Need advice about clipping feathers/barbering

Hi everyone. New here, and I was hoping to get some advice about my female (~1.5 year old) eclectus that's been clipping her feathers. Long story, so bear with me.

My wife and I got her from a well-known local pet store two Thanksgivings ago. She was still on formula at the time, and she stayed on formula for a while. We eventually switched her over to a mix of soaked monkey biscuit with various blended veggies and fruits. She would eat 3-4 of those mixes and some safflower seeds a day until around summer of last year. We then slowly reduced the number of monkey biscuit to 1-2, replaced by carrot/yam, farro, and beans. She would still get her usual blend of veggies/fruits. In October, she clipped all of her chest feathers over the course of a few days, to the point where it was just the underneath gray fluffs. The owner of the pet store recommended an avian vet 2 hours away, and we went to see that vet. All tests came clean. After reviewing everything, the vet thought we didn't wash her enough and recommended keeping humidity above 40.

So we tried to do that, washing her almost daily and running humidifiers, especially when the humidity outside was low. She seemed okay for the last few months, but there weren't really any feathers to clip anymore. Fast forward to the start of January, a bunch of her feathers are growing, and she starts clipping them. She also is developing some bald spots around her beak, eyes, and back of her head - looks very similar to mojo molt pictures. We checked in with the vet again, and she recommended an elimination diet (that consists of just rice and supplements/vitamins) to make sure it's not some food sensitivity. We tried the diet, but she basically refused to eat. So we tried a more expanded version of it with (all organic) brown rice, carrot, blueberries, and 20 safflower seeds. She seemed a little better for a week, but she's been clipping the last 2 weeks. The vet recommended removing the safflower seeds last week, and we've done that. Within the last couple days, she's started clipping her larger wing feathers.

Besides the clipping, she's seemed mostly normal. She tears apart her toys, flies around a bit daily, sits on our computers when we work (which looks a bit uncomfortable), and "talks" for anywhere between 15 minutes to 2 hours a day. While on this rice, carrot, and blueberries diet, she has shown much more food motivation (sometimes flying to the kitchen whenever she sees one of us in there), talked less, and appears sleepy (long blinks) sometimes during the day.

Has anyone else had similar experiences? Is it just a really bad, first molt? Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated!

Boy have we ever!

Welcome! Where in this wide world are you located?

My boy is a barberer as well, seasonal: He will barber his feathers Dec-March down to grey feathers everywhere. He will stay in tha tcondition for months until he molts, July/august usually. He'll leave the feathers alone August-December, rinse and repeat.

Have you noticed any other behavioral changes lately - aggression, vocalizations, etc?

At 1.5 years old, she is PRIME for puberty which barbering is a classic sign of. Females line their nests with their feathers. That is started is Oct (the fall), stopped, then recently picked up again (on the cusp of spring) is also a hint at the hormonal cycle as well since most birds experience hormone surges in both the spring and to a lesser extend the fall.

But a diagnosis of Puberty comes with other behavioral changes: may get more vocal, regurgitation, masturbation, posturing (laying flat suggestively), seeking dark places like under your couch or a closet to find a nest, increased aggression, increased shredding, barbering. To name a few.

And it hits different birds in different ways: one bird may regurgitate and seek dark places, another may just become more aggressive, and yet third may not really show much reaction at all.

So this is my question to you: are you seeing any other behavioral changes?

Also, does she get a lot of mental stimulation (foraging opportunities, time out of age with the family, any sort of clicker training like target training or flighted recall training?)

chris-md said:

Welcome! Where in this wide world are you located?

So this is my question to you: are you seeing any other behavioral changes?

Also, does she get a lot of mental stimulation (foraging opportunities, time out of age with the family, any sort of clicker training like target training or flighted recall training?)

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Thanks for your reply!

We're in San Francisco, but one of the less foggy/wet districts.

So from Xmas break to mid-Jan, she was more vocal; she would make sounds for almost an hour straight when we have work meetings or music was playing. She has since returned to normal (or maybe even less than normal).

