Long-lasting Mood Change and Aggressiveness - Seeking Help

[AutumnPGCC]

Hello all,

This is my first post reaching out for help for Autumn my Pineapple Green Cheek Conure. My husband and I adopted Autumn almost a year ago and she will be 2 years old soon. When we adopted her from her previous owner she seemed very gentle and sweet and was for the first couple months we have had her. But we noticed right away that she has separation anxiety. Her previous owner could not be around a lot because of their job. Even I am not around a lot during the week days. But my husband has worked from home and is with her most of the day. We like to have her out of her cage most of the day and she has a couple perches/stands to go on that have toys to keep her entertained. Her wings were clipped when we got her and now they have grown out more and she is starting to fly short distances and we are happy to see it!

However, 3-4 months since we adopted Autumn she started to pick up more aggressive tendencies. She will always let us hold her and pet her generally, but she has been biting more. There’s not a day where I don’t have scratches/bite marks on my hand lol. It is not that we are trying to make her mad or keep touching her when she is mad, she just kinda charges after any piece of skin she sees and bites it. She never sits still and has a lot of energy, but uses that energy for biting whenever she is with us. Even when she does not seem to be in a bad mood she is biting anything she can. She has a tonnnn of toys and has ripped many up. We will admit her cage is a little small for right now and we are working on getting a new one. But our intention with that was that since she could not fly, it would be nice for her to have more walking space and she does not need a lot of flying space (it is an old rabbit cage with a wide bottom and still lots of room to stretch her wings and exercise). Plus she only sleeps in the cage at night.

Back to the problem…the separation anxiety and a new habit of hers has us at our wits end. The separation anxiety is not as bad for me, but if we walk out of the room she is in (even for 10 seconds) she freaks out and will scream or call out to us. She knows how to say “come here” “baby” “step up” and “crazy girl” from us. So she literally screams for us saying “come here” on repeat lol. We do not try to go running to comfort her immediately because we read that is bad. But she never stops this tendency. The new habit is what has me going crazy (and very sleep deprived). I stay up late because of work stuff (maybe 1-3 AM sometimes) and we put Autumn to bed at 9 PM every day. Autumn’s new habit the past 3 weeks has been screaming until we wake up and she starts this at 5/6 AM. So in the past few weeks I have consecutively gotten only 3 or 4 good hours of sleep. The first few nights we tried to ignore it so she is not getting attention for that behavior, but then I got desperate after a week of bad sleep. I started opening up her cage so she could walk around on it while we are still sleeping. She goes quiet for 10 minutes and then is back to screaming. When I say screaming, it is screaming and she does it for hours nonstop until we wake up. We have tried moving her to the farthest room from us and that does not work. We have a small apartment and are worried we will receive a noise complaint very soon.

We just need advice on moving forward. I am too tired to focus on my work tasks and have been way too irritable the past few weeks because of losing sleep. We both love Autumn very much but are getting exhausted and bad thoughts are coming to mind about taking her to a shop. I do not have the heart to do that and won’t, but my husband is more inclined towards that. Both my husband and I have grown up having birds our whole lives, I have had another GCC before as well. We have just never seen these behaviors and are trying our best to learn how to help her.

Any advice would be helpful for us. We appreciate you reading all of this and feel free to ask more questions. I will be checking this regularly because we need help desperately!

Thanks,
Worried Bird Parents

 

[zERo]

Welcome to the forums!

Sorry your here under such unfortunate circumstances!

It sounds like she is going through puberty, maybe a bit late but the first is often the worst!
For the biting, I recommend target training and stick training.
Target training so that you can get her to go somewhere without picking her up and stick training so, if she wants, she can step up on a stick rather than your hand. I’ll link a few YouTube channels at the bottom for training tips.

At night, do you cover her cage?
Also, what is her diet like? A diet that is not correct can really make a bird impossible to work with.

A few hormone minimizes I recommend and do for my own birds.
#1- Ensure your bird gets 12 hours of good quiet sleep (I understand your situation is not that easy!)
#2- Limit petting to the head and neck as touching your bird anywhere else often will tell them you are their mate.
#3- Don’t allow her to go in any dark places that could feel like a nest.
#4- An avian vet visit is always a good idea, as is a blood test to rule out if her attitude change is medical rather than environmental.
#5- Do not over feed sugar/protein/fat. If every food group is offered in excess, this tells the bird it’s breeding season.

