Hi im new here and find your information excellent :hap:

 

I have a budgie which im not sure of its age but ive owned him 1 month, since yesterday he has started pulling his feathers out around his breast and now under his wings, i cant see anything else wrong with him, he seems happy and is very friendly, he is kept in a cage when we are out approx 1hour per day at all other times he is free to fly the house.

I am very concerned about the bald patch he is causing (can supply photo if helps) . he has plenty of toys and play with them all the time.

 

any ideas why he would start doing this? i phoned a local vet who said he is bored! no way! he has a better life than me.

 

Thanks for any help

Hi tiki and welcome. It sounds like he is either bored or stressed. Have you changed anything in his environment recently? Sometimes feather plucking can become a behavioural problem. Some people have hung feather dusters with real feathers in the birds cage, which sometimes works as the budgies attention turns to those feathers. However if you do hang up a duster, make sure there are no parts that could harm your bird.

I'm just looking at this veterinarian book here, and it say that all underlying problems (such as stress or boredom) should be addressed first.

It might be a good idea to just get him checked by a vet because some medical illnesses can contribute to feather picking, these diseases can be Endocrine diseases, infectious diseases, poor nutrition and food allergies, So what do you feed your bird?

It also suggests here that birds that have been moved into a new home or are handled excessively can become stressed and become prone to feather-picking. How do you handle you bird?

 

How large is your cage? Where is it positioned in your house? Does he have a friend?

 

Hopefully someone else with more experiance will be able to help you too.

With budgies, it is rarely a behavioral issue and is more often a disease/parasite such as giardia. Another thing that can cause it is heavy metal poisoning.

 

Any time a bird is feather plucking the very first step is to take it in to an avian vet for testing. You'll want to dismiss all possibilities of this being a medical issue before treating it as a behavioral one. Call an avian vet (not a regular vet) and get an appointment. If they tell you it's just boredom and don't urge you to get the bird seen, they know very little about what they're doing and you should find a different vet.

 

In the meantime, make sure your bird has no access to metal objects that could be rusted or ones that contain lead or zinc.

 

Sometimes nutritional deficiencies factor in as well. What type of diet is your budgie on?

Thanks for the replies,

 

His cage is 60h,50w,40d (cm) which he stays in for no more than 1 hour a day.

Diet consists of seed apple grape and occasional carrot but not keen on it.

 

He will fly around the home but wont land or stand on my finger i need to be holding something (even a pen will do)

 

He has perches set up in a corner of every room which he always uses.

 

I have noticed he is scratching his head with his claws today, but not plucking as much as yesterday.

 

He loves attention, just look at him and his head turns asking for a stroke.

 

Thanks

Hi tiki Welcome to the forum.

 

It could be that he's just going through a moult (possibly his 1st) and if you've never seen it before it can be alarming if lots of feathers are falling out. If you're able to post pictures then that would help to determine if anything unusual is going on.