Cricket’s doing great. His adult tail feathers are in now, making him quite the lovely! He spends a fair amount of time on my shoulder getting head scritches or stealing bites of egg or cucumber (he goes apesh-- for cucumbers!). I try to interact with him a lot, and if it’s not enough, he doth protest loudly.
I’ve been giving my dog sweet potato for intestinal issues and Cricket was enjoying little tastes of it but I notice his poops started to get a little watery, so I put the kibosh on that, thinking that the sweet potato was the only change in his diet. I’ve been using vitamin drops in his water for several months because my money was going down the drain on the fortified pellets I was adding to his seed- they were being discarded and uneaten. The watery poop didn’t start until after the sweet potato. So we’ll see if the removal of that changes anything.
Questions:
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He seems to have an oral fixation with his plastic millet seed holder. There’s a little plastic hook at the top that almost meets the plastic bar below it and I often find him mouthing it and almost holding hands with it with his beak. Normal? Some kind of self-soothing thing??
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I found him rubbing his cloacal area on one of his perch branches this morning and making hiss-like sounds. Irritation? Masturbation?
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I put a mirror up behind his house. He doesn’t live in his cage but on top on a perch system I devised. Other than a bit more singing and sometimes arguments with his reflection, he doesn’t seem bothered by the mirror. Permanent mirrors are OK, aren’t they?
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Should I be concerned about the watery poop? It still has the white and dark green in it (although it’s not quite as dark as when they were more solid)
Must include cute pic, although this was before he lost the rest of his baby tail feathers. 
He’s adorable! Thank you for the pic - I love it when pet posts include pictures.
I’m not an expert on birds - I’ve just owned a few (including cockatiels) and done some reading, but it makes me sad when people don’t get a response, so here’s one, for what it’s worth:
First off, instead of mixing the pellets in with the seed, if you’re inclined to give them another go, you could just give him pellets (with no seed available to him) every other day and seed the rest of the time. That way, he’d also get more variety in his diet, which I’m sure he’d appreciate.
As for your actual questions:
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Doesn’t sound like anything to worry about to me, but hopefully parrot experts will weigh in.
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Masturbation.
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As long as you pay attention to him and he’s bonded to you, according to my brief research, a mirror is fine. (As I understand it, the dangers are that he will be come attached to it to the expense of your relationship with him or that he’ll become angsty or depressed since a mirror isn’t much of a substitute for another living creature.)
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This is one you should definitely not just rely on my advice on. If if was me, assuming he isn’t showing any signs of being sick (even slight - birds hide illness extremely well. In my experience, seeming to be more tired and less interactive than usual is an accurate warning sign in the absence of obvious illness), I’d just keep an eye on things for now and keep him off the sweet potato.
I hope that helps.
My bird does the ‘oral fixation’ thing with either a toy or one of my fingers-- it’s a handholding thing. Your bird’s got the hots. Yeah, masturbation more or less-- don’t sweat it. My dude’s not into mirrors, so can’t answer. And mine’s poo gets a bit watery if he has fresh fruit like a grape. If it’s temporary and the greens and whites are pretty much separate I think it’s ok. Sweet potato is quite good for them-- lots of Vitamin A via beta carotene, good against aspergilosis.I’d wean him off the seed and onto the pellets and veggies.
All three of ours found different things to orally fixate on. Don’t sweat it.
