Cockatiel help!

[Birdman08]

About 3-4 weeks ago I got two cockatiels. Each one was kept in it's own cage for what ever reason. I put them together after about a week or so of them being at my house. The seem to get along fine but sometimes they do get upset at eachother and try and bite or "nip" at eachother. I was told by the lady that one of them did lay an egg. I can't tell if I have to males (and the lady was just crazy lol) or if I have two females or 1 male and 1 female. They were both very mean and would his and try and bite you when you got to close to the cage. I grabbed one by an old t-shirt and held him. I held him for about 5 minutes and BAM! He/she did a 180. He/she will sit on my finger and let me pick them up. Still a bit scared when being taken out of the cage. Anyways, what I'd like to know is what I have in the way of sexes. One of them loves to whistle while the other one doesn't talk much but when it does it's a squak more then anything. Can you tell the sex by the way they act and talk?

 

[Auggie's Dad]

"Can you tell the sex by the way they act and talk?"

Simple answer: No.

There are certainly some correlations, though no way to know from that.

For most parrots you would need a DNA test to determine the sex. However one of our cockatiel experts might be able to chime in on plumage differences. I vaguely remember something about their cheek color being different, but I know next to nothing about cockatiels.

 

[Lori]

You can visually sex a Cockatiel google it..it is one of the few that you can tell by looking at most of the time.

 

[chilover6]

You've probably already found an answer but just in case, mature adult males have a solid color on the underside of their tail feathers while the females will have stripes on the underside of the tail. Usually the males will be much more verbal than the females but not always.

Hope this helps.
Cathy