Girltron

Thanks. I'm going to only work with her at ground level for awhile. I'm definitely not going to handle her any more until she starts singing again though! She seems to trust both me and my husband...we've only had her a week but we've known her a year, and to date we're the only people she seems to love in her life. She used to bite her previous owners. I've tried to be respectful at times when she didn't seem to want to be handled-sometimes she'll nibble a little hard-but I'm aware parrots are sort of bound to bite at some point or another if they aren't getting their point across any other way. So I'm trying to be really sensitive. I've never owned a bird before. What should I do about the fact that she really wants to be on a shoulder? It's so high and I don't want her to fall again. She also loves to tuck her head down so I can ruffle her neck feathers in that position. She doesn't seem to know how to be cuddly without climbing up onto my shoulder and she might have jumped the last time because she didn't understand why I was asking her to go back to my hand instead.

Here's the first photos we took of Francis. http://www.flickr.com/photos/lord_powell2112/sets/72157623919546611/ Notice the red feathers around her throat? I was hoping they would go away if we can get her to stop plucking and chewing on her feathers.

Oh! Yes, that's important. Francis has been with us 6 days and except for this, has acted in every way as if she absolutely thinks our house is an amusement park. It is, really, compared to the previous home. I keep saying she but at this stage we still don't know her gender, and my husband says "he" so who knows. I think I'd better not handle her for awhile, because it really upset me when she fell and broke that feather. She's preening and stretching on her perch now, and played a little "peek a boo' with me but still isn't whistling at me like normal.

I'm really worried that my new Grey, Francis, is becoming nervous that I won't hold her safely. She's at least 10 years old and comes to me from a home of people she didn't care for. She's been social and happy in her new place, and more than willing to come out of the cage and walk around the house in my arm or on my shoulder, take a bath, or sit and talk. But yesterday and today she started something new: suddenly standing up and flapping and sometimes leaping off a hand or shoulder when she used to cling to me all the time. Nothing new is happening at those times, and she doesn't seem scared because she comes back to me and acts happy right afterward. In an effort to teach her to stay on my hand (I feared she was slipping off my shoulder) I had her out on the tabletop practicing step-up from hand to perch and from hand to hand, when she decided to do it again. She jumped right off my hand and did a nose dive past the table onto the floor and when I came to pick her up she waited until I stood almost all the way up and did it again! This is bad because she plucked so many wing feathers while she lived with my friend that she can't fly and her wings are uneven so she falls fairly heavily to the floor. She actually broke a blood feather in half this afternoon but it stopped bleeding after only a minute. I put her right into her cage and haven't touched her since because I'm afraid I'll make her scared that I can't hold her safely. Even though her feather broke she doesn't seem too upset, when I come to the side of her cage to ask her how she's doing she just stares at me as if wondering why I'm being so buggy. Only she isn't whistling or talking, so I know she's a little stressed. I'm really upset about this and I know it's just because I don't understand her body language and habits well enough. None of the books we bought seem to have anything to say about this.