Yes, it’s that time of the year when our beloved companion birds begin to “sow their wild oats”! And while this behavior is perfectly normal, and it provides a good time to molt those old, worn out feathers to grow beautiful new feathers in, the behavior that comes along with this seasonal behavior can both cause great discomfort to our birds and drive us absolutely up the wall!

Although not all companion birds experience this phenomenon at the same time of the year, because of the circadian clock, each bird really does have its very own cycle. But for many of us, we will experience this behavior along with many of our fellow exotic bird-lovers.

There is a lot we can do to come to the aid of our birds to provide them comfort, and us as well, during this very frustrating and uncomfortable time.

First and foremost we need to have a good understanding of what biologically takes place in our birds during breeding season. An abundance of testosterone is produced by both the male and the female birds. So in order to help curtail this “mating and breeding behavior” we actually want to help lower the testosterone our birds’ systems are naturally producing.

Testosterone is synthesized from cholesterol, so this is one good reason we want to keep cholesterol at a healthy level in our birds. But let me explain what I mean, we can’t just take my statement at face value and say that we need to avoid cholesterol overall in order to prevent testosterone from being produced. It’s the lousy “LDL” cholesterol we want to avoid in our birds’ diet, such as fat obtained from the long chain fatty acids (LCFA’s) from meat or other animal products. We actually want to keep the healthy “HDL” good high density lipoproteins (normally obtained from plant fatty acids, medium chain fatty acids (MCFA’s) in our birds’ diets. Our birds need the good “HDL’s” in order to transport oxygen and other nutrients throughout the body.  The brain which consists of mostly “fat cells” especially needs these healthy “good fats” in the form of Omegas obtained from certain plant oils. And by raising the “HDL’s” and offering healthy Omegas in the form of *Palm Fruit and Coconut oil during breeding season we will help calm our birds’ overall behavior,  while also providing the “good fats” they need for healthy overall nutritional support and proper brain function. However, I must caution you, DO NOT use hemp and flax oil in high amounts during breeding season, these are high in nutrients that actually help produce testosterone, keep them at minimal levels, just enough to keep your bird calm, cool and collected. At any other time of the year these are perfectly safe oils to use, but not during this time period known as “Seasonal Hormonal Irregularity (SHI)”.

Let me explain the delicate balance just a bit.

At any other time of the year you want to be sure your feathered friend is receiving enough of these highly beneficial fatty acids to keep its system running smoothly, carrying enough essential nutrients to all of the vital organs of the body as well as a good supply of oxygen to the brain. You can feed these oils fairly liberally to exotic birds during off-mating season periods because they consume a good amount in the wild by way of the fatty acids in the fruits and leafy vegetation they consume as well as the nuts and seed they eat in the wild. In captivity they are at our mercy and we need to make sure we are supplying a fair source of these fatty acids through quality sources such as hemp seed and flax seed oils.

But during the mating season, otherwise known as “Seasonal Hormonal Irregularity“, we need to back off just a tad because these oils also provide the nutrients that supply the basis to manufacture testosterone which will cause our birds to become more frustrated and may lead to more aggressive flock behavior or even feather destruction. However, we still need to make sure our birds receive enough of the Omega 3′s to help soothe and calm their nerves, because this is exactly what the Omega 3′s do, they have an overall effect on our bird’s emotional health. So while the nutrients can, and do, help to manufacture testosterone, they also play a vital role in balancing our birds’ moods. It’s a tricky proposition and one you have to balance carefully.

