Hi Melissa,
I'm not nearly as experienced as most of the folks here, but I can tell you that my BFA started doing exactly the same thing at about 4.5 months. I know everyone says it's something you're doing or not doing, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out anything that had changed. (She was still actively coming to me, and initiating contact, so the 'you're making your bird do something they don't want to do, you're not reading their body language' bit didn't seem to apply.)
I tried everything advised here (and these are the right things to do):
- Watch for eye-pinning or any signs of overexcitement, and let the bird calm down before you try to interact. (It's important to try to remove or minimize the opportunity/likelihood of the bird biting you in the first place—each time they do it is kind of its own reinforcement, it's way better to avoid it altogether.)
- Try not to yelp/scream/react when they bite you (this was hard because she was biting extremely hard, often drawing blood)
- Try to immediately walk away/put the bird down. (Good advice, but easier said than done—sometimes she was literally not letting go, and other times if I put her down she'd fly after me.)
- I also tried saying 'no' firmly but calmly, which some people advise and others say won't work. I can say that she definitely understands 'no' now. (These birds are smarter than a 2-year-old human, so I think it makes sense that they can learn 'no,' especially if it's accompanied by a consequence—like you removing their attention, for example, if that's what they want.)
I got her a couple of foraging toys that hold food, too, and she especially loves one that is a big plastic rotating container with small holes that she can interact with to get nuts (like pine nuts in the shell), pellets, and dried fruit out of). She has to work for it, and I think the stimulation and exertion are helpful.
I also started making sure she got a full 12 Hours of sleep. (She had been getting 10-11), and I started leaving her in her cage more during the day. (I was nearby, and would talk with her, but didn't let her out nearly as much.) Previously she'd been out most of the day. I found that she was typically a little less bitey in the evening, close to bedtime, and more cuddly—it was more likely to be a positive interaction, so that's mainly when I took her out to spend a little time.
Basically, less direct interaction, as long as it was mostly positive, proved to be helpful.
After about 2-3 weeks of doing all of the above, she stopped biting hard/actively coming after me. She became once again the sweet bird she was before. She still beaks me a little, but now it's just normal bird behavior—they are going to bite some, but hopefully not too hard/often. She definitely seemed to learn bite inhibition, as far as force. And now she'd not biting all the time for no apparent reason like she was—so it's easy to read when to leave her alone to avoid a bite, so that advice does work now.
Don't lose heart, just be patient and mindful, and I'm sure you two will get past this. (I was very sad/discouraged at first, but we're all good now. It was probably good practice for puberty, where I'll likely be dealing with this again, if not before!)
One other thing I've started to notice, even though she's not biting very often and definitely not very hard now, is that she seems to do much better if I pet her with the hand on the same side as the wrist she's sitting on. She almost never bites at all when I do that. But she sometimes does get a little more bitey when I pet her with the other hand (even if I'm not reaching toward her quickly, or from above, or anything else that could be threatening). Just a weird new observation I've made lately, wanted to mention it.
