor you. I remember how much featherage one small budgie could manage to produce, back when I was a kid. Those feathers get everywhere.

3

Thanks for making me smile. I just put our fuzzies to bed an hour ago. They’re not molting, but there has been some sratching action today…I was preening Cosmo’s crest, and Buddie (hen) and Scritch got a shower this morning (Cosmo sat it out and the other two, Navajo and Sweetie, don’t like water).

Sailboat

4

Poor birdies. Molting season is just no fun. Perhaps more frequent baths will help with the itchiness until the new feathers are all grown in? My own conure seems to find that ehlpful; I think it may help loosen those nasty feather sheathes.

Just think of how pretty your sweeties will be once their new plumage is finally revealed!

5

How often do they do this? Brian the Bolshie Budgie has just about finished dropping feathers, but he’s still itching like mad and doing the blurry foot thing.

But we’ve just passed mid-summer - from the OP, it sounds like I’m going to have another flock of feather bunnies up the vacuum cleaner, come winter.

6

I’d highly recommend misting them daily and/or taking them into the shower with you. The shower doesn’t need to spray on them, but put them where they can get some of the water as it splashes off you. They’ll look like drowned rats but every bird I’ve ever had LOVED it.

7

…We don’t get pictures?!?

8

About every 6 months

We have a big shallow dish we use for a bird bath. Well, THEY use it as a bird bath. We’ve been making it available to them every day. It seems to help a little.

9

I forgot to say that I’ve always wondered how new feathers grow in. They couldn’t grow out like hair does, since the little veins (or whatever they’re called) grow away from the body. Now I know that feathers grow in in their own little gift wrapped packages.

Now I wonder if gently brushing the birds with an old toothbrush or something similar would help remove the wrappers? I guess that one could, if one had nothing better to do, sit down with a bird and a pair of tweezers and unwrap the new feathers. If the bird would sit still long enough, that is.

10

Had a hand raised cockatiel named Baby … he adored being groomed and would sit there as long as he could sucker one of us into grooming him. Of course he loved to groom back and it was startling to say the least to be laying there half asleep and have a bird decide he was going to groom your eyelashes for pin mites…talk about a primal visceral reaction [usually screaming and flailing in an adrenaline fueled heartpounding condition!]

11

I’ve kept budgies for quite a few years now and I’ve often been surprised at the sheer volume of feathers they produce.

What really surprised me is the sheer weight of feathers they don’t produce. I collected every fallen feather I could find for a whole year, then weighed them.
They occupied about a pint in unpacked volume, but weighed too small an amount to register on my 1 gram-resolution electronic kitchen scales.

Thread on the topic here:

12

I always just kind of rubbed them between my thumb and a my middle fingernail. The sheaths are kind of waxy and break down easily. And most birds will just stand there and let you do it as long as you want to.

13

Seconded!!

I caught my boy tiel using his feet like the little parrot he is and massaging his head. Over and over, with pinfeather dust floating down from his manipulations. Smart little guy - I guess my fingers just don’t do it right!

14

My parrot, if we’re not attending satisfactorily, will grab an almond shell, another old feather, pencap, pencil, or whatever in his little talony fist, and scratch his head with it. Wacky little tool-user.

15

Can you smear hydrocortisone on them?

16

No, I can’t - I don’t have a formulation for birds, formulations for people (and other animals) would probably prove toxic, and even if I did, a cream or ointment would destroy the insulating properties of their feathers, which could prove fatal. (We have to be careful they don’t get seriously chilled after baths, and their body heat dries their feathers out relatively quickly, allowing them to warm up again) There’s not much I can do for them, other than baths and sympathy. While I did once get a cream for an injured bird from a vet, that was for a leg with damaged skin and very localized, not the sort of all over treatment these guys would require.

Bird skin is kind of funny - it’s more like lizard skin in some spots than like what we have. And when the cockatiels get their heads really, really wet while bathing they start to look more like little dragons than like what we’d think of as birds.

17

The scream-and-rassle seems to be mandatory conure behavior. My George did it all the time, pretending my hand was another conure to tussle. He screamed “YEEK!”, and my scream was "Killer bird! Oh-NO its got me!"If he could not convince to ruffle his feathers when he felt like wrestling he would back up until his tail feathers touched my hand, then spin around squawking like I had pulled his tail. It always seemed like the WWF: lots of drama and motion, no real injury, and discrete apologies for accidental roughness.

18

I thought almond shells were toxic, no?

19

This whole thread needs pics. And ESPECIALLY this sentence.

20

Almond shells are Ballistic; its an easy thing to confuse. Parrots don’t ingest the shells at all. They have incredible dexterity with the tongue/beak combo, and remove the almond with the deft touch of a surgeon. If the bird is Zahzoo, he then retain the shell in a fist until the cat walks by, then whips it at her head. His record is to hit a moving cat head from ten feet away.