Should we be surprised that parrots that live in very large social flocks in the wild also are obsessed with sex?

Should we be astonished that parrots that live in extremely large social flocks in the wild also are preoccupied with sex?


 At this year’s annual conference of the Association of Avian Veterinarians, I was in a lecture that concentrated on how much sexual difficulty truly bears multiple of the frequent difficulties from which pet parrots endure.

Amid the most commonly treated difficulties for which parrots of all species are taken to the veterinarian are feather chewing/picking, dermatitis (skin inflammation), self-mutilation of skin, egg-laying challenges, and aggression.

When approximately 100 male and female parrots of varying ages and kinds each representing one or more of these difficulties had a small implant (the size of a rice grain) surgically implanted under the skin over their backs to gradually deliver a hormone (Deslorelin) that stops the sexual cycle momentarily (for approximately 3 months), all of them had important drops in the difficulty of behaviors they were having. When these parrots’ difficulty symptoms recurred, regularly after about 3 months, many of them had a second hormone implant that again suppressed their unusual behaviors for another few months.