GandalftheAfricanGrey
New member
Above is a picture of Charlie, an African Grey my wife and I just adopted from his former family. As you can see, he is in rough shape in terms of mangling his feathers, and we are trying to help him turn this around. I want to give a little bit of Charlie's history and hope some of you may have insights into things we can do to help get him back on track.
We took in Charlie about two weeks ago (the picture was the night we got him home) and he has had some ups and downs. His former family kept his cage outside a lot, so I am not sure if he was getting all the attention and out of cage time he needed. Because they were wary of getting bitten, they would use a net to catch him when he would not go back in his cage, which I think may have seriously stressed him out. He used to have a cagebuddy, but someone unknowingly fed him avocado so now Charlie is a loner. His former diet also seemed very heavy in nuts, so we are trying to slowly get him on a diet mixed with extruded food (Kaytee brand for now.)
Charlie has taken fairly well to our home and seems to be content to ignore our cats and sun conure, so is not stressed by the other animals. He has periods of being quiet and then he'll go off for an hour straight with all his whistles, beeps, and sound effects chatting back and forth with us. We have not been able to get him to step up yet, which is a major hurdle for us because we want to take him away from his cage for play and training. We also have not been able to give him the head strokes we know our other bird loves. We want to, but he seems very nervous when our hands get close and we are wary of that big beak. We have tried getting him to step up on a wooden dowel, but as soon as he sees it he runs to the far side of his cage, so this seems like it will be a long trek. We are still waiting on the paperwork to find out when his last vet visit was, but we would like to get him to see a local avian vet soon just to be sure, and getting him into his carrier is going to be an ordeal.
What has me most concerned was something that happened tonight. I was outside grilling for dinner and Charlie was up on his cage. As you can see in the picture, he's about 10 feet back from the door so I was chatting with him through the screen. He started doing the stretched to full height flapping wings excited dance that tells me "I want something." I tried seeing if this would be the magical moment he might want to step up, but he ran away again when I got near him. The longer I was outside the more agitated he got, until he plucked out a feather from his wing and tossed it on the ground. The feather looked fairly new, it still had the sheathe at the base and there was some blood on the tip he yanked out. We tried not to react so as not to give him any reinforcement, but it worried us that he would pluck so aggressively. We also have no idea what he was so excited about: if he thought we were leaving because we were outside, if he wanted to be outside, if he was upset that we were outside and it was getting dark, etc.
So if anyone has insight we would certainly appreciate it. We want to make Charlie a fully integrated part of our family, and he seems to want attention and treats, but we just can't seem to make headway so far.
