There’s a great line from the movie Jurassic Park when they’re discussing the miracle of manipulating dinosaur DNA and Ian Malcolm says “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think about whether or not they SHOULD”. Now, there are many good reasons to have your bird’s wings clipped. Escape; You don’t want a fully flighted bird to fly out a window where the screen fell out. Or when you’re having a family gathering and the nieces & nephews leave the door open. Join some bird groups on Facebook and about once a week you’ll see a post about a bird flying away. Hell, when I was a kid, my best friends mom had a giant bird feeder and there was a period for about 2 months were a pet bird would come and get those seeds. From memory I think it was probably a sun conure but it came from somewhere. Safety; Birds, especially baby birds, that are clipped can injure themselves by not having enough control to avoid running into things or worse, hit the ground at full speed. Granted, a baby bird learning to fly indoors will hit the wall or ceiling almost guaranteed so there are arguments on both sides but you can always clip. You can’t wave a wand and grow back. Speaking of that, there are also stories online where a bird has hit the wall and died. There was one story where a lovebird fractured its skull and its beak. From that point on it had to be hand fed every day. Luckily the owner was loving and willing enough to do that for her bird but there are many people who would just as soon let it fly free and succumb to nature. Bonding; A bird will bond with you more and faster if it can’t get away from you and is forced to collude with the scary biped that feeds it. So clipping a pet bird can certainly be an adventageous thing.
However, there are negative aspects to clipping. Aside from the fact that you can clip too close, injure the bird while you’re trying to clip it, clipping your bird is the equivalent of putting shackles on your legs. Birds are meant to fly. Flying takes an incredible amount of energy. Because of flying, birds have their efficient lungs in order to process the same amount of oxygen percentage that we do in order to get airborne. This is why birds are so adversely affected by things like aerosols that have absolutely no effect on us. So taking away a birds main mode of transpiration and movement is a stark contrast to what nature designed them for. This can lead to a variety of negative and often unintended consequences. Ladies, is your husband a couch potato? Don’t you just love that spare tire he’s attained? Well, a bird without wings is almost destined for this. Now take away his ability to expend that energy while flying and couple that with taking away his natural born instinct to forage for his food. Then couple (or would it be triple by this point?) that with the fact that he gets pellets designed to have all the nutrition he needs (and calories) AND add that to all the treats and seeds he gets from you which are like sugar cubes and bacon to a bird. Take all those things into account and not only will your bird gain weight but it will lead to things like heart conditions, fatty liver and a whole plethora of problems that await Father Time.
One big problem that you see with birds is plucking. Birds are sensitive creatures. Sudden changes in environment can cause them to get PTSD like symptoms but the other thing that can cause a bird to pluck is that it has all this energy and not only is it in a cage, not only is it eating seeds that can raise its energy level like sugar in kids, not only is it not foraging to keep it occupied, it can’t even fly. Not only to get from A to B but to get rid of all that normal AND excess energy that birds have. So now, with all this energy and being stuck in a cage…. ALONE… (which is why its good to have another fid companion if you can manage that) the bird sits there by itself and just waits and waits and waits for its only companion… YOU… to get home from work just so it can have a buddy to play with AND release some of that energy. But then when you get home you have to do things. Get your work clothes off, go to the bathroom, check your email, throw in some laundry, cook dinner, then when that’s done you probably want to relax and watch TV. Where is birdie in all of this? Hopefully you get to take him out but then when you do… does he just pace back and forth on the stick at the top of the cage?Add all these factors together and instead of walking around the streets of a big city, collecting cans, smelling like pee and mumbling about the end of the world…. birds?…. they pluck. So when you see a bird who plucks, even though it could be from a bad situations, most of the time its just pent up energy and no way to spend it. Breeding time issues is the other biggie for mutilation issues but not being able to fly is probably top of the list. So keep that in mind when you are considering how you’re going to maintain your bird’s wings.
