So, we have successfully minimized attack flying over the last few weeks. We just got back into town after a weekend away and we did have a bit of a flare up. Every time I go into the kitchen, and especially down the hall I was getting "attack flown" but no actual biting.

So, this is progress!! Another side-effect of progress? She now flies to G every time she has to poop...and then poops ON him. I find this kind of funny, especially since the focus seems to be shifting off of him and on to me. She seeks me out for affection and food now and she seeks him out for...pooping.

We're going to take this as an opportunity to potty train her on command. She knows "poop" as something that we say when she actually poops, and I have been able to get her to do it on command when I know for a fact she has to go a few times already.

Also, while we were gone she didn't scream at all, according to my mom who was our bird-sitter and lives downstairs from us. Of course, what do you think the first thing Coconut did once we got home was? Started screaming. She is now screaming in disgust at the empty food bowl which she has flung to the bottom of her cage in disdain. Poor, starving, unloved, pitiful thing. (she was fed at her usual time this morning and will be fed again at her usual time tonight. The food-dish throwing does not make the process any speedier, though she seems to think it does.

Edit: I forgot to mention that when G picked her up to put her back in the cage she knew what was about to happen and said, "Shit!".

Apparently she has said this in relation with going back into the cage more than once. It's VERY HARD not to laugh at these things when you don't want to encourage them.

Last night G and I were having a deep conversation about adoption (as in, adopting a human baby/child) in our bedroom where we usually do not take Coconut but she hadn't been out of the cage all day at that point so we kicked the fur kids out and brought her in there with us. The whole time she sat on my chest, totally ignoring G. She preened my hands which she only ever does to G and was very calm and affectionate. It was sooooooooooo nice to have all of us coexisting and connecting with no TV or computer and no face biting or other bird angst. I'm feeling really good about our progress with her. It's amazing how much little changes make a difference.

It's been a little over a week since we made some changes in Coconut's lifestyle in the hopes that she'd stop attacking me.

1) We started turning the light off in her room at night. When we first brought her home this terrified her and she screamed all night. Now most of our nights are quiet. Sometimes she wakes up and screams but almost always will stop on her own. The first night she didn't scream at all. Since then she has had maybe two screaming fits at night and we ignored the first one. The second one was on the third night in a row I hadn't gotten any sleep so I had G go in there and calm her down, which I knew would not help our cause, but it did work.

2) She's back to an all fresh diet. As I said, G had been feeding her increasing amounts of seed while he was handling her feeding as I was in school. She was also getting fresh food in addition to seed every day but she was less and less interested in the fresh. We tapered it and cut it out after a few days as she seemed all about the variety of fresh food we were offering. Things she would have thrown to the bottom of her cage if there had been seed available.

So, at this point she'd been getting about 14 hours of darkness as our nights are long and our days are short here. And she'd been getting fresh food and all of her favorites: yams, broccoli, frozen "gumbo mix" veggies with okra which she LOVES, fresh chopped zucchini, cauliflower and carrots. We discovered that she loves yams best when they have been microwaved instead of boiled. I hate microwaving her food but it helps G get her fed on time in the mornings.

3) G started doing all the stuff she doesn't like: cleaning her cage, mostly. I was the one bringing her treats, spoon feeding her baby food etc. Now I have good reason to spoil her to some extent which is good.

4) We finally turned the TV off during the night last night. She slept without a single peep. Her behavior is less aggressive toward me SLIGHTLY. I have not given her the chance to fly at my head until today.

However, the other day, G went into the bedroom and closed the door to get something while keeping the cat and dog corralled and the moment the door shut she attacked my hair. Sometimes she does that for fun, even to G, but I felt it could easily have been my ear she grabbed instead of my hair. She just wanted to manipulate G into coming back into the room.

I have the day off to go run some errands which I am going to do once her majesty is dry, so I took the opportunity to spend some time with her doing something she likes. She has never attacked me during shower time so we tried it today. I had to leave the bathroom and come back with towels and when I did she flew to my head violently but didn't actually bite me. She's now perched on my shoulder, shunning any sort of warm towel and thus shivering, but she's not perched across the room on G's chair like she normally is when she dries off.

I think we're making progress. I hadn't really realized the extent of the rift that grew between us while I was in school. I was spending time with her on some nights and weekends, but only when G was around. She still screams when he's not in the room but I am, and I suspect we'd still have a problem at this moment if I'd just taken her out of the cage and plopped her on my shoulder.

But, in reflecting on one year of cockatoo ownership, I realized that everything with these birds takes time and repetition. They become masters of routine. It takes time to get into a bad routine and it takes time to reset it into something positive.


