Post by Casey on Sept 15, 2013 23:16:08 GMT -8
^ This bird, she sure is something. she has figured out that almost everything makes a nest. over the last year she had laid 21 eggs. she was VERY creative in what she would turn into a nest and it became a mental challenge for us to find a way to stump her. she nearly won each and every time.
she cant have the following, because she had at one point, turned it into nest material:
sunflower seeds with shells (we buy shell-less now)
spray millet
cotton twine
rope perches
any plastic but super hard plastics--like acrylic
paper
any other natural perches aside from the debarked manzanita from the petstore.
cardboard
any fiber type of material that she could shred
only certain fabrics got away from her beak even lol she was very very clever in what she would turn into nest material.
however, we finally figured out the real trigger for the hormones, after this whole dang time.
her cage bottom.
before, it was a deep brown pan. it had a rim around it, about 5-6 inches high and she would constantly turn that into a nest.
well, we got rid of it, zip-tied her old grate to the bottom part of the cage for a secure closed bottom, and slid in a sheet of acrylic for the bottom.
now cage cleaning is a breeze, it's secure, aaannnnd! no more hormones!!! she's not presenting herself to us anymore, she's not huddling in her cage corners anymore, and so far, it's been 3 weeks of no hormonal signs since we've switched her over! this whole dang time, the trigger for her nestiness was the deep cage pan.
but, this is what we did with her cage:
this is the deep pan from before, you can see her sitting on the more recent egg (4 weeks ago, a week before we switched the cage bottom, she had bashed that egg in a little after we switched her over)
and then with the new acrylic bottom
it may not look all that fancy, but it works, it's secure, it's safe, and it's soooo easy to clean. slide it out, dump off loose seed into the garbage, then scrub it down in the bathtub and dry it off and slide it back in, takes like ten minutes
Woohoo!