#<- technically that is this specific parrots design is from bc i have not made a ls/general design for him yet

[vinlynn]

I did a doodle of him while at work and I liked how it turned out so I just ended up making it a full drawing :D

Actual doodle i did at work

[amazinmango]

I present to you a will so strong that it defies all that would stand before it: science, biology, finance, reason.

It has defeated the efforts of medical professionals, direct physical and psychological intervention, thousands of dollars, and years of effort.

It is the epitome of defiance in the face of insurmountable odds.

It is contained within a very. smol. borb.

I give you the gorgeous idiot at the center of it all: Petrie.

So cockatiel hens can lay a handful of eggs each year, with or without fertilization or even companionship of another bird (species and gender notwithstanding). Also if said ladybird has bonded with her human; she don’t judge. They can produce clutches of a couple to five (or more, if feelin’ sassy) at a shot, and it’s typical to have maybe two clutches a year if any at all.

Unless you’re Petrie.

If you are Petrie, you can churn out stupid numbers of little white ovoids, each one of which contains enough craziness fit to drive your human off the deep end. I lost count after she’d pooped out thirty just over the course of one year; there was maybe a three-week span when she, for the love of some deity somewhere, took a breather. (That’s a little under ten clutches; at the time I was removing them as she laid them when I could distract her before I realized I was making the problem worse.)

Thing is, Petrie is very pretty. She has an apartment next to her buddy Loona, a Very Old Man who has no interest in her That Way. There’s one brain cell between them (spoiler: it’s his) and Petrie typically has the memory of a gnat. Cockatiels and similar small parrot(lets) are thought to possess intellect along the lines of a human toddler. Cause-and-effect are something Loona understands quite well. You can see him mapping out his path from where he is to where he wants to go, and then watch him implement it. He knows where the bathroom is down the hall, and how to get there. He knows where he is not allowed to go in the kitchen, and goes there anyway. He has specific calls for “Where are you? Okay, thanks!” and “Hey, I’m hungry and don’t WANT these pellets” and “WE’RE OUTTA WATER BC SHE SHAT IN IT AGAIN.”

Petrie, tho. She will fly from her cage, land upon the floor in front of it (near the ladder that leads up to the entrance), and walk in circles backwards, screaming, until rescue.

...she is very, very pretty.

So Cockatiels aren’t laying hens, right; their tiny bodies are not designed to churn out calcium-fortified baby-containment units on the regular. Chronic layers can become egg-bound--they run outta calcium to the point that the egg’s shell is neither hard nor soft enough to pass. It gets stuck, jams up the works--being birds, there’s one business-end orifice for all functions. She can’t poop because the egg is in the holding position, and her body doesn’t stop making poop especially if she continues eating. Her strength wanes, and her calcium deficient and heavily-taxed body is not built to handle this shit.

In short, she becomes even more highly stressed, malnourished, possibly septic, and dies.

It’s a shitty way to go.

Solution(s): 

Provide plenty of calcium, discourage laying and breeding behaviors. 

Avoid overfeeding and reduce free-feeding. 

Rearrange the cage frequently, try to eliminate cozy spots that look very NestableTM. 

Don’t touch her on her back, and do not engage when she’s sticking her butt in the air and squeaking. 

Redirect, distract, do anything that gets her out of make-babies mode and go on with your lives.

As you might have guessed, Petrie is a Chronic Layer to end all chronic layers. She shan’t cease egging for no man. You can’t take away an egg she has made, as she will immediately get to work on cooking another. Rearrange the cage all you like! That perch and dish combo really make that corner pop. Change the photoperiod to the point that you are genuinely worried about her psychological wellbeing, until telltale squeaking emits from a covered cage at three AM. Balance out her diet with regulated mealtimes (how DARE you father i am sTaRVinG) that inevitably regresses into free-feeding chaos because she needs all the nutrients bc shitting out eggs. 

You can consult avian vets, plural, on other solutions.

Purchase expensive, stressful shots (as in needle-y injections into this tiny borb) that are intended to have a stern discussion with her single functional ovary. Being governed by hormones, it can, in theory, be deactivated by the same principles--throw the right kinds of hormones at the birb, the birb stops egging.

Petrie’s utterly-fucking-determined drive to create egg after egg after egg is so insurmountable that she has laughed in the face of said injections on a quarterly basis for more than one year. These shots, btw, are $75 a stick.

You can discuss with an avian veterinarian possible surgical options--but removing the ovary in a cockatiel is a high-risk operation on a healthy bird; the prognosis for coming out of the operation alive is fifty-fifty.

Never mind if your bird is stressed and already egg-bound. If you’ve gently massaged her bootie above where the egg sits, and you’ve vaseline’d her butthole (technical term for gentle application of approved oils to cloaca, of course) and given her the equivalent of a bird sitz bath. All short of gently taking this fluffball in hand and just squeezing her.

Thus you find yourselves at the emergency vet at two in the morning because she collapsed at the bottom of her cage, too weak to hold her head up. She’s checked in, and you go home with an empty carrier and stare at the stupid eggs she’s left on the floor of the cage away from any hospitable nesting configurations and amidst all the barriers and deterrents you’ve placed there.

You get the call at work that she’s holding steady but not looking good; she’s malnourished and they can’t risk trying to crack the egg, suck out contents, then gently crush and remove the shell. She won’t survive any sort of stress, never mind surgery. At this point, it’s touch and go if she’ll see the morning.

You can keep her checked in, and hope.

You get the call that she’s made it through the night, holding steady. And then in another day or so, she’s passed the damned egg, is scarfing enough food to feed a rottweiler, and is ready to come home.

That’s just the first time shit got real over the last several years of hyped-up egg production, the first thousand bucks and change.

After she’s back to a healthy weight and shows good on her bloodwork (another stressful test), Petrie goes back on the hormone injections.

She lays three eggs, her average clutch.

The vet says “hey, maybe it didn’t work, let her finish with this clutch and bring her in for an early next shot.”

She ‘finishes,’ as in loses interest in the unfertilized eggs long enough for me to distract her and remove them, rearrange the cages anew, and watch closely that she doesn’t immediately start going ass-in-air squeaktoy. We go to the vet. She gets the shot.

She lays three eggs.

The vet scratches her head, and reminds me of the half-chance of survival should we try to de-ovarize this bird.

She gets another shot, and lays three more eggs.

We stop the shots.

She bulldozes through a bunch of creative, bird-safe debris and obstacles placed at the bottom of the cage. I have found her underneath crunched-up water bottles sitting on eggs, happily poofed up and looking up at me like “I maked these!!”

She became egg-bound a second time, and that was a second vet trip, though not as dramatic or in the wee hours. She passed the egg overnight, to the tune of another cool grand.

This bird. This friggin borb.

She came home, and amazingly went for several months without egging. I was thrilled. She crapped out five eggs in January 2020, a big clutch for her. She rolled out the dummy eggs when I tried to get her to please stop, baby. She lost interest in them faster than usual, and then came another blessed fiveish weeks of egglessness.

And yet, as I sit in my mancave-turned-office for work-from-home, I hear the distinct sound of a fluffy borb shuffling through crunchy water bottles and squeaking as she goes. I can only hope to fortify her, love her, and support her as she works on her next set of freaking giantass (for a cockatiel) eggs.

Petrie contains her own fortitude and sheer will beyond any I can imagine. She persists, against all odds, and survives her own best efforts to do herself in, and when I look at her in exhausted exasperation, she gives me this little cute squinty-eyed cockatiel smile and chirps.

This gorgeous idiot cannot do otherwise, and I love her and hope to love her as long as I can, as I cannot do otherwise.