This was taken before Christmas, featuring my handsome husband G!

So Coconut has recently learned how to pick up her dish and throw it on the floor of her cage. This generally happens when it contains something she decides she does not want at that moment. We have found her on several occasions picking the bowl up off the floor of the cage and flinging it repeatedly.

Just now she managed to unscrew the safety ring that held up her newest and fanciest toy, managed to get the toy off of it and then get the ring off of the cage bar. The toy is now at the bottom of the cage and she's playing with the ring. So glad I spent like $20 for that ring, lol.

The other day she got out of her cage, we think because we forgot to latch it but I have been vigilant ever since to make sure she hasn't figured out how to unlatch it herself. She's taken to perching on the top of the blinds which is VERBOTEN because it's like 12 feet in the air and G can barely reach her to get her down. After she comes down from such lofty heights she can be an aggressive bitch so she gets put right back in the cage when she does that.

She's also taken to attacking me for no reason, especially when I leave the room she's in (she'll fly, land on my head and bite me). I suspect it's because I haven't been spending much time with her. I had swine flu a few weeks ago and did not want to go near her lest she contract it too, and with school I am not around a lot in the evenings. In January things return to normal and in fact G might be going back to school so her care will fall largely to me, I hope it will be a bonding experience for us.

It occurred to me today that Coconut hasn't had a seizure in a long time!! We've kept her off nuts entirely and while she has had some seizures since discontinuing any nut-containing products, they became way less frequent and now they seem to have stopped all together. At least for the time being. YAY!

I was going through my herb drawer the other day and found some herbs I'd gotten for Coconut's cleansing process as she detoxed after living in her old crappy cage and I thought, "I should make her some of this stuff!" and then I realized: She is totally detoxed. Her beak looks wonderful, she is playing with toys on her own, her feathers are all growing in totally normal and she is spending more and more time out of her collar without incident.

PLUS:




She's molting. Today she is in one of her sweet, adorable moods. So far she hasn't shown a lot of discomfort or attitude resulting from her first molt as a member of our family.

Here is a feather she shed a few weeks ago. It was one of a few that gave me major cause for concern when we first brought her home. You can't really tell because of the flash, but the shaft of the feather is discolored in places. Looking at it now, it looked like she had so many stress bars that the thin fibers of the feathers broke off, making it look super malformed.

Some pictures for your viewing pleasure (made relevant by the inclusion of Coconut's most recent portrait)




This is my dog, Lilah!

Today at the used bookstore I scored a copy of Parrot Tricks in brand-new condition for $8. It sells new for $20. Sweet!

Coconut is on the up-portion of one of her cycles. She's off the chamomile and out of the collar for part of the day. When she gets frantic we put her back in it. So now every day she gets time out of the collar. So far this is working well. She is her lovely, snuggly self (instead of her terror-incarnate self) these days and we are all enjoying it. Leaving the TV and light on at night has cut back dramatically on her night-time screaming and doesn't seem to have impacted her sleep.

Anyway, having a calm, sweet bird is wonderful, I was just posting to share some happy thoughts on the subject :D

I know all parrots are potentially stubborn and temperamental but...I feel like I need a special book for "how to train completely bossy primadonna parrots".

Coconut has had a FANTASTIC week. We have been leaving the light and the TV on for her at night and almost NO screaming. She fussed a little bit right after we said goodnight but that was all. She didn't even wake up in the middle of the night to scream. Last night I tried turning the TV off and leaving the light on and she was not having that. My electric bill might scream even louder than she does. We are working on a night-light solution.

Her step-up skills are getting even worse. She will not step up for me at all no matter where she is except from G's hand, so we've been working on that. It's hard for me to think about trust building with her when I feel like I'm not getting anywhere, but I am trying to be patient. Instead of seeing improvements in her behavior at this point, she's getting worse. I feel like it must be because we are enabling bad behavior and I'm trying to be really really aware of those instances and have been working to change them before they occur. Maybe that accounts for her worsening attitude, I don't know.

It's always so much more of a bummer when we've spent great time together bonding and then she becomes more aggressive toward me. I am still able to handle her, but if I need her to step up I have to have G around to do it. If anyone has any advice for me here I'd love to hear it. I feel like all of the stuff I've read is getting me nowhere and all of the learning I've done about training has been in vain. Maybe I'm just not being patient or emotionally detached enough?