I suggest, during mating season, cutting the amount you normally feed at least in half and see how that goes. You might want to discontinue the hemp seed oil all together during mating season and offer only the flax seed oil during this time. Resume the hemp seed oil / flax seed oil combination after mating season is well over. My typical recommendation for hemp seed oil / flax seed oil is a 1.5 part to 1 part ratio respectively. But regardless, whether you are feeding the combination of the two oils during off-mating season, or you are feeding only the flax seed oil during mating season, below are the feeding guidelines, just remember to cut them at least in half during mating season:

You can add it on top of their food. (Please DO NOT add this to their drinking water! It will only coagulate and cause a mess and if you don’t wash the water bowl out really, really well, it could go rancid.) And about how much will you be using? Just a drop for small Budgies once a day is more than enough. You can probably get away with giving only a drop every other day.For parakeets such as the Ringneck and similar size birds a drop or two daily will do. Moving on up to larger birds, say Conures, Pionus and the like, maybe 3 or 4 drops a day on top of their food. Then for African Greys, small Cockatoos (and even the small Macaws) and such, 5 drops to a 1/16^th of a teaspoon a day. Larger Cockatoos you could give from 1/16^th to 1/8^th of a teaspoon a day depending on skin and feather quality. Then the large Macaws you can give 1/8^th to ¼ teaspoon daily depending on skin and feather quality. Always pay close attention to the skin and feather condition. If all is looking good and their energy level is normal, meaning “active” and not over active or on the other end, lethargic, then you are probably feeding the right amount of oil. Feeding oils will give your bird an extra boost in energy so be on the lookout for that emotional effect. (If you have a bird that is abnormally lethargic, consult your licensed avian veterinarian, this is not normal.)

*(Palm fruit oil is high in beta-carotene and naturally synthesizes into vitamin A during the metabolic process in our birds’ systems, which is normally very good for our companion birds, and I highly recommend feeding this oil on an occasional basis. However, there is some, though very scarce, research that indicates that vitamin A may contribute to the synthesis of testosterone. If this is accurate research we would want to avoid feeding Palm oil during the breeding season and feed only Coconut oil as a replacement to Palm oil, avoiding all other types of oils except in low doses, just enough to keep your bird calm. I would take each bird on an individual basis and watch their behavior closely. If you witness your bird becoming aggressive or cranky after you have fed Palm oil, simply discontinue feeding it until after breeding season has lapsed.)

Anyway, this cholesterol I mentioned above, comes from cells in the ovaries in females and from cells in the testes of males. These cells synthesize and secrete the androgens, androstenedione and dihydroepiandosterone (DHEA). Small amounts of testosterone are also secreted by the adrenal glands, but most of it comes from the testes in males and the ovaries in females.
The amount of testosterone produced and secreted is controlled by a circulating luteinizing hormone (LH), as well as a follicle stimulation hormone (FSH)(not to be confused with feather follicles in any way, this hormone is strictly concerned with the female’s ovaries ability to reproduce). These two hormones are secreted by the pituitary gland and are regulated by the hypothalamus gland located deep within the brain. This is a self-regulating process and is drastically affected by physiological as well as environmental conditions. These hormones primarily regulate ovulation in female birds although it does have an effect on testosterone levels in females as well, but it primarily regulates testosterone in males.

The pineal gland integrates the photoperiod by which a living creature regulates its life cycle, it is responsible for the circadian rhythm, and it produces melatonin and it is that hormone that carries both the LH, the FSH as well as prolactin a luteotrpic hormone (LTH) that is a protein-like substance and an important regulator of the immune system.  Prolactin serves an important function in overall growth of all body parts but also plays an important role in blood coagulation as well.

If you have ever wondered what the biological connection is between breeding season and a good molt, this is the reason.

Foods that are high in the “B” vitamins, but specifically B5, B6 and B12 as well as foods high in zinc, will actually increase libido, in both female and male birds, because they help in the production of testosterone. These foods would include bananas, figs, asparagus, fish, poultry, meat of any kind, eggs, basil, and literally all nuts and seeds. It may seem like you are starving your bird during breeding season by reducing or removing these foods, but keep in mind that many birds will be “love-sick” anyway and may actually reduce their food intake naturally. While birds may eat voraciously prior to actual breeding season, they may actually reduce their food intake upon the actual breeding time period in order to prepare for the activity ahead, mating and then later during the production of eggs and then brooding over them. So reducing their food intake is not a mean or harmful thing to do, and it may just help with lowering the amount of testosterone produced giving the bird, and you, a more peaceful and calm environment in which to live during this potentially stressful time.

