"Unemployment" brings boredom
Simple boredom is responsible for 90 percent of feather picking, believes Dr. James Harris of Montclair Veterinary Clinic and Hospital in Oakland, Calif., and author of ParrotChronicles.com’s "Ask Dr. Harris" column.

"Birds observed in the wild spend 50 percent of their waking time finding food, 25 percent interacting with their flock, and 25 percent preening. We put them in cages where they have no flock or social structure and put a bowl of food in front of them.

"We have essentially eliminated 75 percent of their normal daily activity. The bird has no job left to do. So it takes what it does normally, which is to preen, to the extreme." (For a laundry list of other non-medical causes offered as reasons for feather picking, see Many causes, no one answer.)

Dr. Clint Chastain, a veterinarian with the Preston Road Animal Hospital in Dallas, agrees, noting that feather picking is a curse of the modern bird.

""One hundred years ago, pet parrots roamed the house at will or were kept on free-standing perches," he says. "They got a lot more attention from people--and training.

"With the advent of mass merchandising, birds moved into cages and the amount of attention and handling went down, allowing frustration and psychological problems to develop."

Desperate for answers
Whatever its cause, feather picking can drive frustrated owners to the fringes for a cure.

Some experiment with holistic remedies. Others, desperate to break a life-threatening mutilation habit, look to Elizabethan collars, hormone injections or tranquilizers (see Should you drug your bird?).

Prolonged picking can take its toll. At a minimum, permanent baldness may occur in spots where repeated feather removal has damaged follicles.

Naked birds may have trouble regulating their body temperature.

When picking progresses to broken blood feathers or mutilated skin, a bird can lose dangerous amounts of blood.

Always a plucker?
After biting and screaming, plucking may be the most frustrating behavior problem parrot owners face.

Small triumphs--a feather returning here, a patch recovering there--quickly turn to bitter disappointment when a bird backslides and plucks again.

Follicles take from three to eight weeks to generate new feathers. Then the anxious owner may experience the rollercoaster emotions of success and failure all over again.

Common wisdom holds that once a plucker, always a plucker.

And while this gloomy maxim appears to be the case in many ongoing struggles, it doesn’t always hold true.

Some parrots do stop picking, thanks to their owners’ persistence at finding a solution, luck, or a combination of the two.

We spoke with some who seem to have found the right combination of therapies necessary to help their birds recover, perhaps permanently.

Here are their success stories.

Arkie, with a mildly picked underbelly, and owner Rosemary Patrick.

Arkie resumed her bad habit in late 1999. For over a year Patrick wrestled with the behavior of her bird, whom she describes as a "moderate chewer." Arkie’s shoulders looked ragged and she picked her chest some. She had no tail feathers.

The shotgun approach
Two different vets who saw Arkie diagnosed boredom or hormonal problems. Patrick rejected the idea of hormone shots but followed one vet’s advice to buy an outdoor aviary.

However, once she set up the 4-foot-by-6-foot enclosure, she couldn’t bring herself to leave Arkie in it alone all day. "We live in an area where there are hawks, crows, coyotes and snakes."

Late last year, Patrick began making changes suggested by parrot behaviorist Pamela Clark. She extended Arkie’s sleeping hours from eight to 10, provided more foot and shreddable toys, bought a humidifier and bathed Arkie once a week.

She switched her food to Harrison's High Potency and almonds and added the dietary supplement methyl sulfonyl methane to her drinking water.

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