After being switched onto this restricted diet, she has shown more food motivation. She'll become a little aggressive if she's hungry and we're in the kitchen ignoring her. She'll fly to the kitchen or even to try and land on us and then quickly run towards whatever food we're preparing/eating.

We haven't seen regurgitation or posturing. Sometimes my wife puts her on her lap underneath a desk, but she doesn't actively seek out dark places. For example, she'll climb down her cage and walk to one of us, but I've never seen her walk underneath our couch or underneath another object.

Since the pandemic started, she's pretty much out of her cage the whole day. She has some toys on top of her cage she likes to chew/forage. We did a little training with her before, but our treat was safflower seeds, which she spends like 15-30 seconds eating. Currently, when we feed her, we have her fly across the room to one of us who's holding her food.

How much does she weigh?

chris-md said:

How much does she weigh?

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~315 g. The vet thought she was fully grown.

Ok so I’m hesitant to contradict a vet and their proscribed plan of action, but I’ll say I’d tackle this a bit differently. I’m cautious, becuase i Think a lot of behavioral problems get attributed to hormones, and they aren’t.

However, I’m 70% this is actually the onset of puberty (lack of certainly due to a somewhat dirth of other typically crystal clear behvaioral patterns), given the birds age and weight. It’s a smaller subspecies, and those tend to enter puberty right around a year and a half old.

Keeping in mind as well that even amongst avian vets eclectus can be somewhat misunderstood, especially dietary requirements.

If it is puberty, this restricted diet you have her on is actually making things worse, not better. To understand why, you have to look at mature eclectus, those past puberty.

Unlike most parrots, eclectus do NOT have breeding seasons. They can largely breed whenever they want. This means they can be turned on by environmental and social cues. Often those cues include high carb diet (carbs include sugar and grains, sugar from fruits count as sugar!), high fat diets (excess seeds/nuts), touching them anywhere except the head, excessive daylight (14+ hours), access to dark places, just to name a few.

These all can TRIGGER an adult eclectus to hormones. And during the spring when they can be at their worst on their own without us doing anything wrong, adding in these triggers on TOP of natural fluctuations exacerbate the situation.

Why does this have to do with your girl? Think of it like spring time hormones, which are out of your control, just like puberty. Add on top of this natural hormonal peak the fact that you are currently loading her primarily with nutrient free carbs (rice) and tons of sugar (20 blueberries!!). So if this IS puberty, your elimination diet is loading her up with common triggers that will cause hormonal surge, make the feather plucking WORSE.

Also, blueberries are occasionally known to cause toe tapping and wing flipping because they are nutrient dense. More on this in a moment.

So my own approach here is aligned with you vet: diet adjustment! But elimination diet isn’t quite right, you need a low calorie diet! You need a proper eclectus diet, which focuses on eliminating any foods with added vitamins and minerals (no enriched foods), and making sure fresh veggie and grains make up the bulk of the diet, with only occasional fruits. High fiber, but low calories. By low calories, and I’m making up these numbers, think a cup full of cauliflower being equal to 1/8 cup of rice, both 100 calories - which is more filling, 1 cup or 1/8 cup?

Substitute riced cauliflower for most of the rice you’re giving, feed assorted other veggies but do include some other whole grains like spelt, wheat berries, etc. they love assorted pulses so include a bunch of lentils, chickpeas, to name few.

Look into sprouting! One of the best things you can do for your girl, hands down.

Basically: Ekkie diet is high fiber diet, but also nutrient sparse. Ekkies have naturally longer digestive systems, allowing them to more readily extract nutrients from more nutrient poor source of food. With this increased efficiency comes more easy absorption of excessive nutrients from nutrient rich foods, like from antioxidant rich blueberries or enriched foods containing added vitamins and minerals like your average parrot pellet. At minimum these nutrient rich foods can cause toe tapping and wing flipping, but at worst you can get hypervitaminosis. So things like blueberries should be given sparingly.

