Cockatiels are strange little birds, aren't they?
Of all things I've heard about cockatiels liking, I would've never expected socks.
Alex isn't to the point where she bleeds weekly (hopefully she doesn't ever get that bad). I mean during the times she had some pretty bad night frights within a few nights from each other, I found dried blood all over the cage.
The things I've found to help Alex the most is low light and music. When I got Alex while she was still being weaned, she'd have moments where she would make the "feed me" cry even when she had been fed and didn't want any food. My guess is that she was crying for some kind of company. Or attention. The latter seems very likely because she is actually a huge attention hog, and acknowledgement within itself is like a treat to her. On the bright side this makes it easier too convince her to do things like fly to me, but trying to keep her
out of things is a different story, since she notices that she gets my attention when she does something bad (and it's not like you can ignore them when they're chewing on your mom's orchids or something).
But during these times where she'd cry for reasons other than food, I would basically have her sit on one hand while I cup the other over her head, then rock back and forth while I hummed a specific tune. I did this also to keep her quiet when the baby food was being microwaved at the time, and it had actually worked out well.
So this basically became the go-to method for calming Alex down, and I've found that she loves being in small dark areas in general. My guess is because it feels like being in a nest box, or the fact that in the wild, they nest in tree hallows (which is basically the reason why we commonly use nest boxes when breeding them in the first place, I think).
I have seen what appears to be a bird version of occupational therapy done. There's a dove that was once at a rescue in San Fransisco suffering from "torticollis", which makes it hard for them to hold their head right. It disorients them to no end, and for the dove in particular, caused him to have panic attacks. Since the torticollis prevented him from knowing which way was up basically, he wouldn't really fly. Just kinda tumble backwards.
Here are the articles you can read about him:
http://www.pigeonrescue.org/2014/12/21/ ... g-problem/http://www.pigeonrescue.org/2015/03/11/ ... -recovery/http://www.pigeonrescue.org/2016/02/08/ ... -big-news/You may notice in the first two articles, they called Bell a female. Well they ended up finding out he's actually male in the end, which explained why his original "mate" was aggressive at times.
If Zap enjoys cloth-based stuff, I wonder if he would enjoy those little "bird tents" I always see.
I guess it would be a similar concept to having little blanket caves for that dove in the articles I showed above (minus the torticollis of course). Although for parrots like cockatiels, there is the risk of having it encourage nesting behavior. For a male cockatiel that would mean becoming a little more aggressive and territorial of his "nest". However that isn't
always the case, and if you do find him to start acting a little more aggressive than usual, then the problem would be fixed easily by removing the tent (though it'd take a few days to get the aggressiveness out of his system.
Nesting behavior is basically the reason why I haven't really gotten one of these for Alex, despite her being calm in a dark and enclosed area. For female cockatiels, encouraging nesting behavior means laying eggs and well... that problem's a little harder to fix than a male being territorial. Lucy had just finished laying eggs this year, I don't need her to try again, nor have Alex start laying too (she's not old enough yet, but she's close).
I'd love to hear about some of the other methods that have worked for Zappy's anxiety. Maybe I could use them on some of the anxious animals I work with.
