Bird claws are necessary for them in the wild for both defense and existence in general. Birds will hang upside down like our bat bird shown earlier but birds also use their claws (and beakys) as hands.
Holly. Our baby batbird.
They use them to climb and to eat too. Using feet to eat is much more so with larger birds but you’ll also get a foot check push from some smaller birds. Its rather amusing. Larri (the female) will actually hold Hank’s leg and not let him near treats to keep him away from them. Dude is totally whipped lol.
A bird’s claws, like our fingernails need to be maintained and a certain length. Most parrots have 2 front & 2 back toes, 1 big, 1 small on each end. The 3 longest toes have a claw that will generally need to be clipped by either you or a vet. If you have the extra money to go to a vet, honestly, save it. Unless it’s a larger bird with massive claws, you can usually do it yourself if your bird cooperates. If you get a baby, this is key to practice holding them and at least going through the motions, stating what you’re doing and praising him for being a good boy during it. Millet or a small treat after doesn’t hurt as a bribe either. Since it only happens every so often, a treat after every clip is fine.
For larger birds, I once saw at a bird show demo where they took an umbrella cockatoo (U2, more lingo), sat it flat on the ladies lap, covered it with a white towel except for the foot that was sticking out and took a Dremel tool and sanded the nail. The bird squawked but not due to pain, the Dremel tickled her foot. But having the bird under the towel, like having a lovebird under your flannel or sweater when bonding with the bird, calms the bird while you do the nail trimming. As for lovebirds, there are many ways you can do it. Like any procedure, getting the bird used to it is key. This is why practicing holding your bird like and egg and even on their backs is beneficial. It is not a natural position for birds to be on their backs. A bird will generally not do so until it absolutely trusts you. So if they don’t do it right away or even ever, don’t get mad at the bird. Its not natural for them. Its like being in an MRI machine for humans. You can use standard human nail clippers that have the clipper on the front (preferably small clippers), or the kind that come in from the side, they even sell the style of nail clippers that they use for dogs, for birds only smaller. I don’t like those because you can’t see how much you’re cutting without contorting your hands, head or body. If you get good at it, you don’t even need to need to hold the bird like and egg or on its back. If you get good at clipping, you can even perch your bird on your finger and clip them from below. That way you also have your finger to lean the clippers against for better stability.
WARNING: Bird nails have blood flow just like us humans. Have you ever clipped your nail too close? It hurts. Don’t do that to your bird. On a bird, this is called the “Quick”. Why? Beats me. But if you clip this, not only will your bird bleed but it will hurt too. And just like you hurting yourself, you’ll be reluctant to do it again. Then trimming can be frustrating because your bird will start to run away from you as soon as they see those clippers. You’ll start to get mad at the bird but he’s only avoiding it because you hurt him. Be patient and use praise and treats to hopefully win back their trust. We have to take Herbie into the bathroom (with the lid down) so he can’t get away from us. He’ll scoot away and do the lovebird super speed side step shuffle on the shower curtain rod to get away from us but one hastily made clip turned slip many years ago has him not liking trimming at all.
We usually know when its time to trim when one of 3 things happen. 1. You simply notice that the claws are long. 2. It starts to hurt or scratch us through our shirts when they’re on our shoulders or 3. The more dangerous scenario, they start getting stuck on things like the hut, curtains, couches, shirts etc.
WARNING: DO NOT PULL YOUR BIRD OFF OF A SURFACE UNTIL YOU ARE CERTAIN IT IS NOT ATTACHED.
I’m going to make a separate paragraph here because this is VERY important. I honestly don’t know how we’ve never managed to have tragedy strike this way even being careful and knowing what I know by having an experience that most bird owners never have but NEVER YANK YOUR BIRD OFF OF ANY SURFACE. Why do I say that? Whether we’re sneaking up on them to catch them to put them back in their cage or simply scooping them up to give them loads of kisses, lovebirds, ESPECIALLY baby lovebirds, grip onto things, especially cloth like their life depended on it. Baby lovebird claws are also VERY sharply pointed so they have extra grip potential on top of the wrap around that the toes do. Nature designed them that way so when they’re learning to move around and get used to landing and sitting on tree branches in the wild they have extra grip. Nothing ends a baby bird’s life faster in the wild than losing your grip and plummeting to the ground and not being able to fly back up. And its not like a cat or raccoon where mom can grab them in her mouth and drag them back up the tree to the den hole. Slip = death for a wild bird so claws will be sharp and they will grip like hell to EVERYthing. As a side note I wouldn’t bother clipping their nails as babies because they will wear down on their own as they become more mobile. If they are just painfully sharp and need to be dealt with I’d simply recommend taking a fine grit nail file and giving it a single stroke to take the edge off. Literally . But as for grabbing a bird and quickly pulling them away from the perch or surface they were on… more than once, if I had not been vigilant in making sure that all the bird’s claws or beak were detached from the surface they were on, I would have easily ripped their leg, beak or head off. I’m not exaggerating. Lovebirds are so fragile. That is why you never flick, hit, swat your bird and especially never flick its beak. Look up pictures and videos of “Rhea, the naked lovebird” who has PBFD (disease) and look at how scrawny their necks are (and everything else for that matter).
