Quentin98
New member
Hello everyone,
This is gonna be a long one so please bear with me. First some background. My name is Quentin, and my girlfriend and I adopted her grandma's eclectus parrot about 2 weeks ago as she is now too old to take care of him. This is the first bird either of us has ever owned personally. Both been around birds, her more so than me, but we definitely aren't very sure what we're doing. He is mostly plucked except for his head and a few feathers on his wings, but as of right now he's doing fairly well and growing a decent amount of feathers. We've been researching as much as we can and are going to take him to the vet as soon as possible.
As for his history, her family believes he was bonded to her grandma's ex husband, as after the divorce is when the plucking first started, but that was about 10 years ago. He's been fed mostly pellets for I don't know how long, possibly most of his life. Grandma smoked cigarettes in the house, albeit very far away from him. His cage was not being properly cleaned at the time I met him. He also was getting very little interaction at all, also for what I assume to be a while.
Currently, we've been feeding him vegetables and berries with a bit of seeds and nuts mixed in, and as of yesterday I took the pellets out since I found out colored pellets are bad for them, and I picked out the non colored portions as grandma had been switching him over to the zupreem natural pellets from a mix of the fruits mix and veggie mix pellets, also from zupreem. He has been fed pomegranate, sweet potato, chard, collard greens, hemp seeds, dried chili peppers, a mix of rasp, black, and blueberries, butternut squash, carrots, mango(which he oddly didn't seem to like), spinach(found out I was giving him wayyy too much of that and stopped), broccoli, cauliflower, a little bit of an orange, some healthy nut treats we found at the store that I don't know the exact contents of, and some small dried papaya bits.
The primary issue at hand is that because of the lack of interaction, either whatever training he had has essentially been rendered meaningless or he has a big issue with trusting us. I don't really know how to handle him, and he won't let me do anything other than touch his beak. (UPDATE) I forgot to mention here, he has known my girlfriend her entire life as he was born before her and grandma had him his whole life to this point. Also, about a week ago he regurgitated on my girlfriends hand a couple times and then tried again the next day, but since then has seemed sort of mad at her. He can be extremely friendly with her although like I said he still doesn't want to step up. Depending on the day he can be very friendly with her, almost like hes bonding with her, but then other days he doesnt like her much more than me.
Also, he has some sort of bulge around his chest which I have no idea if it's normal or not as well as a white streak type thing. If you have any advice of any sort, please post it. I'll take anything I can get no matter what the topic is as I know essentially nothing outside of common sense. Thank you if you bothered to read all of this.
This is gonna be a long one so please bear with me. First some background. My name is Quentin, and my girlfriend and I adopted her grandma's eclectus parrot about 2 weeks ago as she is now too old to take care of him. This is the first bird either of us has ever owned personally. Both been around birds, her more so than me, but we definitely aren't very sure what we're doing. He is mostly plucked except for his head and a few feathers on his wings, but as of right now he's doing fairly well and growing a decent amount of feathers. We've been researching as much as we can and are going to take him to the vet as soon as possible.
As for his history, her family believes he was bonded to her grandma's ex husband, as after the divorce is when the plucking first started, but that was about 10 years ago. He's been fed mostly pellets for I don't know how long, possibly most of his life. Grandma smoked cigarettes in the house, albeit very far away from him. His cage was not being properly cleaned at the time I met him. He also was getting very little interaction at all, also for what I assume to be a while.
Currently, we've been feeding him vegetables and berries with a bit of seeds and nuts mixed in, and as of yesterday I took the pellets out since I found out colored pellets are bad for them, and I picked out the non colored portions as grandma had been switching him over to the zupreem natural pellets from a mix of the fruits mix and veggie mix pellets, also from zupreem. He has been fed pomegranate, sweet potato, chard, collard greens, hemp seeds, dried chili peppers, a mix of rasp, black, and blueberries, butternut squash, carrots, mango(which he oddly didn't seem to like), spinach(found out I was giving him wayyy too much of that and stopped), broccoli, cauliflower, a little bit of an orange, some healthy nut treats we found at the store that I don't know the exact contents of, and some small dried papaya bits.
The primary issue at hand is that because of the lack of interaction, either whatever training he had has essentially been rendered meaningless or he has a big issue with trusting us. I don't really know how to handle him, and he won't let me do anything other than touch his beak. (UPDATE) I forgot to mention here, he has known my girlfriend her entire life as he was born before her and grandma had him his whole life to this point. Also, about a week ago he regurgitated on my girlfriends hand a couple times and then tried again the next day, but since then has seemed sort of mad at her. He can be extremely friendly with her although like I said he still doesn't want to step up. Depending on the day he can be very friendly with her, almost like hes bonding with her, but then other days he doesnt like her much more than me.
Also, he has some sort of bulge around his chest which I have no idea if it's normal or not as well as a white streak type thing. If you have any advice of any sort, please post it. I'll take anything I can get no matter what the topic is as I know essentially nothing outside of common sense. Thank you if you bothered to read all of this.
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