I’ll leave it here for now. It’s a lot for you to digest. I’ll sum it up by saying “spend lots of time researching everything you can about the eclectus dietc as well as hormone control. If you’re doing eclectus care right, you’ll become an expert in hormone control”. But note that hormone controls arent miracle workers. They just make sure you aren’t making the situation worse. Your job: ride out hormonal times without making it worse by implementing hormone control.

But you also have to take what I’ve said here and marry it with your vets advice and determine what is the best way forward for you. We’re strangers on a forum, your vet has actually laid hand in your bird.

Also, up the mental stimulation: trick training, foraging. Give her reasons to focus on things other than her feathers.

chris-md said:

I’ll leave it here for now. It’s a lot for you to digest. I’ll sum it up by saying “spend lots of time researching everything you can about the eclectus dietc as well as hormone control. If you’re doing eclectus care right, you’ll become an expert in hormone control”. But note that hormone controls arent miracle workers. They just make sure you aren’t making the situation worse. Your job: ride out hormonal times without making it worse by implementing hormone control.

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This diet thing has definitely been confusing. We sort of felt the trigger for this back in October was a diet that was too high in protein - though she would pick out the farro, beans, monkey biscuit, corn, etc. out of our mix of food items.

I saw some photos of your chop in your Instagram; what's your recipe? Definitely open to trying something else. The other option is what the owner of the store where we got her has as a diet for the eclectus at the store. That female eclectus (~3 yrs old) gets peas, corn, green beans, dried banana, dried papaya, and ZuPreem nut blend and looks perfect.

Iyanden said:

chris-md said:

I’ll leave it here for now. It’s a lot for you to digest. I’ll sum it up by saying “spend lots of time researching everything you can about the eclectus dietc as well as hormone control. If you’re doing eclectus care right, you’ll become an expert in hormone control”. But note that hormone controls arent miracle workers. They just make sure you aren’t making the situation worse. Your job: ride out hormonal times without making it worse by implementing hormone control.

Click to expand...

This diet thing has definitely been confusing. We sort of felt the trigger for this back in October was a diet that was too high in protein - though she would pick out the farro, beans, monkey biscuit, corn, etc. out of our mix of food items.

I saw some photos of your chop in your Instagram; what's your recipe? Definitely open to trying something else. The other option is what the owner of the store where we got her has as a diet for the eclectus at the store. That female eclectus (~3 yrs old) gets peas, corn, green beans, dried banana, dried papaya, and ZuPreem nut blend and looks perfect.

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Hi Iyanden, welcome to the forum. You are correct about the very confusing information out there regarding an Eclectus specific diet. I'll share a link with you so that you can research a world renown Eclectus expert and author on Eclectus diet and care. I use Dr. Marshall's diet and routine for my darlings. It is also worthwhile checking out signs of Vitamin A deficiency and the Eclectus Wing-Flipping and Toe-Tapping condition. This way you will quickly spot these common diet related issues in your Eclectus .
https://www.birdhealth.com.au/eclectus

I generally had an OK perception of Dr. Marshall, saw his youtube videos. I'm not particularly adherent to him, but at least hes AN eclectus-specific voice. But I just read your link, Ellie, and he advises weekly supplementation as a standard practice. He completely lost me there.

I'm not an Eclectus pro by any means and have very little to add to the excellent advise you are receiving from our Eclectus pros...

My two cents:
- A Parrot that is stressing from Hunger will display behavior problems with feather multination being one of them. Take great care that you are not limiting those items recommended by our Eclectus pros! Fear of starvation is a serious driver and needs to be reduced by ensuring natural, healthy food sources are available.
- Low humidity levels will cause problems with dry skin that will contribute to feather multination. 40% relative is IMHO at the low side with an indoor temperature of 72 degrees or higher. Temporary efforts at adjusting humidity can be problematic. Target steady state of near or at 45% relative humidity level or higher. Your static level will be dependent on your exterior temperatures, construction of your home, etc...

