Green cheek conure, four years old. Nearly every time she drinks she comes up and sneezes once or twice, then carries on as if nothing happened. She also likes dunking her whole face in the bowl, which I assume is related.
Nares look clean and dry to me, no crust, nothing on the feathers above her beak, and she is otherwise a menace in the normal way. Is one sneeze after a drink something I should be doing anything about?
Worth running through the room rather than the bowl as well, since irritants produce the same sneeze. Aerosols, perfume, cleaning spray, scented candles, plug-ins, smoke of any sort, and feather dust if there is a tiel or a cockatoo in the house.
The tell is timing. Sneezing right after a drink is the bowl. Sneezing while you are cleaning or spraying something is the room. And keep her well away from an overheating non-stick pan, that one is not an irritant, it is lethal.
Occasional sneezing is normal in birds, much like us. Frequency and discharge are what change the picture.
Coming back to give you the other list, since this thread has been reassuring and the reassurance has edges. Book an avian vet if the sneezing stops being tied to drinking and becomes frequent, or if you see discharge wet or crusty, staining or matted feathers above the beak, swollen or reddened nares, tail bobbing with each breath, open-beak breathing, any clicking or wheezing, or her sitting fluffed and eating less.
None of that is what you described. Worth knowing because birds are good at hiding the start of it.
@nares_above_beak · last mo. · 3 replies
That is water in the nares and a sneeze is how she clears it. Her nostrils sit just above the beak, she is burying that whole area in a deep bowl, and some of it goes up. The dunking you mentioned is almost certainly the whole story.
The shape you have described is the harmless one: one or two sneezes immediately after drinking, then normal, clean dry nares, nothing else wrong. A shallower dish fixes most of it, and giving her a separate bath dish fixes the rest, because right now her bath and her drink are the same bowl.
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@deep_dish_problem · last mo.
Would a bottle be better than a shallower dish, or is that trading one problem for another?
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@nares_above_beak · last mo.
Plenty of people run both. If you switch, leave the dish in until you have actually watched her drink from the bottle, because a bird that has not worked out the valve will quietly not drink. Bottles also jam, which is an argument for not relying on one alone.
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