Bonded pair fighting

[Amzlah]

Hi All.

I have a bonded pair, one quaker (6yrs) and one conure (5yrs). A cage door fell off last week and the quaker flew away. We were fortunate that he was found nearby and we were reunited with him 3 days later, however now the conure does not want anything to do with him and will fight him if they are together. The quaker was always the more dominant of the pair and the original owners got the conure to keep him company as he was plucking. I currently have them in seperate cages and have been doing supervised time outside their cages but the conure always attacks. Not sure if it's partially due to it being breeding season (both males) or if the conure finally got to be on his own for the first time in his life and has just prefered it.

Is there anything I should be doing to reintroduce them or will they always just need to be seperate now?

Appreciate any help
Amy

 

[Laurasea]

Welcome to the forum! I guess a silly question are you sure you got your quaker back and not an imposter? It could be the conure associated the scary door thing with the Quaker .. hopefully they can get past that

 

[ChristaNL]

hi


I am simply going with: "Hey...this is MY place now...you left!"


but they have been reunited for 4 days now?
I would just give it time.
(If I take my birds to the vet- and they all adore my CAVs, usually love the attention etc. they still are not completely themselves for 2-3-4 days after that.)
Let them settle.
They have a new situation: 2 cages instead of one...so that also takes time.


You can swap cages every few days (bird A one week in cage A, the next in cage B) so the territorial issues can fade out since they are both migrating.

 

[EllenD]

First of all, I'm glad you got your Quaker back, most of the time it doesn't work out that way, so that's what is most important here. (Assuming it is your Quaker, lol.) Laura is correct though, if you live in an area where there are colonies of wild Quaker Parrots it's possible to find them outside...I'm sure you know your own bird, but just checking, as they are quite plentiful in certain states..

Otherwise, it's probably going to just take time. What's important is that you never let them out together alone, because they could kill each other, with the Quaker probably being the winner, but getting severely injured in the process. It may very well be that the entire ordeal stressed the Conure out a great deal, and it's just going to take some time for him to calm down and recover. Or it's possible that your Quaker has some kind of scent on him that the Conure isn't liking (a shower/bath is a good idea anyway, if you haven't done it already, just to make sure he didn't pick-up any parasites from wild birds)...Likely the Conure just isn't liking the back and forth and has been under a great deal of stress since it happened, and now the Quaker is back and the Conure is like "What the hell is going on here!"...

They may be fine and go back to being closely bonded to one another, they may never be able to be together again without fighting. Only time will tell...