Iyanden said:

I saw some photos of your chop in your Instagram; what's your recipe? Definitely open to trying something else. The other option is what the owner of the store where we got her has as a diet for the eclectus at the store. That female eclectus (~3 yrs old) gets peas, corn, green beans, dried banana, dried papaya, and ZuPreem nut blend and looks perfect.

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No, that's HORRIBLE as the main diet. Dried fruits are just fruits, lots of sugar, except they are smaller (dehydrated), meaning more of them can be eaten in one sitting. So you're LOADING up on sugars. And because they are dehydrated, it destroys a large chunk of the nutrition (any water soluble vitamins/minerals are lost, which is most of them).

They aren't BAD as an treat, or maybe one or two chunks in the dish at meal time, but as a large proportion of the diet, absolutely not!

And that nut blend. Don't get me started on Zupreme, they are JUNK. And they are fortified! Remember, fortified/added vitamins and minerals=should not be fed to ekkies. As an ekkie owner, get used to reading labels. If it has added sugar, vitamins, or minerals, it should not be fed.

Chop can be made a couple different ways: A lot of people throw 50 ingredients into a chop in the name of all-around nutrition. Thats perfectly valid, and if you want to do that, go for it! The problem I have with that is that the chop never changes, and meal time can get boring for the bird because you're feeding the same thing over and over. There is also very little adjustment for seasonal needs (hormone control, slower metabolism during the winter, etc). So I use fewer ingredients, usually 10-15, that get you *mostly* there, and as the recipe changes with each batch over a couple months, so too does the nutrient profile of the food.

I don't exactly have a recipe, per se. Once you know what birds can and can't eat, you can go in relatively blind and just grab stuff off the shelves. Though I put SOME though into it: some root veggies, some leafy veggies, some frozen veggies, some starchy grains, some whole grains, some green colors, plenty of red/orange colors for vitamin A, some yellow (feed the rainbow, different colors represent different nutrients). I also adjust based on time of year, since for example you want fewer calories in the winter I'll have much less rice than I normally would. So an example of a recipe I might put together today would be:

Riced Cauliflower
riced broccoli
bell peppers
quinoa
spelt
sweet anise plant
kale (leaves separated from the stems, leaves are chopped finely, the stem in chunks to mimic celery)
rolled oats
riced butternut squash
Chia Seeds
handful of sunflower kernels
handful of amaranth seeds
handful of millet seeds
chickpea flower rotini noodles

Right before serving, I might top it off with any combination of assorted spices (dried plants!), herbal tea mixes (i.e. mint and lavendar tea) pomegranate seeds, chia, flax, assorted sprouts, rolled oats, depending on what I've already added to the origianl batch, and maybe what I topped off with last meal. One day I might add just the herbal tea and rolled oats, the next could be just topping with pomegranate seeds

How is this tailored for this time of year? Not much starch: the riced cauliflower (I didn't note the quantities above, but the riced cauliflower is a just about a whole, SMALL head of cauliflower) takes the place of brown rice, but that might be a summer addition. As would sweet potato. Sweet potato is fairly innocuous, but I opt to choose for caution in *potential* hormonal triggers, and sweet potatoes are starchy so for me, better safe than sorry during hormonal times like spring/fall.

How would I adjust it for a summer chop? I'd add more frozen veggies like corn and peas as well, which have greater sugar content. And sweet potato! Perhaps substitute a portion of the riced cauliflower and more brown rice and wild rice (more starchy foods).

If you want a dry mix to supplement your fresh food routine, I personally tend to favor The Hookbill Legume Blend by Goldenfeast. Lowest fat content of their line of products, fewest nuts by proportion, loads of veggies, some fruits. And it has the smallest bits so my ekkie is more likely to eat them (he generally won't eat food that has been cut into chunks, so stuff like their veggie crisp blend goes to waste on him, just one of those idiosyncrasies parrots develop with food preferences).

chris-md said:

And it has the smallest bits so my ekkie is more likely to eat them (he generally won't eat food that has been cut into chunks, so stuff like their veggie crisp blend goes to waste on him, just one of those idiosyncrasies parrots develop with food preferences).

