Receiving a severe bite from your parrot can be a deeply unsettling experience, leaving you with physical pain and emotional distress. While it’s natural to feel afraid after such an event, it’s crucial to manage your reaction to prevent it from damaging your relationship with your feathered companion. This guide focuses on how to navigate the aftermath of a parrot bite, emphasizing safety, emotional regulation, and rebuilding trust.
Understanding Parrot Behavior and Hormonal Changes
Parrot behavior can become erratic, especially during breeding seasons in spring and, to a lesser extent, fall. Hormonal fluctuations can lead to unpredictable actions, making it easier to misinterpret their body language and make handling mistakes that can result in bites. While much advice focuses on building trust, there’s less discussion on how to handle situations where the owner no longer trusts their parrot.
It’s important to understand that parrots are intelligent creatures capable of manipulation. If a parrot bites and the owner reacts with screaming and fear, the bird may learn that aggression yields a desired reaction. However, for those who have experienced a significant bite, the immediate aftermath involves shock, a sense of danger, bleeding, and confusion. It’s incredibly challenging to suppress a natural reaction to pain and fear to avoid inadvertently rewarding the bird’s behavior.
Immediate Steps After a Bite
Your first priority after a bite must be safety—both yours and your bird’s. The safest place for an agitated bird immediately following an incident is its cage. This ensures your safety while you tend to your wounds and prevents the bird from being left unattended in a potentially unsafe situation. Approaching an angry bird calmly is key to a successful outcome.
Remember that parrots are prey animals and, by nature, are highly excitable. Their survival in the wild depends on their ability to perceive their environment as safe. When one flock member reacts with alarm, it can trigger a widespread flight response. Your bird is acutely aware of your emotions; you are part of their flock. If you want to calm your bird, you cannot allow yourself to be overwhelmed with tension, as this will cause your bird to reciprocate with its own tension. Taking a few deep breaths and lowering your energy can significantly help your bird relax.
Processing the Bite and Rebuilding Trust
Once the adrenaline subsides and you can think rationally, it’s natural to question your ability to trust your parrot again. While it’s wise to analyze the situation to understand what went wrong and prevent future occurrences, the best approach to preserving your relationship is often to move past the incident.
Consider the experience of Linus, an umbrella cockatoo, whose bite left his owner with a severely injured hand. Despite the pain and surprise, the owner focused on calming down before interacting with Linus again. While bandaging the wound, she spoke to him quietly, acknowledging the difficult night and apologizing for her part in it. This calm demeanor helped lower Linus’s energy and allowed the owner to convince herself that the bite was an isolated incident and not the beginning of a trend.
Bites, while infrequent, are a reality of parrot ownership. However, a bite does not define your bird as “bad.” To overcome the fear associated with a bite, you must actively choose to move beyond it. Approaching your bird with fear and trepidation will only create uneasiness. Accept that the bite happened, learn from it, and move forward with the expectation that your bird’s normal behavior will resume. When you let go of the experience, your bird is likely to follow your example.
Patty Jourgensen specializes in avian health, behavior, and nutrition and has been working with and caring for rescue birds since 1987.
