# renaming a tiel???



## jojo09 (Oct 9, 2010)

hey there. about four months ago i adopted a four year old male tiel named junior. at least i think he's male. a couple questions ago someone told me that if he was male he would have bars or stripes underneath his wings. i have yet to see them. anyhow, i wasn't fond of the name junior and have been calling him gary. do you think that he was attached to him previous name?


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## mpayjr (Aug 16, 2010)

It matters if he was previously used to his name. My Jagger knew his name because of his previous owners. I got him a few months back and he has been called Jagger for 9 years. You can change your birds name, but if they are already accustomed to a previous one, they may get a little confused for a while.


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## tielfan (Aug 31, 2008)

Try calling him Junior part of the time and your preferred new name part of the time and see if it seems to make any difference to him. 



> a couple questions ago someone told me that if he was male he would have bars or stripes underneath his wings.


There's been a misunderstanding. An adult male tiel has plain-colored feathers on his rump and under his tail, plus plain-colored flight feathers. Juveniles and adult females have stripes/bars under the tail, small stripes on the rump, and spots on the flight feathers. Your bird is an adult, and if he isn't one of the tricky mutations (lutino or pied) you can tell the sex quite easily by looking at the top of his rump or under his tail. Face color is a giveaway too for most mutations - a bright yellow (or white) face is a sign of an adult male for tiels who aren't pied or lutino.

Vlad, Buster, Squeebis and Henry in my signature are adult males. Shodu is female, and she's giving a demonstration of her under-wing spots - she's spottier than average!


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## Siobhan (Mar 21, 2010)

You can change his name, but it'll take a while for him to adjust. We got Clyde as an adult, and he just showed up in the yard. Of course we had no idea what his name had been, and he wasn't helpful on that front, so we started calling him Clyde and he knows it now, but it was a few months before he accepted it. We got Jade as an adult from someone who had to rehome her, and she loves her name and says it all the time, so we kept it. Freddie didn't have a name, we got him as a baby, and he picked up on his name within the first week. There's no way we could change it, because he knows he's Freddie. It depends on circumstances and the bird's attachment to the name.


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## lperry82 (Aug 2, 2010)

Pet shop told me that lucky was a boy but she is a girl as she is always quiet and






proves she is a girl
I dont trust petshops as its happend 3 times, which is why cookie is from a breeder, breeders know what they are talking about.


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