# Aggressive female



## hanaflynn (Jun 27, 2010)

About my three rescued cockatiels....the two males are getting friendlier every day...Buddy will sit on our hands and try to preen us, and Dewey comes out of his cage to be near us, although he's still afraid of hands (unless they're feeding him). But Sadie, the female, who is very attached to Buddy, seems to be getting worse. When she came, she was about as friendly as the two males, but as they get friendlier (and spend more time out of the cage), she gets more afraid and more aggressive. Is there anything we can do? We were thinking that we'd just work on socializing the males, so that eventually she could learn from their example. But this method only seems to be terrorizing her and making her jealous.


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## hanaflynn (Jun 27, 2010)

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? She seems so unhappy and there's nothing I can do about it.


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## hanaflynn (Jun 27, 2010)

After reading other threads, I'm starting to think that her behavior has to do with being jealous of us because Buddy pays attention to us and not to her. I think that given a choice she'd be with him constantly, but he likes to play with Dewey and sit with us outside the cage. Sometimes he seems to get tired of her attentions and bites her (although they preen each other and sit together sometimes). It's so sad to see her being rejected and even bullied a little sometimes, and not to be able to help.

Should we separate her from the others? The problem with that is that our apartment is small (2 rooms) and they would still be able to call to each other (which they do whenever we try to move Buddy too far away from the cage).


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## roxy culver (May 27, 2010)

Try giving her as much attention as Buddy, I don't know if this would help but maybe taking her into the other room by herself and doing just some alone time might help...


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## AlbyPepper (Apr 3, 2010)

I agree with roxy culver. Maybe a little one on one time each day may help her trust you and help her to socialise with you a bit more.


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## hanaflynn (Jun 27, 2010)

Thanks for replying. We try to talk to her and feed her sunflower seeds and cereal, like the others, but it's impossible to take any of the birds out of sight of the cage, because they all start screaming for each other. And Sadie won't let us pick her up anyway. For now, we're just going to try to keep talking to her I guess. We're also considering sending her to stay with a friend for a month or so so we can make progress with the other two.


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