Something is wrong with my cockatiel - she is missing feathers

Question

I have two cockatiels and four budgies. Since I got my second cockatiel, I noticed that she doesn't have feathers under her crest. I thought that the reason for it is that she is really submissive and lets herself to be pecked all the time. This was far from true, because now she got worse (see picture). She is 4 years old.

Please help me, I need some group knowledge about this topic, because I have never even encountered such issue with my parrots so far, so I really don't know what to do next.

The bald spot is reddened by her blood - others pecked the feathers out. But I noticed black base of quill (maybe blood in it?).

Answer 1

There seem to be basically 2 possibilities:

1. Another bird pecks her and plucks her feathers
2. She scratches or plucks herself, which can indicate anything from stress or boredom to malnutrition or parasites.

The first thing to do is getting the bird examined by a vet to rule out any skin condition, malnutrition, allergy, fungal infection or parasites.

Then you need to observe what or who caused the wound. If she plucks herself and the behavior started before you adopted her, she might have been very stressed by her former living conditions. Since it's gotten worse since you adopted her, the change in her environment could have intensified her plucking. Since self-plucking is unfortunately quite common in birds, you can find many resources online, like this video, this article on PetMD or this article on petco and many more.

If another birds plucks her, you'll need to separate them for a while. But this honestly sounds and looks a lot like self-plucking.