Otherwise he appears totally healthy. He is on Higgins seed mix with the added supplements and occasional fresh greens are fruit although my time constraints are limited because I have a shiba inu also and I work in corrections. I try to get hour a day interaction but not always possible. Unfortunately he locked it up with my fiance and she’s not really a bird lover so he screams for her a lot. He has full flight feathers, gets to fly around house occassionally, a night and day play cage, and a small cage for on the deck occassionally when weather/temp is right for short visit. He is strong and active but ruled by hormones and i dont want to add a female.

If snything i am about to find an old retired woman he can fixate on…

I am concerned because he consistently has running poop with a mustard-ish coloration. although his droppings most of the time look pretty normal. He sometimes has a regular super large football shape poop and i believe he will retain feces when masterbating??

I feel what ever the problem is it seems to have to do with his incessant nesting/masterbating.

Other than that he can be a sweet heart but just screams in the cages all day unless he has free reign or a womans sneaker nearby.

One more thing he doesn’t eat seed or pellets well just nibble. So I still give him a the formula. Is it ok to give 4 months cockateil the formula?

Please guide me.
I will be thankful to you all.

Awesome website. Thank you for putting together some very practical information. The family cockatiel, a rescue bird, is effectively my third daughter, the only differences being that currently she doesn’t ask me for money and I assume wont be asking to borrow the car in a few years time… 😉

This might sound like a bit of an odd request, but on the The Ultimate Cockatiel Poop Guide, could you include example pictures of cockatiel poop that are from healthy and unhealthy birds? While descriptions are very useful and helpful people may have different interpretations of the written descriptions, especially if you don’t have any other examples to benchmark against.

As we only have the one bird who seems healthy and bright (I found your website while looking up articles on sneezing) I assume that what I’m looking at is normal and healthy and it largely seems to match your description… but my concern is that I just don’t know if my interpretation is correct… and as the old saying goes, “a picture paints a thousand words”.

We used to have a parrot, another rescue case that sadly passed from a form of avian meningitis and for the fist 6 months my wife was obsessed with studying his droppings to try and ascertain if he was OK. It became like a bizarre method of divination akin to reading tea leaves. A pictorial guide to bird health divination from poop scrying would have been useful at the tine 🙂

Cheers