Update: I thoroughly cleaned out the cage in the backyard with a hose, after transferring Loki to a small budgie cage for an hour and a half. He was quite pissed off about the whole process, as you'd expect, but is keenly inspecting the new rearranged interior of his big cage after I coaxed him back in.

I still feel rotten about how bad it got, and how Thor died because I let it get that bad. There were significant layers of old shit mixed with seed husks in the tray under the cage, and it would have been harbouring bacteria, mold, etc, and drifting through the air, increasing infection risk for those poor birds.

I have extensive mental health issues, and they cause me to neglect large parts of my life, but as others here have rightly pointed out, that does not in any way justify the neglect of someone else whose welfare is my responsibility.

I've cleaned the cage properly, and also rearranged things to make it easier to maintain that cleanliness. There's butcher's paper lining the tray now, easy to remove and replace every week. I have moved the water bath, the seed tray, and the water bottle around so that they are less likely to get fouled, but still easy to access and clean.

I don't have a pic of Loki in the new cage, since I've given him some quiet time to recover from the stress of moving back and forth, but here is one of him in the budgie cage, looking like some sort of giant with the tiny seed and water trays built for birds less than half his size.

Edit: this is an update on my previous post, made in mourning and denial: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63916100

One of my birds died rather suddenly overnight. Was going to take her to the vet when it opened this morning after noticing bad signs last night, but she'd been dead for a few hours when I woke up.

She was Thor, and the other bird, Loki, her mate, is currently very loudly singing a bunch of, presumably, death songs.

Liam named them without knowing their sex. The fact that Thor and Loki have been enthusiastically fucking each other in a cage in my room for a number of years would no doubt be pleasing to many readers of slash fiction.

It's darkly funny that Thor is the one who died, because she was the one who sorta liked me, in that she would tolerate me helping her out when she was sick or egg-laying with only a few light bites.

Now me and Loki have to become friends, because birds do not do well alone. My fingers are gonna suffer.

He is probably pissed off at me, because from his perspective, last time Thor was sick, I magically fixed her by putting her in an ice cream container for a day. This time I did not.

Instead I put her in a cardboard box and took her away after she'd been dead in there with him for probably a few hours. That last part is good, in a way, because that gave him time to know she's dead, so he can grieve properly. Cockatiels are smart enough to grieve.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47218267

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47218267