One of the negative aspects about birds is that…. you can’t readily take them outside like a dog or even some cats. The fear of flying away is obvious and prevalent. You can take them out while clipped but what if they fall? What if you or they get into a dangerous situation? They make harnesses and such which some birds absolutely love and to others that harness is Satan incarnate. We tried to put a harness on both of our boys and right afterwards they began plucking. They both coincidentally coincided with their younger cage partners (females) finally coming into breeding age AND our work schedules changing but ever since we tried to put the harness on them they have acted different. If you do plan on using a harness either start them out as a baby and I mean BABY. Before they even learn to fly. This way they’ll think its something normal and done as a matter of recourse. Otherwise, you can watch videos on harness training your bird but since we failed twice I’m not going any farther on that subject because I’ll be the first to admit that we suck golf balls through 20 ft. hoses on that subject. I will say though, a harness for a small bird is nowhere near as easy to put on as it is for a big bird. Its like working on a car vs. working on a watch. Your big human fingers can’t maneuver those nearly as well as large bird harnesses. Larger birds also have simple velcro vests that slide easily over the wings and then you just attach the carabiner to the loop on the front of the vest and your large bird stands there rocking back and forth for you to take him outside. Smaller birds… nope… not so much. They don’t make those types of things that work that small. So if you have lovebirds, trying to maneuver that leash harness onto that small bird is difficult and probably why ours freaked out so badly. We also didn’t remove our stupid hats when we didn’t even give them time to fully acclimate to the harness before trying to shove them into it. So whatever you do, make sure the bird is comfortable with the unit first before you even try to put it on. Now to counter that, good training can solve almost anything. There are videos online where people have their birds fully flighted and they still go out sometimes without a harness. I think Bubba Cyan’s owner has her so well trained that he takes her out without a harness and he can voice command her to fly to him from a perch many feet away. Point is, there are ways to get around clipping your birds wings as a matter of automatic recourse so please consider these things before you make your bird slave to pacing back and forth on the stick on the top of their cage.
So although clipping is damn near automatic and absolute when you first get your bird, if possible, use clipping only when necessary. That’s my personal opinion but when you take away the one thing that makes birds unique, you’re kind of taking their spirit away. Obviously we want our fids to be safe but let them be as free as they can too. Birds are (if you’ve read this far and haven’t figured it out by now) a lot of responsibility. Take the time to plan out your bird’s early life. Take the time to train it and modify its behavior when they’re young or if you’re rehoming and they’re new to your house. Go through all the routines that you want them to know whilst they meander their life cycle in your abode so that by the time the feathers grow back you’ll have most of the desired behaviors in place. Where they can go, what they can chew on, when they come out, what’s yours and what’s theirs, etc. (even though to a bird, EVERYTHING is theirs) But just like a dog, or a kid or a husband, the more the bird knows what to expect from you and what you expect from it, the happier your bird will be. Guys, when do our wives get pissed? When we do something stupid (which is all the time I realize but still) but for the most part can be prevented. If we pick up our freaking socks we don’t get yelled at, right? If we don’t pee on the toilet seat, we don’t get yelled at, right? If we don’t put the fork in the spoon slot of the utensil drawer (after having been REPEATEDLY warned) we don’t get yelled at, right? So when a bird knows what it can and can’t do, it will do the things it can and avoid the things it can’t. That way everyone is happier for it. So I would recommend clipping wings when the bird is first in your house and then only do so again if behavior still needs to be modified. If you are really concerned about your bird flying away, its your responsibility to either train your bird or clip its wings to the point where it can fly but not fly away for any length of time.
There are many videos out there to show you how to clip a bird’s wings. You can clip wings by yourself but if you have the opportunity, I prefer to use 2 people. One to hold the bird, the other to cut the wings. We only clip our birds’ wings when they’re babies and they still have that natural fear of us. Clipping their wings pretty much forces them to give in to the fact that we’re not there to eat them. Once they realize that and we have most of the desired behaviors on the way to being rote, we let their wings grow back we let them be fully flighted. By then they pretty much know where they can land, like our shoulders and the play pen and where they’re banned from, like the TV and the curtain rod.
We still want the birds to be able to fly, we just clip them enough to make them easy to catch. Most breeders and vets will clip to the point where a bird can (hopefully) safely flap enough to not injure itself in a free fall. A bird’s primary or first feathers are the ones that really give them lift and maneuverability. The key to any wing clipping is to make sure that the clips are even on both sides. Otherwise the bird can fly off balance and hurt itself by falling or running into things and it can also drastically and disproportionately alter the muscles on each side of the bird. Having one side built up and the other not, can actually tear muscle tissue and possibly even break bones.
I do want to point out, again, that when it comes to behavior issues and/or training, I do recommend having your bird’s wings clipped until you are done doing your training or behavior modification. Generally, and all birds and all breeds are different, but generally birds will start to grow their wings back after a few months. After a year your bird should have all of its feathers back and regrown. You should be able to modify your birds behavior in that time frame, especially if the bird is a baby. I wouldn’t recommend clipping the bird’s wings on an “I’ll get around to it” mentality. If you want the bird’s wings clipped, fine but have that planned out. The one good thing about larger birds is that they have less room to maneuver in the average home so if they do have flying capabilities, they are much easier to catch than a fully flighted feathered MIG fighter that smaller birds become.