Anyway, tonight she has been a complete monster. G finally put her on the floor because she was screaming incessantly and biting him for no apparent reason (we were all sitting on the couch and she was just hanging out on his knee, her favorite perch, then she ran toward his chest and bit his hand) and I went to ask her to step-up, thinking that she'd appreciate the gesture and start associating step-up with good things and instead of stepping up, she ran around my hand and BIT my toe!!

What am I doing wrong here guys? I know she's afraid of me and I don't know how to undo that. Having to put her in the collar as much as we have has traumatized her. For the last 2 months G has been the only one to put on her collar, I leave the room to prevent her from associating that with me at all.

I just need one task to focus on with her; one set of steps. I love to try to emphasize things I know she likes to do, but even that changes from day to day. One day she loves her bell, the next day she hates it. One day she loves "elevator rides", the next she clings to the hand and then flies away.

Last night as G and I were getting ready for bed we heard Durga screaming in a way I've never heard before. We came in and found that she had gotten her head and both wings through three separate spaces in her cage.... I think she got her head stuck first and tried to use her wings to push herself free and got them stuck in the process.

She slipped out from this position easily and after a good 20 minutes of all three of us being really shaken, we were able to figure out that her shoulder was a little bruised, either from where she banged it against the bar or from bending it to free her wing. She also broke a feather at the skin. It didn't bleed much, but it was right next to 4 new blood feathers so that was a very narrowly missed disaster. We got what we could of the broken feather out, set her up in her old cage with a low perch, vitamins in her food and some millet for her trouble. Instead of utilizing said perch she slept clinging to the side of the top of the cage so she could be as high up as possible.

This morning she is fine, I checked on her throughout the night to make sure her wing didn't begin bleeding again.

I feel really bad, we should never have let her stay in that cage. Now we know better. Thank god she is okay.

You know what is really awesome? Styptic swabs. I got them at the pet store. They were originally 9 bucks but I got to use G's employee discount and got them at about half price. There are a bunch of them per case and we use them when Coconut wounds herself and bleeds more than a little bit (luckily she is an excellent clotter), it's also good for dogs and cats so I keep it handy during nail trims. I used it to make sure Durga's broken feather had stopped bleeding and it helped me clean the area up. It looked like there was a somewhat recent older injury to that feather or the one below it from her night terror's so it was already a bit scabbed. Durga is an extremely clumsy bird and it's always really hard to tell what is going on because she drags her tail through her pureed carrots all the time and gets stained orange, and old blood stains are hard to get off of feathers from night terrors she had months ago. She hates being sprayed and so far isn't into baths or showers. But the styptic swabs are less messy than the powders or pastes and easier to clean off of feathers by far, so I worry less about the birds ingesting it. The down-side is they are very painful on an open wound so we only use them if we absolutely have to. I'd rather let Coconut bleed a little bit from tearing off her scab than use one...if she gives herself a new wound then I usually have to resort to a swab.

It's been a crazy few weeks. My job has been pretty challenging and exhausting and we had to put my mom's dog down a few days ago which disrupted the flow of things for a while both before and afterwards. Things are getting back to normal.

Life with Coconut is settling out into a routine: She still spends some time in the collar but she spends an almost equal amount of time out of it. She seems to always have a small wound on her chest but as long as it doesn't get bigger, we leave her to her own devices. When it does, we put her back in the collar. She has her good days and her bad days. Yesterday we learned a new game: I was walking down the hall with her on my hand and I was moving my hand up and down slightly as if to a beat. She would in turn bounce up and down as if she were dancing and when I stopped, she stopped. When I lifted my hand, she lifted her head and when I dropped my hand she dropped her head. We did this going higher and lower until my hand was all the way in the air and she was on her tip-toes, wings outspread and crest raised. Now when I say "WHEEE!" she knows what game we're going to play and she has asked me to play it a few times by raising her crest and standing on tip-toes. It's freaking adorable.

Her beak has been getting really long lately, the plan was to take her to get it trimmed tomorrow at the pet store but today during one of her flights she broke the tip off, shortening it by 1/4 inch or maybe a little more. She doesn't seem to be in pain, the piece that broke off was needle-thin and probably did not have any nerves. She just doesn't seem to want to wear it down at all. We have been giving her lots of chewables but she is more likely to use them against the side of her beak than the tip.

I am afraid at some point we will need surgical intervention for her ingrown chest feather, the first one. She keeps fussing with the follicle and I am watching it closely for infection or feather regrowth, neither of which is happening, but when it does I doubt the feather is going to grow in even as well as it did last time because she keeps messing with it.

Never a dull moment but life is always interesting and entertaining with Coconut around!