Here’s the YouTube channels:

https://m.youtube.com/@BirdNerdSophie

https://m.youtube.com/@TheParrotTeacher

 

[wrench13]

Hi and welcome to ParrotForums. We read all the time about how the green cheek conures ( and all the sub species and variants) are as a group very 'bitey' or nippy. Lets first address the general change in temperament. You likely know that during breeding season, most parrots have a sort of jekyll/hyde thing where one minute they are fine and then BOOM, not so much. And the first full on breeding season is the worst, or she may well be going thru puberty, tho at 2 yrs old that is very late for GCC's. I would first off observe all the steps to reduce hormone influenced behavior:

• No touching anywhere but head and neck
• Reduce or eliminate sugar bearing or producing foods like fruits, corn, etc
• No access to dark hidey holes
• No access to shreddy type of materials like paper etc
• 12 hours of solid sleep

So the biteyness outside of hormone season. Use the shunning method. It is what parrots in the wild use to discipline unruly flock members. It only works if your parrot is bonded a bit to your family. Basically, when bites occur take these steps:

• IMMEDIATELY put the parrot on a handy nearby chair back. NOT the cage!
• Turn your back on him for 60 seconds. No looking back, no eye contact, no talking about the bird - nothing!
• After that period you can reestablish contact with him
• IN order for this to work, everybody in the family must do it. May take a week or 2 to get the message across but it will sink in.

As far as the screaming, create a contact call for your self and husband. WHen the parrot contact calls you, use your contact call back, a few times, 2 or 3. After that do not respond. Don't rescue her, that just re-enforces the habbit of screaming for you.

All of these things take time to be firmly in place, and you need to react the same way EVERY time.

 

[AutumnPGCC]

Welcome to the forums!

Sorry your here under such unfortunate circumstances!

It sounds like she is going through puberty, maybe a bit late but the first is often the worst!
For the biting, I recommend target training and stick training.
Target training so that you can get her to go somewhere without picking her up and stick training so, if she wants, she can step up on a stick rather than your hand. I’ll link a few YouTube channels at the bottom for training tips.

At night, do you cover her cage?
Also, what is her diet like? A diet that is not correct can really make a bird impossible to work with.

A few hormone minimizes I recommend and do for my own birds.
#1- Ensure your bird gets 12 hours of good quiet sleep (I understand your situation is not that easy!)
#2- Limit petting to the head and neck as touching your bird anywhere else often will tell them you are their mate.
#3- Don’t allow her to go in any dark places that could feel like a nest.
#4- An avian vet visit is always a good idea, as is a blood test to rule out if her attitude change is medical rather than environmental.
#5- Do not over feed sugar/protein/fat. If every food group is offered in excess, this tells the bird it’s breeding season.

Here’s the YouTube channels:

https://m.youtube.com/@BirdNerdSophie

https://m.youtube.com/@TheParrotTeacher

Hello! Thank you for this great response!

We were also wondering if she has been going through puberty but did not know if it is normal to be late. Does it usually last a few months? I know she is nearing sexual maturity because she is almost 2. I also wonder if she has trauma from her wings being clipped and it caused changes in behavior. But the previous owner clipped them so we were not sure when that was done. It has at least been a year.

We will look into the training you recommended. We have no problem with her stepping up, it’s just that once she is on our hand she wants to bite. I think it became a playful habit of hers that she does not know hurts. But we are happy to look into the training!

We do cover her cage, but cover or not she screams.

We will start putting her to bed earlier! It gets dark here at 8/9 so that is why we put her to bed at 9 but if 7 or 8 (or earlier) is good we will do that. She does seem to be getting tired from waking up at the crack of dawn to scream. She is yawning more and is more tired in the evening so we did put her to bed early.

We are good with the petting aspect and there are no dark places.

Food may be something that needs to change. We are not sure. We have only tried two different brands of a seed mix and found the one she preferred was Kaylor of Colorado’s Sweet Harvest for conures & lovebirds. The only thing we have not tried is pellets. Should we incorporate them into her diet as well? As for fresh food, we typically give her a peeled grape every few days, lettuce, mango, apple, broccoli, etc. kind of whenever we have that certain item in stock at home.

And her absolute favorite treat we use for teaching her things to reward her is sunflower seeds!

We will look into a vet and see who is around. I may wait a little bit to see if anything changes.

Thanks again!!

