1. Take your bird to be checked by a certified avian vet to rule out a physical cause.

2.  Make sure she gets at least 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep a night.  This means 12 hours of darkness.  If she can't be in a separate room, cover her cage at night.

3.  Cut back on the hours she is exposed to natural or full spectrum lighting.  In the wild, birds become hormonal when the days become longer.  If we keep our birds up too late with the lights on, it can stimulate them into a hormonal phase.

4.  Birds also go to nest when food is plentiful.  This is because they need to know there will be enough to feed their chicks.  Cut back on the soft foods you feed her.  Stick to more fresh foods and a good dry mix or high quality pellet.

5. Don't allow your bird on the floor.  Do not allow  her anywhere except on a play tree, on or in her cage or on your arm, not on your shoulder or near your face.

6. Give frequent showers.  This seems to calm them down.  If she will tolerate it, blow your bird dry with your hair dryer.  Make sure there is no PTFE (teflon is a brand name for this) inside your hair dryer first.  Again, it has a calming effect.

7. Distract your bird.  Do some trick training, clicker training or just sit on the floor, on a bed or at a table for supervised play.  Place toys on the play area and let her run around and play with the toys.  You can use colored blocks of different shapes, plastic baby keys and other baby toys she can pick up. Those little plastic magnetic letters and numbers made for children, plastic beads and shapes of all kinds make good foot toys.  Get ones birds can't easily bite pieces off of.  Most baby toys are pretty safe for parrots.  Teach colors using the baby keys by telling him or her what color each key is.  Then hold them up and let them pick the color you want them to choose.  Play "thank you" games with your bird like you would a toddler, you get the idea.  Play is a great healer.

8. Get some Bach's Rescue Remedy and put about four drops in your bird's drinking water.  This works extremely well for some, not so well for others.  You can also use Chamomile tea.  It has a calming effect.

9. Try to see what is going on in her world.  Did something frighten her?  Did she something on TV, out a window, in our own sudden movements?

10. Learn your bird's body language.  Once you do this you can almost always avoid being bitten because they have subtle ways of telling us when to back off.

By Kathie Jo Miller

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Ten things you can do to help her cope!