Be VERY careful when taking a lovebird off of a surface, especially a cage, cloth or any surface they can get either their toes around or their claws stuck into. Same thing goes in regards to their beak and head. Their bills are hook bills. In the Birdie Kisses section I talk about how you can avoid getting chomped by an overzealous kissy bird by preventing them from bending their head in such a way that their hook beak can get ahold of your lip. They can’t do that if they have to bend their head back to do it. For that reason, its dangerous to yank a bird, especially a baby bird off of something if they’re grabbing onto it with their beak. Even if its cloth like a shirt that has some give it can still do damage. If you take a hook bill that’s curved and you pull straight back, something is going to give and its not going to be the big human grabbing the bird or the metal cage bars. Its going to be the connective tissue that holds their beaky onto their face. You pulling straight back, due to the hooking of the beak, they can’t tilt their head back fast enough or far enough to position their beak at a straight enough angle to safely disengage whatever it is they’re attached to.
Imagine that you have a ratchet strap hook or bungee cord hook and you hook it on to the cage bars of the bird cage. Now pull straight back. Well obviously it didn’t come loose because the hook is just as strong as the metal. A bird beak is not. Just like the bungee hook was still “hooked” onto the cage bars, a parrot’s beak will be too. Another example is to take a bungee cord hook and drill a hole through a thin panel wall. Make the hole about twice the diameter of the hook. Once you managed to finagle the hook and actually manage to get it through the hole, do a test. Try to have a friend start pulling on the bungee cord while you attempt to angle it to get it out of the hole before he pulls it taught. So now not only do you not have the advantage of time, you now have a force pulling the cord which means the further he pulls the cord, the harder it will be to position the hook at an almost perpendicular angle to the wall to get the hook out of the hole before the force of your friend pulling basically takes that paneling and makes a MUCH bigger hole than the one you drilled. Now imagine that the person pulling the cord is the Jolly Green Giant. It would happen so fast and with so much power that your wall would be toast and you would probably be too for being in the way when the cord came loose.
That is what it is like for a tiny lovebird when we humans yank them off surfaces. Add the fact that when we grab birds, their head is in the meaty part of our hand between the thumb and index finger. They can’t move their bodies because we have them surrounded with our hands and they can’t bend their heads backwards to even attempt to compensate for the angle we’re pulling from because our hand muscle is in the way, assuming they could even react that fast.
How do I know this to be the case? I’m a hunter. Yes, I’m an animal loving hunter. Back when I was younger I had the time to hunt many things, including game birds. When I was really young, like 8, I remember wanting to see what a Bobwhite Quail looked like because I always saw them portrayed in the Bugs Bunny Cartoons as having this black doohickey sticking up from their head. So when my uncles came in from the hunt one day I wanted to see my first quail when they began cleaning them. All of them were headless. I really didn’t ask why at first because I was mad that I didn’t get to confirm my curiosity of whether or not the Bugs Bunny cartoon characterization of a quail as correct. When asked why I was bummed I told them and they said that they ripped the heads off to be sure that the animal didn’t suffer. Just because a wild bird looks dead doesn’t mean it is. Hiding illness and injury is a survival mechanism for birds. I learned that young because they then told the story of why they started doing that. Apparently one hunting trip they’d put their bird bounty in the truck and headed to a friend’s house on the way back home. This was out in the boondocks and back more than 3 decades ago too so… but after a few beers they finally decided to head on home to clean their harvest and brine it for cooking. As they were taking the birds out of the storage pouches, one of the birds took off. It didn’t get very far but the fact that it had been many hours, suffering in agony only to die moments after its last ditch effort to hang on and escape. From that moment on, every bird they harvested got its head ripped off to make sure that it didn’t suffer.
