so I took Lucy in the shower today. She didn't enjoy it, though she did tolerate it. She got all wet, and even smells better now.

However, I did notice something very, very alarming. I noticed some yellow discharge draining from her beak. As she got wet, it was also draining down her entire front side.

Took a picture, though not sure if you can see it.

Luckily, I'm able to upload to photobucket directly from my iPad. This might be the reason why her wings have been a little yellow, as well. Speaking of which, it luckily picked up on my iPad camera, so I can finally show what it looks like.


She's acting perfectly normal, eating and drinking. I'm trying to keep her warm in my hands though, in case she gets too cold. I give her intervals of free time to preen herself as well. Carolyn, do you think she could've caught a respiratory infection at the bird mart, or something?

This is so frustrating, because I can't afford a vet. What can I do for her? Is there anything I could give her for this?

Dont know whats wrong with her but her beak looks chipped same thing happened to Cracker and the vet said it was calcium deficiency.

Really? I heard that was just normal beak growth. The outer "skin" peels off, to reveal new "skin". I've seen it happen with birds all the time

That's definitely normal beak growth, but I'm not sure about the discharge. Maybe the water flushed out her mucus?

It had to have been doing so beforehand though, because her wings have been yellow for he past few weeks. If it would drain onto her feathers as she preens, that's the only explanation I can think of, as how the white part on her wings got yellow.

The yellow on the white bar of the wings is normal cockatiel coloring. Almost all cockatiels with white wing bars have it. It's perfectly normal. Don't be alarmed about that.

My guess is that whatever has been making her look yellow got washed off in the shower. If she got a huge amount of water in her nose you would have heard a lot of choking, spluttering and/or wheezing. I can always tell when my birds have inhaled a little water during a shower because they get a little bit of a whistle in their breathing, but they don't have water running out of their cere or beak and rolling down the front of their body.

There's an area called the choana that connects the nasal passages to the roof of the mouth, and it's normal for them to have mucus in there. That's why it feels wet when a bird sneezes on your neck, they're blowing out some birdie snots lol. I don't know what color this mucus is normally supposed to be but my guess would be similar to what humans have in their nose. If she was rubbing nasal mucus on her feathers, I'd expect both her cere and the feathers to look crusty from it, so that's probably not the problem.

Indeed, the bars on her wings are much whiter now. Whatever it is washed off. They're not completely white, but they're not as yellow now.

Do her nostrils look a bit swollen to you at all? After looking at some cockatiel pictures, they look a little big to me, though I could just be paranoid or something.

EDIT: her nostrils are actually smaller now, so I guess that confirms my suspicion. I wonder if there was some kind of buildup inside, that got cleared up in the shower. Does anyone know what could cause that?

Arizona living? Dry temperatures perhaps.

It's not actually that dry right now by Arizona standards - we're in the post-monsoon period and the humidity is up around 30% in my house most of the time. Cockatiels are basically desert birds so they don't need humidity the way rainforest birds do.

Birds look different when they're wet than when they're dry. The feathers get plastered down so the head looks smaller overall but the beak and cere stay the same size and look bigger in comparison. I doubt that they would absorb water and actually swell up a little bit, but I can't rule it out. She looks fine to me, and that includes the normal peeling on her beak.