As an example of using wing clippings with behavior modifications. On all 3 generations we’ve raised (and this is almost exclusive to females at least from our experience due to territoriality and breeding cycles) we’ve had to do a second clip to our female birds in order for them to stop their undesired behavior. For Holly, our original female and grandma to the rest of the flock, it was to get her to stop biting and going under things and into nooks and crevasses looking for a breeding spot to lay eggs. Larri (whom we thought was Larry and we kept as a buddy to Hank who would sit in a cage all alone and CONSTANTLY crave that attention of mom & dad who had booted him out of the nest) was to stop her from being afraid of us. Even though her parents and cage mate were fully tamed and would come by us and step up on command, she never got the hint and would always freak out and bolt when it came time for actual contact. As soon as we clipped her again, we taught step up in a matter of days and now she does it on command as well, just like the rest of them. Lastly, our 2 girls that we decided to keep, after a few months they just got a real attitude about going back in their cage when playtime was over. We’d have the other dozen in the cage and they’d be flying in circles between the clock and the hanging rod like it was a game. As of this writing, 3 days ago we gave them a clip that was barely to the orange line in the picture below and pretty much instantaneously, they stopped trying to fight the inevitable. They now fly right into the cage when we say “cage time”. The good part about clipping the way we do is that they can still fly up onto the wooden rods we put up that are equal height as the curtain rods but it takes them a bit more effort to do so. But having that tiny bit of feathers cut off basically had them saying “hey, we can’t fly anymore so we know we’re going to get caught so… we’ll just obey now I guess”. Sometimes when the wings grow back and enough time passes they may get an attitude again but when enough time goes by, most birds will be content to follow the rules. Like when we humans get old. We get the “eh, can’t fight City Hall” mentality and go with the flow. We’re like the boy in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree; “I’m too old for any of that now. I’d just like to sit down and rest”. Our oldest birds will come out and forage for seeds and fly around a bit but after a while they just climb up onto our shoulders and grind away as the kids and grand kids run around. Like a birdie version of a wedding or a pool party.
When clipping wings, at least for a lovebird, you can basically leave about ¾” to 1” from where the cover feathers end. I usually cut it straight across to where the ling feathers end. The orange & pink lines are mine, the other lines are other peoples’ recommendation. Mine are the straight lines. Start at the Orange line and work towards the Pink line until their flight curtailing is at your desired level. This way, like a bad haircut, you don’t have to wait for months for them to slowly grow back their feathers while you regret how much you’ve hindered their ability to simply get around and enjoy their environment. Its easier to cut straight and its easier to even out if you need to make minor adjustments in order to make sure the wings are even and it still allows them to fly up to the ceiling and anywhere else, it just takes a bit more effort to do it. At first, they might have to make 2 or 3 short burst flights to get from one room to the other room and on the high perch near the ceiling but they can still do it and are not forced to walk around everywhere. They can still have their freedom, they still have the ability to fly which keeps them active and healthy but if you need to catch them to trim nails or put them away for the night, you’re not chasing them around until they tire out.
The light blue line is where breeders and pet stores usually cut. This will basically make your bird flightless. This will usually allow them to fall off of a high area and create enough lift to keep them from hitting the ground hard and hurting themselves but unless your bird has some real behavior problems, if you are planning to use a harness and take them outside or if you have another absolute need to make them flightless, to me this is unnecessary
Always use a nice new sharp pair of scissors that you ONLY use for clipping the birds’ wings. Using it strictly for the bird keeps the risk of germ transfer. It eliminates scissor blade dents which make for uneven cuts. Its like shaving with a dull blade. Don’t do it. Its not worth the extra $5 for you to have a dedicated pair of scissors to cut your bird’s wings. Having a dedicated pair also eliminates gunk that builds up on scissor blades that’s used for everything from opening packages to cutting open that package of salmonella laden chicken. That gunk can be dirty and downright deadly. That nastiness can hinder cutting and transfer gunk to the bird’s wings. And what do birds do to dirty feathers? They clean them. So anything nasty on those blades will be ingested by your bird. Wanna guess on how great birds’ immune systems are at handling stuff like that? Also, cleaning the blades with a bit of rubbing alcohol after every use helps keep the blade clean and germ free. Keep the scissors in a small plastic storage container to keep dust and debris off the scissors and make sure that both the container and the scissors themselves are properly labeled so that anyone in the house would know to not use those scissors for anything other than the birds’ wings. Even take a fine point magic marker and write “birds only” on the outside of one of the blades or get an etcher/engraver pen for $7 at the hardware store. Have you ever purchased a set of fabric shears only to have someone in the house, use them to cut cardboard or wire, basically rendering them useless for cutting fabric because they’re so damaged? Yeah, it sucks AND its a waste of money. Plus, it always seems to happen on a Sunday afternoon when the fabric stores are all closed and you need the fabric cut by Monday. This way, you never have to worry about cutting your bird’s wings with any adverse effects from the scissors. Not to mention the irony if a bird died from a pair of nasty scissors when the scissors are used to clip wings to keep them safe so they don’t… die.
Think ahead of what you want and clip your birds’ wings carefully and responsibly.