#cause if his reactions are worsening I won’t be able to do the second pellet anymore

[flock-talk]

Newt’s allergy to soybean has been theorized for a while but never confirmed, until today. He used to pluck really bad and we sorted out that pellets high in soybean seemed to trigger the plucking. At the time we also changed 100 other things to help alleviate the plucking so while soybean was a possibility we couldn’t say it was 100% the cause.

So from then on he’s been getting the only soybean free pellet (TOPs) and some caitec OFB which still has soybean but it’s lower on the list since there’s much debate on whether or not TOPs is nutritionally balanced. He hasn’t had any problems with those two.

Today I offered him some Harrison’s high potency pepper pellets as a treat (literally like 10 minuscule pellets that are Mia sized). Thinking the small dose would be fine, the flavour would be a good treat for him, etc. within 5 minutes of eating the pellets he broke out in to a massive sneezing fit. I’m talking back to back constant sneezes with no break in between.

I isolated him to the bird room, ramped up the humidity, heated up the room, and blasted the air filter on high. Minimal changes were happening until I realized what was triggering it (I initially thought it could have been environmental, an air pollutant, etc). The internet was completely unhelpful since looking for “parrot allergies” just shows the absolute basics or humans allergic to parrots. I ended up just thinking about what helps my allergies and offered him some cold cooked sweet potato to coat the throat and cool it to relieve inflammation and itchiness. He almost instantly stopped sneezing, about 10 minutes of offering him small bits of sweet potato to continually soothe the throat and it had completely subsided.

So hey if anyone else’s bird has a food-based allergic reaction - giving them cooked and refrigerated sweet potato seems to alleviate the symptoms.