Other foods we want to avoid feeding during this time are those high in the amino acid “Arginine” because it increases the gas known as “nitric oxide”. This gas expands, or dilates, the veins and arteries which actually helps increase the libido by allowing more blood to flow through the veins and arteries creating a pulsating, vibrating or “quivering” sensation. I have discussed this particular amino acid in great detail in a couple other blog posts so I will not go into detail here, rather you can just click on the hi-lighted words “Amino Acids” and “Arginine” to learn more about the effects of this essential, but cautionary amino acid on your bird’s diet and overall health.

However, during Seasonal Hormonal Irregularity (“SHI”) there are food items and delicacies you can add to your bird’s diet to help prevent the production of testosterone levels too, or just overall balance out the hormonal levels.

Yams (although these are high in Arginine so watch your individual bird carefully when feeding this food for any increased breeding/mating behavioral signs), the orange-red variety, are a natural phyto-estrogen and will aid in the balancing of hormones. And once again, yams are high in beta-carotene which as already mentioned, converts to vitamin A in the body’s own synthesizing process.

Dandelion greens are also touted as hormone balancing because they contain taraxerol and taraxasterol powerful triterpenoids that are anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and anti-tumor as well.  In addition they are extremely high in beta-carotene. But don’t use Dandelion in overabundance as it is high in vitamin K, a powerful blood coagulant.

Red clover seed as well as red clover blossoms are excellent in aiding to balance hormonal levels in both male and female birds. If you find that your bird doesn’t like the whole red clover seed, simply grind the seed in a coffee bean grinder (after you have thoroughly washed the grinder) and mix the fine powder in with other foods your bird likes. I haven’t met a bird yet that doesn’t like the organic dried red clover blossoms (available from Mountain Rose Herbs).

Organic dried hibiscus flower petals are good for curtailing testosterone production too. You can feed them dry just as you would feed the dried red clover flowers; just add them in to your bird’s food. Or, if you would like you can steep a tea, let it cool, and give it to your bird as its drinking water a couple of days of the week. But don’t go overboard with it, just a couple of days out of each week throughout breeding season, not every day.

Generally foods that are high in the essential amino acid Lysine may help curtail the libido by constricting the veins and arteries to some degree, having the opposite effect of Arginine.

Another great treatment for curtailing testosterone production is the Young Living essential oil, “Clary Sage”. Once in the system it actually turns into estrogen. And of course we understand that when estrogen is at play, testosterone is not and libido is calmed down. You can either offer a drop or two on top of your birds food (yes, it is perfectly safe to feed, especially if you are offering a pure, organic blend such as the Young Living brand). Or, if you prefer, you can atomize it through an infuser at regular intervals of 2 minutes on and one hour off throughout a 24 hour period. If you find that even that is too strong for you and your household, reduce the time to 1 minute on and 1 hour off. Don’t infuse it 24/7 though, that would cause an overabundance of estrogen to be produced in both your birds and you!

Some people have found Bach Flower Essences to be of help with “SHI” and have suggested the use of “Cerato, Wild Oat and Scleranthus” added directly to their drinking water. While I have used Bach Flower Essences on occasion, I have not used these three in combination specifically for hormonal balance. But I would not hesitate to try them if the other methods I have listed failed to provide the relief my birds need during breeding season.

Now I wish to move on to another, but very important subject matter regarding your bird during breeding season and that is the topic regarding your bird’s environment! This includes not only your bird’s overall space (room, lighting, temperature, and humidity), but also the inside of its cage and the bowls and toys inside of the cage.

