In the past I’ve written about the challenges of spending enough quality time with two parrots who hate each other. I’m happy to report that we have reached a decent detente for now.
I still wouldn’t trust Mika and Stewie on the same playstand together, but it’s now possible to have a bird on opposite shoulders at the same time. I still have to be on high alert, ready to move one or the other off me very quickly, but even when they realize that the other is just a few inches away on the other side of my head, both birds can just sit and chill. That’s huge progress from two years ago, when I would have been bitten bloody from both sides.
That doesn’t mean they’re ready to be buddies yet.
I took this video of Stewie over the weekend:
Even with the sound off, an astute observer of sun conure body language can tell the precise moment that Mika chose to fly over to us. He’s just hanging out, then he opens his beak in an aggressive gesture; once he figures out he probably can’t reach Mika, he turns his attention to gnawing furiously on the perch beneath him. That’s Stewie’s classic displaced aggression gesture. Whenever he’s mad about something, he reaches down and bites the snot out of his perch. Thank goodness he got out of the habit of screaming (or trying to jump on me in order to bite ME).
Patience pays off for all involved. I’ve watched how careful attention you’ve paid to your birds’ body language over the past year. They are lucky to have you. 😉
My sun conure does the same aggressive thing whenever she sees my 8 year old cat. I closely monitor the cat at all times, but she is so afraid of the birds that she will literally run from my 100 gram ball of feathers. My sun conure will bang her beak against her end table and bite the towel she is on and the edge of said table if she so much as sees the cat, even if the cat is 10 feet away. God help you if you are holding the sun conure and the cat jumps up on your lap without looking first…!!
You have done a great job with those two. We find there are some birds that no matter how they have been raised or how many birds they have been introduced to while being hand raised… once they bond to someone, they get very protective and can’t stand any other birds near their person.