u/EmDickinson

Rosie and Angel are continuing to get to know each other! Keeping Rosie from being a bit too forward in welcoming her sister to the flock has been kind of difficult due to her being fully-flighted. So far offering both of them a whole clementine has been the safest and most effective way to monitor their socialization while I’m at home by myself, since my partner and I have different schedules.

Rosie is definitely quite a bit more interested in making physical contact than Angel, and we are trying to discourage that without causing any antagonism when we are redirecting them away from each other. I’ve always thought Rosie was at least partially parent-raised, and watching her level of interest in Angel makes me think I’m right. Angel behaves a lot more like a hand-raised cockatoo than Rosie does, clearly preferring humans over other birds whereas Rosie has always seemed to prefer birds to unknown humans. This is another reason we are continuing to take it slow, since Rosie is more forward in their interactions and Angel is shyer.

Angel’s plucking seems to have stopped since bringing her home, and she’s gaining a lot of feathers back. So far we haven’t been able to identify what her trigger is, but are monitoring closely so that we can identify her triggers if she starts up again.

We brought home a new cockatoo a few weeks ago. Last week they finally started sharing a room (post-quarantine and testing), and today they had their first longer hangout session in our living room. Angel doesn’t seem to be able to fly due to a long history of feather destructive behavior (which you can’t really see in the photo but is pretty obvious from other angles), but she also doesn’t seem to be making any attempts. She is already growing back feathers in some of her plucked areas, so we are hopeful that the habit can be seriously curbed (and ideally stopped entirely). Today’s social session ended with pinecone destruction, and Rosie preening one of Angel’s feathers briefly. I am so glad they’ve been getting along and showing that they’re curious about each other 🥰

Adding to your flock is always a risk, because not all birds will like each other. There’s risk of aggression, uptick in hormonal behavior, and increase or first occurrence of feather destructive behavior. So far we haven’t seen any of that, but we will keep monitoring for it and working with our vets on next steps.

Rosie (~9yo) and Ollie, our (arthritic) 25yo Sun Conure, enjoying some flock tv time today. We don’t have them out at the same time, but we always try to roll Ollie’s cage out for social time when Rosie is out (she knows she’s not allowed to land on his cage.) Unfortunately, we can’t do that in the reverse because Ollie is fearless, and attempts to land on Rosie’s cage if he has access to it. So Ollie’s out of cage time is 100% solo while Rosie stays in the bird room. They both express interest and affection for each other, and Rosie loves to stand on my shoulder and preen my cheeks while I’m giving Ollie head scritches through his cage, so it’s more out of an abundance of caution due to beak size differences.