# Actually eating wood



## FairyFreak12 (Jun 8, 2012)

Hi guys, i posted a thing a couple days ago about jess eating wood, and i thought she was just shredding it. well it turns out she actually is EATING it. i saw her eating it the other day, and in swallowing it. i took the wooden ladder out and she hasnt started eating her other one, what should i do?? is this healthy?


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## tielfan (Aug 31, 2008)

Eating wood isn't generally considered to be healthy, but it's actually a natural behavior; a study of the feeding ecology of wild cockatiels found that many of the birds had dense woody material in their crops. http://talkcockatiels.com/showthread.php?t=16205 Apparently no one really knows the purpose of this, but personally I would worry about splinters causing an injury. 

Other items frequently found in crops were pieces of charcoal and mineral items aka grit. I don't know whether these items serve the same purpose as wood-eating, but if I was in your place I think I would try offering small amounts of bird charcoal and grit (both are available at pet stores), to see if they satisfy your bird and decrease her desire to eat wood. Be careful to keep the amounts small (just a sprinkle every now and then) because if she overeats these items her crop could get impacted which can be fatal.

I would also work on improving her diet in case she's eating the wood to try to make up for some kind of deficiency. If she isn't already eating pellets and/or nutriberries, start teaching her to eat them (it's usually pretty easy to get a cockatiel to start eating nutriberries, a lot harder with pellets). If she isn't eating vegetables start encouraging her to eat them, and if she already eats vegetables then try some new ones to see if one of them fills a gap in her diet (my flock went crazy for chard when I started offering it).

It's probably a good idea to take edible wood items away from her for now. If you have access to bird-safe trees, some small fresh branches might be safer for her to play with than the hard dry wood in bird toys, but stop giving them to her if she eats them.

P.S. It might also be helpful to give her some probiotics (like Benebac for birds) to help with any digestive issues that she might be having. A few drops of ACV in the drinking water once or twice a week wouldn't hurt either.


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