Feather Plucking / Feather Plucker / Parrots Continued

Of course there are many diet-related reasons for feather plucking. I will, in the weeks, months ahead, attempt to expound on these issues so that you, the caregiver of a plucker and picker, can begin to observe your feathered friend on a daily basis and maybe get a better understanding of what may be occurring in your friend.

There is also a direct relation between vitamin C and feather picking / skin mutilation.

Vitmamin C is a most wonderful nutrient. Decades ago it was touted as the miracle vitamin that should be taken all winter long to help prevent colds and flu viruses. But no one really understood why it was so important, they just knew it worked. Today, with advanced research technology, scientists have been able to identify why Vitamin C is so vitally important in the prevention of viruses and even in some cancers.

As is the fact of Vitamin C, it turns out that is one of the best anti-oxidants nature created for us. It contains an abundance of anti-oxidants. Just what are anti-oxidants and what do they do for a living body?

Anti-oxidants search and destroy free-radicals. Free radicals are a type of "trash" from foods we eat, waste that occurs from cells in our body that have completed their cycle, substances that are thrown off into our system as normal waste from just processing our bio-chemicals, as well as pollutants that enter our system through both eating, smoking, alcoholic consumption, breathing in air pollutants, pollutants that come in contact with our skin and are absorbed indirectly into our systems through pore transfer, etc. The purpose of these free-radicals is to perform permanent damage to blood cells thus inhibiting the body's ability to heal itself.

Vitamin C also helps prevent heart disease and athersclerosis by providng the necessary nutrients to keep arties and vessels from hardening with plaque build up. This quaint little vitamin does a magnificently powerful job!

One other side-performance of C is to complete the process of taking typtophan on up its path stopping at the production of niacin to provide the arteries and blood vessels with this important vasodialtor making blood flow more rapidly and thoroughly and then taking the left over niacin on up to seratonin, that little neurotransmitter that gives a living creature that feeling of emotional well-being.

Vitamin C also increases iron uptake. So if you witness your bird becoming lethargic, consider it may just be a deficiency in vitmain C, not necessarily iron poor blood per say. Most people have been trained to believe that all birds produce their own vitamin C and so supplementation with foods that contain vitamin C is not only not necessary, but we have been told it could be harmful to add C to our birds' diets. In my opinion this is complete fallacy. I do agree that synthetic supplementation can be harmful, but naturally occurring vitamin C contained in fruits and rose hips is a completely safe form to feed our birds. The body will just "thorw off" what it does not need. And if you are feeding a form of the Peruvian clay that so many parrots consume in the wild, the clay will act like a magnet and attract any over-abundance of iron and help it be eliminated from the system rapidly and efficiently.

Another small, but very important function of Vitamin C is its natural anti-histamine action. Many foods contain histamines (allergens) or elements that create histamines once the food is ingested. Vitamin C acts as a natural anti-histamine and neutralizes the histamine activity before it begins to cause allergic-like reactions in the body. This is huge in considering feather plucking and skin mutilation in companion birds and exotic parrots. If you have ever experienced poison ivy, the reaction it causes on skin is what many birds suffer when they are picking at their feathers and their skin. Sometimes histamine will feel like parasites crawling under the skin, sometimes it feels like insect stings and sometimes it feels like acid on the skin. It causes an itching and burning sensation that only increases in intensity as the bird picks and plucks. So the continouous cycle of plucking and picking continues and continues and continues until the bird begins to cause feather follicle damage, or even worse, rips open its skin to bleeding, or, until histamines are neutralized by proper foods or medication. The proper amount of Vitamin C in a bird's diet will help prevent and may completely eliminate this horribly uncomfortable cyle without the use of medicines.

I always consider diet before any emotional, hormonal or behavioral issues when a customer contacts me regarding their plucking friend. I will, however, consider emotional before hormones (Hormones are considered in the diet as well if phytoestrogen-containing foods are being fed.) and behavior only after I have made a thorough diagnosis of the diet. Why? Again, because without the proper amount of Vitamin C, tryptphan, the precursor to seratonin, the emotional well-being neurotransmitter, will not complete its cycle. Tryptophan will get "stuck" at niacin, causing a niacin overload and expanding the blood vessels so much that the vessels begin to "vibrate" and only add to the itching that is already occurring. To add insult to injury, seratonin is not produced which creates anxiety and then the emotional aspects of plucking ensue.

Feather plucking, picking and mutilation is a long time problem of the companion avian community. But if we research history we will find that feather plucking began shortly after the increased and steady use of highly processed bird foods. These foods contain ingredients, usually within the first five ingredients listed, that are known allergens....containing histamines. In addition, most manufacturers leave out Vitamin C because they fear that with all of the other synthetic vitmains they insert in their formulas, the addition of C will cause iron storage disease. Thus, leaving out the Vitamin C only increases the possiblity for allergic-like reactions to the first five ingredients and actually lowers the seratonin uptake by way of not supplying the resource necessary to complete the production of this important neurotransmitter.

Be very careful in choosing your bird's food. Select fresh organic foods when possible and a large variety of them. If you don't have time to feed fresh all of the time, find a food like BirD-elicious! that is minimally processed, not ground into powder, not extruded through metallic machinery and not baked to make it all stick together. Select a food like BirD-elicious! that uses over 30 different ingredients, all whole-foods or minimally processed, gently dehydrated and vacuum-packed in a barrier-protection package that does not allow large amounts of light and oxygen in the package that degrades the nutrients.

It is commonly quoted that "variety is the spice of life" and we all know that "spice" means "kick", "fun", "energy" when we use it in our familiar cultural saying. Variety is what your bird would get in the wild. Birds don't limit themselves to just a few foods unless their environment is poor, dying and dead. They are one of nature's best scavengers and will fly for miles to find what they need to balance their dietary requirements. Why feed a food that is poor in ingredients, dying in variety and dead in real, whole-food nutrtion? There just isn't any reason to feed such a diet unless you wish to take your bird to the veterinarian more often than it would ever go if it lived in the rich and abundant rainforest with varietal foods!