I'm sorry to hear this. My male Alexandrine started to pluck this year, out of the blue, when I first saw it I said to my husband (only slightly over-dramatically!) "This is my worst nightmare!". A vet visit later and bloods and the diagnosis is puberty and breeding season, he is about 3.5 years old. I wonder whether your girl is going throughthesame thing? Being a bigger bird she might mature a bit later than an Alexandrine? The vet said it's something he might just do every year. Maybe your girl is the same? He plucked a brood patch, which is almost a rectangle between his legs to his chest. He did bite off the ends of feathers on his shoulders too. He only pulled out the coloured feathers, not the fluffy ones, is this the same for your girl? I thought we had gone through puberty last year, he got very grumpy and bit, but this year there has been none of that behaviour, but the flipping plucking! Did you see amy hormonal behaviour in the years she didn't pluck?
I've managed it by reducing the energy in his diet (no fruits, moving from Harrisons High Potency to Adult), daily misting (I worried at first that this would encourage plucking, but it didn't seem to), sunshine in the outside aviary and using "preening" toys, which I've never done before. I put one on the perch he usually presents on in his cage so that it pretty much had to touch him and I saw him preening it quite a few times. (Fingers crossed) it seemed to stop after about 3 weeks and now he's starting to moult. His sleep was good even before this. He also likes changes so I did a big overhaul of his cage and I've been changing and moving toys more regularly than I was because this doesn't stress him, but it sounds like your girl might not like this as much?
