Trimming Your Lovebird's Wings

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Sarah and I’m here at Extra Care Animal Hospital today, and I’m going to tell you a little bit about owning a lovebird. As far as caring for your bird’s nails, beak and wings, at your first visit with your avian veterinarian, they can go over wing, beak and nail care with you. Generally, we do recommend having your bird’s wings trimmed, because there is a lot that these guys can get into out in a household that they are fully flighted. Some things that we see birds do in household situations when they are fully flighted is escape, which obviously is very hard to get a bird this size back. Once they’re gone, generally they are gone for good, and that will be a heartbreak that I’m sure nobody wants to deal with. Other things that can happen is we’ve seen birds fly into windows, into aquariums, boiling pots of water, oil etc, things like that, buckets of detergent. We’ve seen birds fly into ceiling fans. All kinds of things in household situations that birds can be seriously injured or we have actually seen birds get killed by because they were fully flighted. You may be comfortable doing the wing trims at home. If you are interested in learning how to do wing trims at home, your avian veterinarian can do a demonstration on how to do that. When your bird’s wings are being trimmed, the only feathers that should be trimmed are the outer 8-10 feathers. If you are ever taking your bird somewhere and they are trimming the whole entire wing, you should politely tell them to stop and take your bird elsewhere. If you trim all of the bird’s feathers, this will lender them completely incapable of having a nice soft landing should they get startled and jump off their cage or off a counter or off of some other high place. The outer 8-10 feathers on your bird’s wings are used for lift; those are the ones that we generally trim. Those are the ones if a bird jumps off it’s cage, are going to take it to a higher height. The inner 8-10 feathers, those are the secondary feathers, those are the ones that are used for glide. Those are the ones that your bird will use if he or she jumps off the top of the cage to have a nice soft landing. Once again, it’s very important if you take your bird somewhere and have the wings trimmed, and you see them start to trim the inner feathers you should politely tell them to stop and take your bird elsewhere."