When I got older I was finally able to hunt along with them. I haven’t been bird hunting in over half my life and that was way before I ever had birds but in all the times I went bird hunting I was only able to retrieve one bird since the dogs usually did that and my uncles were the ones with the storage pouches. I picked up the bird, which I thought was dead, and as I held it in my hand it started biting my finger. It bit surprisingly hard for such a small animal. So I did what I was taught, right in front of my 8 year old cousin and ripped its head off. He was rather taken aback. His eyes got wide and he even said “you ripped its head off”. I got to explain to him the same thing I was taught all those years ago when I was his exact age. This isn’t a lesson in being humane but it is a lesson to learn from someone so you don’t have to learn the devastatingly hard way. It can happen. It does happen and I’ll tell you right now, I was more shocked than my cousin was. Why? Because I myself was taken aback at how little force it actually took to decapitate that little bird with my bare hands. And quail are about twice the size of lovebirds.
So for all of you out there that think that hunters are bad, hunters are actually some of the most humane people out there. If you want an example of inhumane, read my segment about what happens to so many birds and pets whose existence is extinguished by a furnace at the end or a pitchfork. The point is, be very careful with these tiny creatures and understand that they feel more than you realize. Once you have a bird as a pet and not some ornament you will and it will break your heart to see these tragedies on Facebook and to see how many of these magnificent creatures meet just as appalling an end because we humans aren’t as responsible as we all like to believe we are.
So how to you disengage a bird from what they’re attached to? For their beak, simply wait until they quit grabbing onto what it is that they’re on and then continue. Otherwise if they’ve got something dangerous or your female is biting your to defend her eggs and won’t let go, hold the bird like you normally would. Reach around with your thumb and index finger and grab in a pinching type motion a bit further in front of the first knuckles on either side of the BASE of the top beak yet in between the top and bottom beaks. With the beak at the base with your first knuckles, close your fingertips together around the beak until the tips should be close to touching at the front of the beak. Your actual finger tips should apply a small bit of pressure in between the beak split and right in front of where they connect to the face. Similar to what you’d to do a cat. This pressure will usually make them get the hint to stop gripping with their beak.
As for dealing with gripped feet around a perch or if claws are sticking to cloth, you can grab your birds from behind, hold them like and egg and if they are gripping onto a cage, cloth or other material, hold/support them with your ring and pinky finger and use your middle and index finger pinch/wiggle their feet from whatever they’re grabbing on to. As soon as they’re free, pull away and move them where you need them. Again, be VERY careful when grabbing a bird off if a surface. Unless it’s a table or floor or an obvious flat surface they can’t grip onto.
Since birds can get their claws stuck, they sometimes, especially when they are babies and young, can get caught on things. More than once, if I had not been home, we could have been in real trouble having our bird’s claws get caught on things. The birds will panic and start to fly away as their claw is stuck into something. Be aware of what you set out for them. As your bird becomes accustomed to his surroundings and they learn where they can and can’t go, you’ll more and more be able to leave them in the next room without much worry. Until then, just like young children, you need to be aware and vigilant.
As for the claw trimming, we usually only trim the 2 long toes. If we do trim more we’ll only trim 3. We leave the tiny toe facing the back alone. Why? Because even though, a lot of times, this is the claw that is sharp and sticks through the shirt it is also their “leverage” claw. For lovebirds at least. If a bird needs to grip and lean over or hand upside down, almost all the pressure and weight is on this tiny toe and nail. So if you take the pointed tip off of this, they can easily lose their grip on things.
This is something to be mindful of if your bird is both flighted and clipped. Flighted birds will go on and hang on all the things you set out for it. Clipped birds can’t fly and can only use their feet and beak. Now take away their grip and they’re really pretty helpless, especially if they’re used to being somewhere and they try the same grip or lean they’ve done many times before and like Non, the big burly mute Kryptonian bad guy from Superman II when he has his powers taken away and tries to fly… he plummets down the bottomless pit in the icy Fortress of Solitude. If your bird is clipped and there is nothing but a hard floor underneath, the bird can hurt himself. So make sure you’re careful to clip only the sharp tip off the 2 biggest toes or if its real long, give a good couple of millimeters from the Quick (blood supply) before you snip. You can always clip more but once its clipped, like hair, that’s it. If you’re even questioning it… leave it alone or long.