My bird Pepe loves to sit on my shoulders and my finger and be all sweet but occasionally he suddenly changes mood and turns to evil in a second. He goes for my eyes and has on occasions latched himself to my lips and has left nasty bite marks and sometimes blood. He also goes for my ears at times to, which dont hurt as much. I know i am supposed to ignore this behaviour but sometimes its hard not to suddenly move or try remove his hard bite from my face. I make no sound though, just screaming inside!
Is putting him in his cage for 10 mins a good idea after he does this or should i not do that? I try not to hold him close to my face when he is on my finger but most the time i cant stop him from sitting on my shoulder. Pretty certain he is going through the bluffing stage and am hoping it will eventually stop? I get really worried when other people hold him because he has done it to my friends before.
He also has a problem where he loves to attack peoples feet. If your not wearing socks and your feet are in his view, he will run up and give a hard bite!! I think he see's it as a game because he gets a reaction out of us everytime.
I have had similar problems with our Janey. All you can do is try to not let them on your shoulder (just let them sit on your hand) and when they do get on your shoulder, get them off as soon as possible. Do you have a should height perch you can get them to step onto? Janey generally knows now not to go to the shoulder but sometimes she still will. Also see if you can try to identify biting triggers. Is it boredom, are they scared, etc.
Good luck. A biting shoulder running bird is no fun and can be distressing.
salvador has done this a few times aswell. i had a nice little bite across my eyelid to prove it. It was only for two weeks he was like this (thankfully) and other than that he is an angel. I think its a teething (beaking?) issue, and testing their grounds. However, he sometimes does bite ears, nose, lips etc more for the fun i think, and even occasionally has a habit of biting the corner of my mouth and pulling to make me turn my face toward him.
my solution: a piece of leather cord with a whole host of different toys. its a bright, colourful necklace of wooden beads, lego pieces, bells, leather and all things chewable. though it will never be in vogue and is quite an amusing joke for my partner, he loves playing with it and it makes a fantastic distraction from my face...
ive had a similar problem with fingers as you do with toes- it was more of a game that an angry gesture. When he was littler it was very cute and we accidentally reinforced the behaviour. then he got bigger, his beak stronger and sharper and my nails got very short...thats taking a bit longer to train out the behaviour, but a firm 'dont' and wrist-twist when he first went to bite the nail. Now if he pulls away when i say 'dont' he gets a treat. its getting to the point where he rarely bites them anymore.
Simple, no shoulders. Some birds will never be shoulder birds. Hane is one of them. He will pull hair, which I can assure you hurts very much. I cannot imagine allowing a bird to bite my face- they can cause serious damage! I read an article in Bird Talk Magazine some years ago and it had pictures of the plastic surgeries people have needed because of a parrot bite... some of the parrots were just scared one time and bit out of reaction. That cured me of wanting a shoulder bird.
You might have to ban him from the floor for a while until he forgets about his foot game. I try not to let Hane walk around on the floor too much as it is. With dogs and people around all the time, it would be easy for him to get trampled- he very nearly was a few times by dogs rushing to the door.
I've been called 'birdbrained' before, but somehow I don't think this is what they meant. say:hah-nay
