*sigh* Another season of cockatoo insanity. Having a Moluccan Cockatoo as a pet is a dodgy subject. I am rethinking my previous position of how captive bred hand fed cockatoos make the most wonderful pets. I'm afraid that at least for females, it isn't that great an idea.
Every year about this time, C2 starts to go insane. She is a female cockatoo hatched in my garage and hand raised by me. Apparently, she is having the serious hornies and doesn't know what to do about it. Therefore, she gets utterly frustrated and begins "over-preening" which is a euphemism for plucking her feathers out and then ripping her chest open. For the past two years this has resulted in surgery to repair the damage she has caused herself. This year we thought we'd circumvent that and give her anti hormone shots BEFORE the over preening began, in hopes that would short circuit things. Wrong.
So tonight the E collar went back on the bird. I have no idea how long she will be on the bottom of the cage on her back screaming and trying to get the collar off. But if it doesn't stay on, big problems.
So, why don't we just get her a male and let her be done with it? Great idea, but there are serious problems with that approach. The first being that C2 is a very small cockatoo. A normal size male is almost 2x her size. Cockatoos in captivity often undergo a strange phenomenon where the male wishes to breed, and if the female is not receptive, he tries to force her into the nest box, often resulting in ripping the female's beak off. The second problem is the idea of possibly breeding an animal that has this type of psychological problem.
So here we are in our yearly dilemma. What's worse is that we're leaving on Friday. The house sitter will likely be ok, and will have the number for the vet, but it's still an unhappy prospect.
Time to go check the bird screaming on the bottom of the cage again and hope I don't lose a finger.
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