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Thanks for sharing how you prepare your food!

As to idiosyncrasies, yeah, our eclectus basically only eats safflower seeds. She ignores all other kinds of nuts and seeds, except as toys (i.e., crack the shell).

Hey, that shell cracking is a form of enrichment one way or another! Even if she doesn't eat it, worth it just as a toy alone

chris-md said:

Hey, that shell cracking is a form of enrichment one way or another! Even if she doesn't eat it, worth it just as a toy alone

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Sounds like an opportunity there! Get nuts that you enjoy eating and have her crack them open! Sounds like a win, win to me!

chris-md said:

I generally had an OK perception of Dr. Marshall, saw his youtube videos. I'm not particularly adherent to him, but at least hes AN eclectus-specific voice. But I just read your link, Ellie, and he advises weekly supplementation as a standard practice. He completely lost me there.

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Dr. Rob Marshall stated his rationale within the article: https://www.birdhealth.com.au/eclectus

[FONT=&quot]“Although human fruits and vegetables, plus agricultural grains satisfy the foraging requirements of Eclectus parrots, they do not provide a complete nutritional balance for pet birds. For this reason nutritional supplements are essential to the vitality and longevity of Eclectus parrots in captivity. To provide the correct nutrient balance these supplements are given as part of a Weekly Nutritional and Health Programme.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Eclectus that do not receive carotene rich vegetables or vitamin A supplements are susceptible to recurrent sinus infections and are less able to withstand the effects of stressful episodes (i.e. emotional upsets or sudden changes in environmental temperature or humidity). Eclectus parrots kept in captivity as pets or breeding pairs require nutritional supplements in addition to fruits, vegetables and seeds."[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The specific supplements referenced are linked within the article as well under:[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot][/FONT][FONT=&quot]Weekly Health & Nutritional Programme for Pet Eclectus Parrots[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot][/FONT][FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Click here to view the complete weekly health programme for pet Eclectus parrots. (PDF chart available there.)[/FONT]



[FONT=&quot][/FONT][FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
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Thanks Ellie. I saw his rationale which didn't make much sense. I hadn't seen that document you proivded, but I also wish I hadn't as it just casts him in a worse light for me. I can write a dissertation eviscerating the contents of that page. However, I'll play nice and leave it at this: It reads like someone stuck in the very old ways from 50 years ago, like someone who advocates adding adding supplements to water which is always a bad idea, and who also has an oceanfront property in Nyngan, NSW he wants to sell you.

I'll leave it there, I don't want to detract from the OPS' original discussion with my own personal rantings on a tangent.

Update: just chatted with the vet today. Vet thinks it's likely not food allergies given the continued clipping, but could be other allergies. On the diet end, we'll at least halve the rice, up her veggies, and add more variety to her fruits.

To distinguish between hormonal and allergic clipping, vet said to watch for sudden preening where it may look like she's itchy. I'm not really sure what that looks like, anyone have any ideas? Vet said we could also try some omega-3 supplements; anyone have experience with this?

I typically avoid disagreeing with one's Vet as the Vet had Hands-On your Parrot. But, there is a huge different between services provided by a 'Vet' and that provided by an 'Avian Medical Professional.'

IMHO, we steer clear of supplements of any type unless seen needed in a full spectrum blood test that defines a clear need. In those cases, we first change the diet and if that is not working, then and only then consider a supplement.

For an Amazon, the feather plucking associated with hormones is with Females is breast plucking as a prolog to creating a nest and heat transfer from the Hen to the egg.

Iyanden said:

On the diet end, we'll at least halve the rice, up her veggies, and add more variety to her fruits.
?

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I think you missed the part about minimizing the fruits, extremely key here.

Our vet has an avian only clinic. She said she had good experiences with omega-3 supplements.