The canopy of the Rain Forest in which most of our exotic companion birds live is actually drier than most other parts of the overall forest. But most likely during breeding season it becomes more humid as the plants, flowers and trees begin to bloom. It is for this reason that I suggest, in order to curtail the breeding behavior that we attempt to “dry out” our birds’ space to some degree. I know this goes against everything we teach most of the time, but remember this is a specific time of year when we are attempting to avoid a particular kind of behavior and help our birds through a very uncomfortable and frustrating time of their seasonal life. So if you are running a humidifier I suggest you dial it back a little, don’t turn it off, just dial it back a tad, until breeding season is completely over and done with. This will help “click off” that part of the brain, the hypothalamus, and trick it into thinking that breeding season does not really exist, at least mentally. It doesn’t mean that the physiological aspects of your bird’s body, the molting and the growing in of new feathers, will stop all together, it just means that you are calming down the mental and emotional aspects of what your bird is experiencing.  And you might want to cool down your bird’s room a tad too. Remember, in the wild if the humidity raises, the temperature does too. So if you are lowering the humidity as well as the temperature, you are curtailing the kind of environment that a wild bird would key into during a natural breeding season.  You don’t have to make your bird’s room into a freezer, just turn the temperature down a degree or two, it will make all of the difference in the world.

Also during breeding season the days become longer, there are more daylight hours. So if there is any way possible don’t allow that to happen quite as fast as it’s actually happening in real life, make it happen at a slower pace so your bird can ease into the Spring and Summer months at a slower pace, gently easing your bird into the new season. If you can, allow your bird to take advantage of those longer days for a longer period of time, but at the same time don’t allow your bird to go to bed! WHAT? Yeah, that’s what I said. Because if you disrupt your bird’s normal sleeping pattern you will cause your bird’s entire physiological system to become off-balanced and that will have an effect on its ability to produce testosterone. So try to keep things dark around your bird’s room instead of allowing it to stay light at night, but keep your bird up later than usual to interrupt your bird’s overall system so it can’t produce the hormones it would normally produce, throw the system off-balance. You don’t have to keep your bird up another hour or two, just keep it up another 15 to 30 minutes, that’s enough to change your bird’s circadian cycle.

Next, consider the food bowls you have in your bird’s cage. Are they large enough to make nests in? If so you may want to consider replacing them with smaller bowls or bowls that be can’t climbed into and a nest be made in. Nesting instincts are very strong in these not-yet-truly-domesticated exotic birds and they will make use of anything they can to make a nice home for their potential eggs and potentially coming little nestlings.

And remember, what you consider a toy for your bird may be looked at with completely different eyes by your bird. Your bird may view that shreddable toy as nesting material. You might need to remove the toy from the cage and if necessary don’t replace it with anything until breeding season has passed. If you can’t find a toy that doesn’t have any shreddable objects on it, then leave your bird without a toy. As harsh as it may sound, doing without a “toy” for awhile isn’t going to kill your bird. But there are toys on the market that are not shreddable, it takes a lot of looking, but they are out there, you just have to be diligent in your search.

On the other hand, if your bird has not yet learned how to forage, leaving a shreddable toy in your bird’s cage during this time of year may prove to be a valuable time for your bird to learn how to forage and shred! Use this natural breeding, mating and nesting instinct for your bird to learn how to forage and shred. Then just simply remove the shredded materials before your bird has the opportunity to actually make a nest!

And finally hey, maybe you can spend more time with your bird teaching it how to come out of the cage, how to step up, or other new behaviors to take your bird’s mind off of its mating frustrations. That is unless spending more time with you brings out more breeding behaviors like regurgitating on you, showing its love and affection for you. If so, then “Polly” spending time alone in her cage may be the only solution during this time, unfortunately.

