Birds like to rule roost

I am the master of my perch; I am the captain of my cage.

Birds, it seems, like to be in control as much as the rest of us.

“Behavior is not this kind of frilly thing that’s only on ‘Animal Planet’,” says Joseph Garner, an assistant professor of animal sciences at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “Animals are not these passive black boxes. They’re active agents that interact with their environment to make it optimal.”

Denying an animal some self-determination in its surroundings doesn’t just make it cranky, Garner adds. It can be perceived as a threat to its survival and can be a source of enormous stress.

Research studies Garner has undertaken with a colony of orange-winged Amazon parrots bring this point home to roost.

The most recent study, published this month in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, looked at abnormal repetitive behaviors in the parrots, including feather-picking. It found that birds whose cages were situated near doors and had a direct view of them were more likely to engage in this self-mutilating behavior.

“Our feeling was that they are surprised” by the human traffic, says Garner, likening it to someone living on a street that parallels a train track: Those who are farther down the block are still exposed to the choo-choo-ing but have the time and distance to acclimate themselves to its arrival, while those living near the tunnel where the trains barrel out are constantly on edge.

“Owners need to give birds a really long line of sight to doorways or the approach of people,” Garner says. “Don’t put them next to a window where people are going to suddenly walk by.”

Similar to compulsive hair-picking in humans (which has a name – trichotillomania), feather-picking was more common in females and has a genetic component – that is, it runs in families. As a result, potential buyers might want to ask breeders about the history of feather-picking in their line of birds.

Researchers disproved the idea that feather-picking is “socially transmitted”: Birds don’t learn it by observation.

In that same study, Garner and his team looked at “stereotypies,” which are repetitive, unvarying patterns of movement, similar to body-rocking in autism, which differ from compulsive behaviors like feather-picking in their robotic nature. Stereotypies – such as walking loops on cage sides or twirling pieces of food in beaks – weren’t affected by any factor other than the number of bird neighbors. The more bird friends around, the lower the frequency of stereotypies.

Indeed, despite the conventional wisdom that birds should be housed singly so they will interact better with humans, Garner says the opposite is true: Paired birds not only showed fewer behavioral issues, but were much less fearful and easier to handle.

Another big benefit to the birds was “physical enrichment,” which brings us back to the control thing.

“Essentially, a parrot is a monkey with wings,” Garner says. As such, they love to climb – often precariously – and to pull objects apart to find food.

So when it comes to cage-side entertainment, bells and mirrors just don’t cut it. In an earlier study, the birds were given objects they could manipulate: flexible perches that bounced, swayed and turned them upside down, as well as miniature straw hats stitched together and filled with shredded paper and treats.

“Parrots are really, really smart and very social,” Garner reminds, and they might very well try to extend their control over their environment to you.

“Animals often learn that certain behaviors will gain them attention,” he says. The bird figures, “If I’ve been ignored for an hour-and-a-half while someone watches TV, getting yelled at is better than nothing at all.”

Hard as it might be, owners shouldn’t reinforce undesirable behaviors through attention.

But they should mull them over. Behavior is the way animals communicate, Garner says, “and we’re just trying to translate.”