 

[AutumnPGCC]

Hi and welcome to ParrotForums. We read all the time about how the green cheek conures ( and all the sub species and variants) are as a group very 'bitey' or nippy. Lets first address the general change in temperament. You likely know that during breeding season, most parrots have a sort of jekyll/hyde thing where one minute they are fine and then BOOM, not so much. And the first full on breeding season is the worst, or she may well be going thru puberty, tho at 2 yrs old that is very late for GCC's. I would first off observe all the steps to reduce hormone influenced behavior:

• No touching anywhere but head and neck
• Reduce or eliminate sugar bearing or producing foods like fruits, corn, etc
• No access to dark hidey holes
• No access to shreddy type of materials like paper etc
• 12 hours of solid sleep

So the biteyness outside of hormone season. Use the shunning method. It is what parrots in the wild use to discipline unruly flock members. It only works if your parrot is bonded a bit to your family. Basically, when bites occur take these steps:

• IMMEDIATELY put the parrot on a handy nearby chair back. NOT the cage!
• Turn your back on him for 60 seconds. No looking back, no eye contact, no talking about the bird - nothing!
• After that period you can reestablish contact with him
• IN order for this to work, everybody in the family must do it. May take a week or 2 to get the message across but it will sink in.

As far as the screaming, create a contact call for your self and husband. WHen the parrot contact calls you, use your contact call back, a few times, 2 or 3. After that do not respond. Don't rescue her, that just re-enforces the habbit of screaming for you.

All of these things take time to be firmly in place, and you need to react the same way EVERY time.

Thank you for your response!

That is true that she is probably acting more outruly because of the breeding season. That would make sense for the screaming while we are sleeping. We will try that method you mentioned about the biting! We were kind of doing something like that for a while with one chair that has a perch on it, but then she started being resistant to going on her perch and biting and not letting go because she knew she was in trouble. We will try this method you gave!

As for all the other things you listed, I think we are good with all of those!

I think Autumn sees the words “come here” as our contact call so I have tried that every once in a while with her. The only problem is that there is nothing we have been able to do about the screaming in the morning. The only way to calm her has been to pick her up and be with her. The ignoring method did not work here. We will see how the next couple weeks go and are still trying out having her in a different room.

I appreciate your response in helping us and our little Autumn!

 

[zERo]

We were also wondering if she has been going through puberty but did not know if it is normal to be late. Does it usually last a few months? I know she is nearing sexual maturity because she is almost 2. I also wonder if she has trauma from her wings being clipped and it caused changes in behavior. But the previous owner clipped them so we were not sure when that was done. It has at least been a year.

I would bet it’s late puberty at this point. Since it’s been over a year I’d say she’s probably over her wings being clipped especially since she’s trying to fly anyways.

We will look into the training you recommended. We have no problem with her stepping up, it’s just that once she is on our hand she wants to bite. I think it became a playful habit of hers that she does not know hurts. But we are happy to look into the training!

Lots of birds seem to develop the habit of biting once they step up. Often I see people focus their birds attention on a target stick while they move their bird from point A to B.

We do cover her cage, but cover or not she screams.

We will start putting her to bed earlier! It gets dark here at 8/9 so that is why we put her to bed at 9 but if 7 or 8 (or earlier) is good we will do that. She does seem to be getting tired from waking up at the crack of dawn to scream. She is yawning more and is more tired in the evening so we did put her to bed early.

I put my birds to bed at 8 pm. And wake them at 8-8:30 am. They’re covered at bedtime and the light is turned off.
I bet she’s tired from staying up all night! And I know you are too!

We are good with the petting aspect and there are no dark places.

That’s good to hear!

Food may be something that needs to change. We are not sure. We have only tried two different brands of a seed mix and found the one she preferred was Kaylor of Colorado’s Sweet Harvest for conures & lovebirds. The only thing we have not tried is pellets. Should we incorporate them into her diet as well? As for fresh food, we typically give her a peeled grape every few days, lettuce, mango, apple, broccoli, etc. kind of whenever we have that certain item in stock at home.

I would offer her pellets 24/7. A few brands I recommend are TOPs or Lafebers as both of these are human grade pellets.
I would limit fruit to 2-3 times a week in a small amount, say, 1/4 of a grape. I would also try to offer vegetables daily if possible, specifically dark leafy greens like Swiss chard, arugula, or kale, and then orange veg too like lightly steamed sweet potato or carrot.
The other veg your offering is great too.

Is the bulk of her diet seed?

 

[wrench13]

Both the Shunning method and the Contact Call method are a kind of discipline that both the parrot and you and family have to afopt 100% of the time when they are warranted. Doing these sometimes and others not are going to confuse the poor thing and maybe even exacerbate the problems.

Puberty and hormone seasons - No hard and fast rule with these, because every parrot is an individual. Our Salty had a very mild puberty, almost unnoticeable, and his first mating/hormone season likewise was very mild, AND THEN!! His second mating season was just horrible. He is a yellow shoulder amazon, about 1/2 the size of a blue front amazon, but his razor sharp beak is still plenty strong. As you gain time with your GCC you will have a better idea of how to handle these periods and yeah they can last months. 2 things to remember- Know Thy Bird and This Too Shall Pass .