charmedbyekkie
New member
Cairo is trying to regurgitate.. Sometimes a little does come up, but he’s not directly forced it on me (yet). He only does it when I’m around. Need some guidance.
Overall I think we’re in puberty somewhat.
If he’s in his cage, he’ll chill out, practice talking, play with his toys, etc. But the moment he’s out of his cage, 3/4 of the time, he’s zooming around, landing to knock knock on different places around the house. I’ve been taking his knocking as just hormonal playing/territorial behaviour. It’s ok, so long as he doesn’t do it on a computer monitor. But the trouble is he’ll sit on a perch (whether official perch or a chair or a door) in front of me and knock knock as he attempts to regurgitate (my partner is spared the same treatment).
When he gets into this knock knock mode (basically hormonal agitation from my understanding), there’s little talking sense into him (figuratively speaking). He will step up if required (and mutter something at us), and I put him in his cage to calm down. But the moment I take him out of his cage, he starts the knock knock again.
Here’s a video:
[ame="https://youtu.be/OqEs0UM4KAs"]Knock Knock - It's Hormonal Cairo - YouTube[/ame]
I don’t normally let him go on for this long, but just for the video this time….
As for what he mutters when I ask him to step up, it’s the same things my partner might say to him when he’s being ‘naughty’ (somewhere he’s not supposed to be, chewing something he’s not supposed to chew, biting when he’s not supposed to bite us, etc.). So there’s a clear correlation in Cairo’s brain between a negative situation and those words.
To add to the mix, my partner suspects that Cairo views me as a potential mate. When I was overseas for a work trip for one week, Cairo got really aggressive with my partner - lunging and biting. The moment I came back, Cairo tried to regurgitate for the first time for me. He’s not possessive of me (yet); my partner and I can interact with each other just fine in front of him, and Cairo is happy to just quietly sit next to my partner sometimes. But I definitely don’t want to lead him on.
What do you recommend I do? The guy is knock knocking more than half the time he’s out of his cage. So it’s almost a few hours total of knocking going on. Sometimes he’ll calm down and just preen. Sometimes he’s too agitated to even do his trick training.
Here’s the measures we’ve taken:
I don’t know if a factor is that we haven’t been able to flying as often. We used to go 2-3x a week. Now, it’s been reduced to once a week. And yes, the clever boy KNOWS. I’ve shared a video on the forum before of him asking to go fly-fly when we were having breakfast at the park. Last weekend, as we reached the park where we fly, I asked him, “Cairo, do you want to go fly-fly?” And the clever boy replied, “FLY-FLY!!!” (Mind you, this bird doesn’t ever repeat what I say.) So I’m almost wondering if he just doesn’t have the means to expend the energy of ekkies who fly kilometres every day.
Surely knock knocking most of the time can't be healthy for him....
Overall I think we’re in puberty somewhat.
If he’s in his cage, he’ll chill out, practice talking, play with his toys, etc. But the moment he’s out of his cage, 3/4 of the time, he’s zooming around, landing to knock knock on different places around the house. I’ve been taking his knocking as just hormonal playing/territorial behaviour. It’s ok, so long as he doesn’t do it on a computer monitor. But the trouble is he’ll sit on a perch (whether official perch or a chair or a door) in front of me and knock knock as he attempts to regurgitate (my partner is spared the same treatment).
When he gets into this knock knock mode (basically hormonal agitation from my understanding), there’s little talking sense into him (figuratively speaking). He will step up if required (and mutter something at us), and I put him in his cage to calm down. But the moment I take him out of his cage, he starts the knock knock again.
Here’s a video:
[ame="https://youtu.be/OqEs0UM4KAs"]Knock Knock - It's Hormonal Cairo - YouTube[/ame]
I don’t normally let him go on for this long, but just for the video this time….
As for what he mutters when I ask him to step up, it’s the same things my partner might say to him when he’s being ‘naughty’ (somewhere he’s not supposed to be, chewing something he’s not supposed to chew, biting when he’s not supposed to bite us, etc.). So there’s a clear correlation in Cairo’s brain between a negative situation and those words.
To add to the mix, my partner suspects that Cairo views me as a potential mate. When I was overseas for a work trip for one week, Cairo got really aggressive with my partner - lunging and biting. The moment I came back, Cairo tried to regurgitate for the first time for me. He’s not possessive of me (yet); my partner and I can interact with each other just fine in front of him, and Cairo is happy to just quietly sit next to my partner sometimes. But I definitely don’t want to lead him on.
What do you recommend I do? The guy is knock knocking more than half the time he’s out of his cage. So it’s almost a few hours total of knocking going on. Sometimes he’ll calm down and just preen. Sometimes he’s too agitated to even do his trick training.
Here’s the measures we’ve taken:
- No fruits (except on the weekend)
- 12-14 hours bedtime
- Touching his body is limited to training (so we can handle him at the vet - touching his keel bone or his chest as if listening to his heart and lungs, flipping him onto his back for a blood draw, opening his wings to examine, etc) and for harness training (if we don’t keep up practicing touching/harnessing him, he becomes hand-shy)
- All food is not warm or mashed, just chopped or whole pieces (we’ve read reducing starchy stuff helps with hormones, so brown/red rice is limited to 1-2x a week)
- Toys are all chewing related or sound/color related (nothing he can fixate on)
- No boxes or dark areas (we had a foraging box in his cage for a week only a few months ago)
- I put him aside to calm down if he starts trying to regurgitate
I don’t know if a factor is that we haven’t been able to flying as often. We used to go 2-3x a week. Now, it’s been reduced to once a week. And yes, the clever boy KNOWS. I’ve shared a video on the forum before of him asking to go fly-fly when we were having breakfast at the park. Last weekend, as we reached the park where we fly, I asked him, “Cairo, do you want to go fly-fly?” And the clever boy replied, “FLY-FLY!!!” (Mind you, this bird doesn’t ever repeat what I say.) So I’m almost wondering if he just doesn’t have the means to expend the energy of ekkies who fly kilometres every day.
Surely knock knocking most of the time can't be healthy for him....