FINCHforum

I've been sitting on a few questions for a while now but I've been waiting to move my birds into their new super big flight cage (almost finished!!!) to see if their behavior would change once they had more space. But now I have a question that's got me a bit worried.

I have a shaft-tail hen who grows out her shafts and then immediately loses them. When I got her, she had no shafts at all (which is why she ended up being named Shorty). However, she grew them out after a bit and had a long pretty tail. Then the new shafts fell out. I figured it was because they were getting bent or causing problems when she had her nest...

However, the nest has been removed for some time now, and today I noticed one of her (again regrown) shafts on the floor of the cage!

At first I thought it had to be plucking, but she is only in the cage with her mate, and he has never shown any signs of plucking at her, even when they had a nest and were actively mating. (They have no nest now and I work from home, so I can tell they are not trying to mate right now. Even when they had a nest, none of their feathers were in it, and her lost shafts sat on the bottom of the cage ignored.) Furthermore, she is never missing any other feathers except the shafts; everything else looks great. She and her mate preen each other very gently, so I just can't see either one of them actually pulling the feathers out, even when my back is turned.

Normally I'd attribute this to regular feather loss, but none of my other shaft-tails has lost shafts this many times. Could this be related to a health problem or lack of vitamins? Is she doomed to have a stubby tail forever?

The wires on shaft tails' tails can bend and curl while sitting in the nest, some break off. They will groom each others tail wires to straighten them out. The will stand head to tail and uncurl the tails wires with their beaks, almost like they are flat ironing the wires.

What size nest were you using? Are they roosting on perches that are set in a way that when they sit they back tight up against the cage wires?

The nest was one of those bamboo nests; it was the larger one, but I could still see it causing problems for the shafts. But it has been gone a while, so I know this time was not the nest.

It could be the cage bars though! They do perch on one branch that is close enough to the cage bars that their tails can go a bit through, so maybe that is the problem--although then why are the other birds not having the same problem? Everybody else's tail is as "shafty" as usual. XD
(Edit: I should have noted, I moved my other two shaft-tails to a separate cage now but with an identical set up, so both cages do have perches close enough to have tails poking out a bit from the bars.)

Also, the shaft feathers don't seem to have anything visibly wrong with them when they fall off--they aren't bent or broken in any way. Not even one feather barb out of place. It's just like they dropped right off.

I'll keep a close eye out to see if he might be grooming them off her or if maybe she's knocking them off with the cage bars or something though. Thanks for the tip!

In the future try giving then an open face keet box....it is more roomy since they tend to have large clutches. Also try straitening the perch out, shaft tails wires are much longer and delicate than other birds and just the pressure put on the base of the feather against the bars over time may cause them to bend and break off easily.

If you can not find an open face keet box take an 8x8 nestbox that has two removable panels in the back, remove the top one and mount with the original entrance hole up against the inside cage bars.

Thanks! She must just have delicate feathers, or maybe she tries to squish herself in the corner more or something. I will make sure when I move them to the bigger cage, I move the perches far away from the walls. (I'd do it now, but they're in those 30 inch white flights and there's just not enough room!! But the bigger cage is going to be 49x28, so that will work much better!)

Also, thanks for the tip about the nest box--I definitely did not like the bamboo nest. However, I don't think I'm going to let them breed again for possibly a long while; they raised a clutch to hatching and then completely ignored them, and given the awkward shape of the nest and the amount of material they stuffed into it, I wasn't able to see that some of the eggs had hatched until it was too late to save them. It was heart-breaking for me, seeing as these are my first pet birds.

(And of course it turned out my other "pair" was not the boy and girl my parents were promised but two more hens. So things are just a hot mess over here.)

With the bamboo nest even the large size and they way these guys build out a nest it gets cramped and chicks can get crushed. The more space inside the nest the better...mine built out the front of that box until there was just an entrance hole. When they were done raising the babies I took the nest apart, they built sort of a little wall with two areas, dad's compartment in the front and mom and chicks' larger space in the back.

Yes exactly, I kept giving them material and it kept getting thicker and thicker... they had an elaborate routine just to get in and out of the nest and it took them like ten minutes every time after they came out of the nest to replace all the material they had to move out of the opening. It was funny until I couldn't do any real nest checks.