Cockatoos are by far the most loving and generally affectionate of all the parrots. The problem is that in my experience, they are also some of the most unpredictable. Ariel loves to sit and be cuddled in the evening. Twisting her body into various contortions to let me scratch just the right spot. But, she is also known to suddenly reach out and grab me with very little warning. Toward strangers she can be disarmingly sweet until she suddenly decides to set the record straight on who is in charge. Ariel is always convinced that she is in charge.
I brought her home from a very loving breeder near Chicago on January 2nd, 2002. She was hatched on April 17, 2001. Three months after arriving home, Ariel started to feather pick. After spending many months and a lot of money on vet bills and lab work to find the cause, I have discovered that most of Ariel's problems are allergy related. She becomes very itchy from about March through November each year. She usually has a few months of relief during the coldest part of winter when the allergen producing plants have gone dormant for the year.
In the past, Ariel has tended to react when pellets were included in her diet. I've recently started to include a few in her evening snack and so far, I have not seen any increase in her plucking. As of now, her diet is very much the same as my other birds, but a little lighter on the pellets and heavier on the sprouts.
Ariel LOVES to untie knots. It is next to impossible to keep toys in her cage, because she will systematically untie all the pieces until they fall through the cage grate. I have to be carefull about what toys I allow her to play with. She tends to injest soft wood, so most of her toys are very hard plastic and small pieces of hard wood and paper tied up with leather strips or stainless steel chain. Like Cosmo, Ariel is a magnet for mini-blinds and wallpaper. Several months ago, she spent several hours carefully removing the wallpaper covering the wall behehind her 42X30X60 inch cage. She is also pictured at the bottom of my home page.