Birds have allergies too

King parrot in rehab.  Bird liked foster parrots until they started flying!

Birds have allergies too.  And by accidents, trials and errors we were to find a few of "Birds" peculiarities.  Apart from the usual things that birds should NEVER eat - like chocolate, dish-washing detergent, wine and avocado - the stop go tablets from my Brazilian trip!, we found a few more...

"Bird" encouraged me to cook from scratch so that I knew what was in our food.  In the early days she had absolutely terrible table manners and would land or jump right in the middle of a plate of food!  Geesh she even picked the bits out of Eddie Marfleets teeth once!  eeww!!  He thought it was great! Eddie was a mechanic at the zoo then..    

She would come to me on occasion acting irritated I used to think she loved me but what she wanted me to do was save her from the imaginary crawlies that were running around under her feathers.  I deduced she was having allergic reactions like hives that were itchy. Mum used to all them THE IRRITS. These episodes would last from 10 - 20 minutes and then subside.  I even discussed the options of treatment with friend & vet Peter Wilson but treatments would take about 20 minutes to be effective anyway so not really of any benefit.

Spaghetti bolognaise was a favourite in our house - it still is - but every time I cooked it she'd have a reaction.  What could it be - I use all natural - tin tomatoes & tomato paste the only pre made products....  So we started a trial by removing produce one by one.  Turned out to be mushrooms! So no mushrooms in  our fridge again..  This was in Dubbo I learnt this.  So powerful was her allergy that it recurred in Jimboomba after eating fresh spinach from the garden!  Hey what else has she got into I thought - but as we searched I realise that I had recently bought a load of mushroom compost from the local mushroom farm and had grown the spinach in it!  WOW!  The spinach had taken up the mushroom component that "Bird" was allergic too!

It was always awful when an episode occurred - sometimes I could trace it back to the kids red lolly she'd found, mums unattended wine, sometimes not.   There is one more message here and it's again with spinach.  I am a big believer in fresh greens for most captive birds - especially parrots.   I used a so called safe fertilizer on the spinach about a week before - we'd hosed the spinach - it had also rained, yet we had an episode after eating it!  A real eye opener about how chemicals and nutrients are taken up by the food that we in turn are eating.  Being human and a lot more robust than birds my guess is that a lot of episodes (like a headache - or an itch) goes totally unnoticed as related to something we ate?

I made spaghetti with Chloe yesterday for all of us and the chickens and it broke my heart that "Bird" wasn't there on my shoulder impatient to wait for it to cool down..  Still lots of holes in our world.  I took her perch out of the bedroom and that's going okay.  I'm having trouble with having removed the newspaper for catching pooh on the fridge though..  I might have to put it back for a while.