An entirely new concept for many of us may be avoiding colorful toy parts…

Let’s think about this rationally. What happens in the wild during the normal mating and breeding season? That’s when trees, plants and flowers begin to bloom and the landscape comes alive with color. This is a natural visual trigger to our exotic birds. And what do many species of birds do during their courting procedures? They dance about and “display their colors” to their potential mates! Is it any wonder then that so many of our birds pick, pluck and mutilate, possibly in total frustration when we place colorful toys inside of their cages, hanging there 24/7 “displaying mating colors” constantly before their eyes antagonizing them like a temptress beckoning them to dance along in true mating behavior?  We need to rethink how the brightly colored “toys” we are placing in our birds’ environments may be affecting their emotions, even when their hormones are not actively and fully engaged in full-fledged breeding season. We may just be triggering an “artificial” breeding season at other times of the year leading to generalized picking, feather plucking and skin mutilation without even realizing it.

Lastly, for any of you that may be in to using healing crystals, the crystal “Smokey Quartz” is commonly used to calm hormones and help with the production of female estrogen. And as mentioned earlier, when estrogen levels are increased, testosterone levels decrease lowering the libido. Simply place two or three of these crystals around your bird’s cage and allow the “energy” from the crystals to do their “work”. Keep in mind that you will need to “clean” or re-energize, or “re-charge” your crystals from time to time. Normally this is done by placing them in the sunlight for a few hours up to a day or so.

Now, taking a much, much different approach to all of this, if your bird hasn’t had a good, hard molt in a very long time, you might want to allow your bird to continue onward through this natural process as long as your bird isn’t physically harming itself and you can tolerate the behavior. Remember, this is a natural process, something your bird would experience in the wild. And it’s good for your bird to experience a molt and rid itself of old, worn out feathers. It’s good physically as well as mentally and emotionally. Just be sure to provide as much comfort and reassurance to your bird during this time as you possibly can.

Provide all of the food your bird will need to actually induce a good, hard molt by adding in to your bird’s diet, in abundance, some of the foods I suggested eliminating above. Allow the natural change of the season to occur, letting all of the longer daylight hours of natural sunlight in to your bird’s room. And you might even want to increase the humidity and slightly raise the temperature in your bird’s room.

But please don’t encourage any breeding behavior by offering toys all decked out in loud colors, this will only add to the frustration your bird is already experiencing. The natural physiological process your bird is going through will take care of itself without the complexity and confusion of adding tempting “fake colorful mates” by way of brightly colored toys hanging around 24/7.

All in all if your bird still has the “call of the wild” in it, and let’s face it most of these exotic birds do have that “wild instinct” because they aren’t that far removed from their natural habitats, only on record as domesticated since 300b.c., and even that’s somewhat debatable, then there isn’t a lot any of us can do to avoid this behavior completely. The next best thing we can do is to make our birds as comfortable as possible during this stressful time, provide them with adequate nutrition, adjust their lighting, their air source, room temperature, and their cage environment to try to suit their current situation and suffer along with them until their misery passes. Hopefully on the other side of it all the reward will come with some amount of new feather growth if a molt occurs. If not, well then we need to be thankful that our bird, and us as well, made it through another season. Hey, it’s not so much to go through considering all of the wonderful companionship they offer to us for all of the remaining times of the year!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sign up to our blog so you will be sure to receive more educational articles like this one! Just return to our home page at http://TheBestBirdFood.com and click on “Sign Me UP” in the upper right hand corner of the blog!

Be sure to visit our “forum” on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Parrots-The-BEST-Bird-Food/169623509768097

Machelle Pacion / The BEST Bird Food / BirD-elicious! / Passion Tree House LLC © 2012 All Rights Reserved

*Information supplied by The BEST Bird Food or any of its contributors, associates, et al, does not intend to diagnose, treat or cure any symptom, illness or disease. Any information provided is strictly for the purpose of “sharing” resources. Should a reader decide to use any such information they do so at their own risk and holds author(s) and associates, et al, of The BEST Bird Food blog harmless in any and all legal matters concerning their health and the health of their family and/or friends and/or colleagues who they may share the information with as well as all of their pets and/or livestock whom they may practice the information upon.