Help, conures suddenly hating each others!

[Chocolach]

Hello there!

I desperately need help with my birds sudden aggressive behavior.

So, context; I have two birds named Pebble and Marble. Their introduction had been long and grueling. In fact, I had once asked for help in this forum, but after four/five months of tension, they had finally become inseparable, preening and cuddling, and no longer needing different cages.

It has been a full year of smooth sailing in a lovey dovey bird world.
I had to stop a few fights every once in a while, but nothing too dramatic, and while these fights seemed a bit more frequent in the last few weeks, they always went back to preening each other after a time out.

These fights always seemed to start in the hallway, where they would go on the floor and start bickering. I figured they were being weirdly territorial, but I can’t close it off (no door) so I decided to just be more careful and not let them out of my sight.

Except yesterday it all went to shit.

Pebble had just finished her bath, and as I was drying my hands, a fight broke out.
Pebble ended up with a bad wound on her leg, so I quickly placed Marble in her room to take care of Pebble and stop the bleeding.

When I finally let them reunite, they were at each other’s throat right away.

Since no amount of time out seemed to do the trick this time, I prepared a new cage to keep them separated for the night.

They seemed in better spirits this morning buuut nope, another fight on the hallway floor. No new injuries (except for my own fingers) but it’s clear some trust was lost in that fight yesterday.

It doesn’t help that Pebble is almost always the attacker, but Marble is the better fighter. (she has a bigger, sharper beak.)
So, any idea what I can do to calm them down?
Right now I’m just switching their time out of the room, but it’s gonna suck when I have to leave home again and just keep them in their cage all day, when they were used to have a whole room just for themself.

Would placing both cages in the hallway calm down what I think are territorial instincts?

Or is it more likely to be just hormonal, and I have to wait it out? How long might that take?

Taking any and all idea, honestly, I dread having to go back to those difficult and sad first month of tensions…

Here they are in a preening session just days before the fight.
(No picture of the fight ofc since i'm too busy getting my hand bit off separating them )

 

[DonnaBudgie]

A few things I can think of.
I use a tension rod with a shower curtain to block off hallways with no door to segregate birds. Make sure it reaches the ground and magnet weights at the bottom help a lot.

I wouldn't let them out at the same time and would keep them in separate cages.

Are they dna sexed males or females? If they are both females you may have a problem because the worst combo can be two hormonal females and they're almost always hormonal to some degree once past puberty.

This situation sounds miserable. I wish you the best!

 

[Chocolach]

Unfortunately, I do have a tension rod with curtain, but there's enough space on the top for them to squeeze through and go on the other side. (in fact, having the curtain closed seems to just entice them to the forbidden corridor even more)

Only Pebble was dna sexed female, the other is unknown. (The internet would tell me that Marble is male, because of her larger beak and vocal tendency, but with nothing conclusive, I prefer to just refer to her as female due to her pretty eyeshadow lol)

I just got them out of their cage to test some supervised out time before seeing your message. They had a little preening session on the top of my screen and seems to be in a better mood despite *some* lingering hostility, so I guess there's hope...