Post by siobhan on Jun 1, 2017 13:03:19 GMT -5
I would have sworn I could tell you every tiny detail of every one of my birds in appearance and personality, likes and dislikes, but somehow I missed noticing that Jade has a ton of stress bars on the underside of her tail until this morning.
She was sitting on the boing above my head, pulling my hair (that's her version of preening me) and I looked up to speak to her and saw them. Clyde was, of course, on my hand, so I peered at his tail to compare and he doesn't have a single one. How did I not notice those? Jade doesn't act stressed, and a parrot-blog-writer friend of mine who is also a parrot advocate (and saves my sanity regularly!) said the bars weren't new. They form in the shaft with the feather, and if I thought back to her last molt, and thus when those feathers grew, I could probably figure out what had stressed her so much.
All the birds in that room molted at once in March, and March is also when things at work got very, very stressful. We changed our whole way of doing things, we attended tons of meetings while also ramping up the amount of work we do and how we do it, and it was insane and a very difficult adjustment. I'm still adjusting, really. But Jade, in spite of being my least cuddly bird, is also my most empathic. She KNOWS when something is wrong and she not only knows, she actually cares. Clyde doesn't care as long as it doesn't keep him from getting what he wants, Benjy is oblivious, the tiels are only focused on each other most of the time, Rocky is a total narcissist and Ringo just wants me to stop being a drag and cheer up and give her some meal worms.
I feel kind of bad, in one way, that Jade picked up on my stress that much that it turned her tail feathers into zebra stripes, but on the other hand, it's nice that she cares that much. That is honestly the ONLY thing that it could be. Nothing has changed in her cage, her room, her food dish or her daily activities that could have stressed her.
She was sitting on the boing above my head, pulling my hair (that's her version of preening me) and I looked up to speak to her and saw them. Clyde was, of course, on my hand, so I peered at his tail to compare and he doesn't have a single one. How did I not notice those? Jade doesn't act stressed, and a parrot-blog-writer friend of mine who is also a parrot advocate (and saves my sanity regularly!) said the bars weren't new. They form in the shaft with the feather, and if I thought back to her last molt, and thus when those feathers grew, I could probably figure out what had stressed her so much.
All the birds in that room molted at once in March, and March is also when things at work got very, very stressful. We changed our whole way of doing things, we attended tons of meetings while also ramping up the amount of work we do and how we do it, and it was insane and a very difficult adjustment. I'm still adjusting, really. But Jade, in spite of being my least cuddly bird, is also my most empathic. She KNOWS when something is wrong and she not only knows, she actually cares. Clyde doesn't care as long as it doesn't keep him from getting what he wants, Benjy is oblivious, the tiels are only focused on each other most of the time, Rocky is a total narcissist and Ringo just wants me to stop being a drag and cheer up and give her some meal worms.
I feel kind of bad, in one way, that Jade picked up on my stress that much that it turned her tail feathers into zebra stripes, but on the other hand, it's nice that she cares that much. That is honestly the ONLY thing that it could be. Nothing has changed in her cage, her room, her food dish or her daily activities that could have stressed her.
