How to Tell a Female Parrot From a Male Parrot

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Madeline Franco and we're here to talk about birds specifically we are talking about sexing birds, determining whether they are male or female. I am standing here with two birds that are what we call dimorphic. This is the female. This is Zoey and this is Nigel the male. You'll notice that Zoey has some yellow spots on her and she has a striated tail. They are red tailed black cockatoos and Nigel here has a red slash across his otherwise black tail. He is otherwise dimorphic birds are Jasmine who is a female eclectics and this is Josepie, Josepie Verde which means in Italian Joe Green and he is a male eclectic. You'll notice his beak which is also a candy corn color. There are several Asiatic parrots that also have candy corn colored beaks in the male and the female has a black beak most notably the Derbyan Parakeet. Most parrots however, are monamorphic which means that they do not have any differentiation between the male and female that is visible to us as humans and this over here is an example of that sort of bird. This is a kieek. This happens to be a female but if it were a male it would look not a whole lot different. Those of us who know birds a little better realize that behaviorally you can often tell the difference but my advice would be for anyone not to wait until a bird is older or lays an egg to find out that it is a female. It is best to know the sex of your bird because knowing the sex of your bird also helps you deal with certain behaviors that are typical of a male or female. The most reliable way to sex a bird these days is through DNA sampling and there are many labs throughout the USA who will do that for you. For DNA sexing all you need is a small blood sample which you can obtain when you cut the bird's nails or something like that way and you get your results back with a very short amount of time with the e-mail even quicker than we used to and it helps you as I say anticipate behaviors and deal with some problems and hopefully could save your bird's life if there is a disease or a situation that is specific to a female such as egg binding that you would know about because you would know right away that your bird is female and that would be a possibility. DNA sexing is as I said very inexpensive. It is about $20 or $25 and it is highly recommended."