Broken Tail Feathers

Sherbert.the.Bird

New member
May 12, 2017
31
0
California
Parrots
Lutino Bourke's Parakeet
So to start off, its been a rough couple of months for Miss Sherbert ever since I got her from the shop with a horrible clip job. They ended up cutting most of the feathers on one wing and all the feathers on the other, primary and secondary feathers. This lead to lots of issues with flying and landing safely. In the aftermath, she ended up breaking or twisting the remaining feathers on her tail as well. I noticed Sherbert preening the broken feathers out, as most birds do, but it seems as though she only chews off the broken part leaving the majority of the quill in place. Or so I'm guessing as every broken feather I've found does not seem to have the quill attached. My question is this, should I pluck out the remaining quills to encourage full new feathers to grow or should I leave them and hope for the best? They are not blood feathers and they don't seem to be bothering her. She's currently molting as well. Her head/neck has quite a few pin feathers and I can also see new pin feathers forming on her wings.

PS I do not intend to clip her again after all her feathers have grown in. She has a very large flight cage that I plan on moving her to.
 

SailBoat

Supporting Member
Jul 10, 2015
17,646
10,008
Western, Michigan
Parrots
DYH Amazon
Feathers of the flight structures (Wings and Tail Feathers) are natural molted in very specific patterns of specific timelines to assure continuous ability to fly. And, at the same time, to assure that the Body has the energy stores to maintain good health. Flight feathers, because of their size require greater stores of energy to create them as compared to body feathers, in short, flight feathers are expensive.

When a cut feather is pulled to encourage regrowth, it is placed ahead of all other feathers and as the number of feathers that are pulled increases, the Parrots body is placed under ever greater stress. As a result, the Parrot knows that it cannot fly and goes into overdrive to replace Flight Surface Feathers, in addition to the feather's plucked. Since, Parrots can fly without tail feathers, pulling cut /damage tail feathers only prolongs the replacement of Wing Feathers while overloading its metabolic system pulling ever great stores from it energy stores. At this point, the Parrot is under heightened stress too replace feathers.

There are far too many uninformed individuals in the Parrot trade that believe they know far more than they do, practicing stupidly on your Parrot. This is proven by the Wing Clip your Parrot received. Please do not join or have one of those idiots near your Parrot.

There is a Reason Why, you should only have a Certified Avian Vet and/or a Certified Avian Vet Tech near your Parrot. Avoid the mayhem!
 

Most Reactions

Top